Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman
Ernst Ingmar Bergman; 14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer and producer who worked in film, television, and theatre. He is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential auteurs of all time and is most famous for films such as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Cries and Whispersand Fanny and Alexander...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth14 July 1918
CityUppsala, Sweden
CountrySweden
This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously?
Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.
People ask what are my intentions with my films - my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer...
Theater is the beginning and end and actually everything, while cinema belongs to the whoring and slaughterhouse trade.
There is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.
For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour.
One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)
Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.
Artistic license sneered through the thin fabric.
We worked on 'Fanny and Alexander' for seven months and it was an amusing production. Still, it was very long and heavy and so awfully complicated, .. And when the premiere was over and everything went well, I thought, 'That's that.' .
I am conscious about myself and everything, and then suddenly, or slowly, my conscious fades out. Switches off. And it's not existing, and that's a marvelous feeling. That from existing, I am not existing. And at that moment, nothing can happen to me.
A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.
I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.
I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me.