Saturday, August 18, 2007

The Great Film maker and lover of chess Ingmar Bergman has surrendered his game to death...His wonderful movie "The Seventh Seal", a must see, is played out through a chess game...Ingmar includes the Goddess in this fasinatin g film. He will be missed, but never forgotten. Legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman buried Sat Aug 18, 8:57 AM ET Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century, was buried on Saturday in a private funeral on Faaroe Island in the Baltic Sea. A small circle of family and friends, including actresses Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, attended the ceremony at Faaroe Church. "The funeral service was carried out as a traditional Faaroe funeral, in line with Ingmar Bergman's wishes," his family said in a statement sent to Swedish news agency TT after the ceremony. Bergman died at his home on the island on July 30 aged 89. No details of the private ceremony were disclosed in advance, and police and security guards kept media and curious onlookers at bay. The statement said only family, some Faaroe residents and a handful of Bergman's colleagues and friends were invited to the funeral. During the service at the Faaroe Church, a white building with medieval origins where the Swedish flag flew at half-mast on Saturday, two Swedish psalms were sung and a cellist played Bach's Saraband from Cello Suite Number 5. Bergman was buried in the church cemetery after the religious service, according to the statement. Daily Dagens Nyheter said in its online edition that Bergman's simple wooden coffin had been made by a Swedish carpenter who helped design parts of his beloved home on Faaroe, a small island in the Baltic Ocean where the director lived as a virtual recluse. Bergman was laid to rest next to his fifth and final wife Ingrid von Rosen, who died in 1995. A shared tombstone bearing both von Rosen's and Bergman's names was erected after her death. In order to keep the date of the funeral a secret as long as possible, his grave was dug in the church cemetery at dusk on Friday, Aftonbladet reported. Bergman's films won three best foreign language film Oscars. Despite his preoccupation with dark themes such as death and sexual anguish, he was widely acclaimed for perennial arthouse favourites such as "The Seventh Seal" (1957) and "Fanny and Alexander" (1982). For many movie buffs, Bergman was the greatest of the authorial filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s, outranking such figures as Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel or Jean-Luc Godard. Bergman was married five times and had nine children. His strict childhood -- his father Erik was a clergyman in Stockholm -- and family relationships influenced him profoundly and were reflected in all his work. He directed his first film "Crisis" in 1945 but it was not until 1956 that he won international acclaim when "Smiles of a Summer Night" was shown at the Cannes Festival. For more than three decades he produced an average of a movie a year, including "Wild Strawberries" (1957), "The Virgin Spring" (1960), "Through a Glass Darkly" (1961), "Winter Light" (1963), "Scenes from a Marriage" (1973), "Autumn Sonata" (1978) and "Saraband" (2003).

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