Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman made The Seventh Seal, in which a knight plays chess with Death against the background of the plague, and spent sixty years making films about the silence of God and the cruelty of families. He was the son of a Lutheran chaplain to the Swedish royal court and was raised with a severity he described all his life, including being locked in a cupboard. He ran theatres as well as making films - Malmo, then the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm - and always said the stage was his profession and film his mistress. The Seventh Seal, made in 1957 in thirty-five days on a small budget, took its imagery from medieval church paintings he had seen as a child while his father preached in country parishes: Death playing chess, the flagellant procession, the dance of death across the hill at the end. It is set during the Black Death and it is about the absence of an answer, which is why it was read as a statement about the nuclear age. Wild Strawberries, Persona, Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander followed. He left Sweden for Munich in 1976 after being arrested for tax evasion, a charge later dropped, and returned. He worked with the same actors and the cinematographer Sven Nykvist for decades. The chess game with Death is taken from a fifteenth-century painting in Taby church outside Stockholm, which he had known since childhood. Woody Allen and Bill and Ted have both parodied it, which is a fair measure of how far the image travelled. He made more than sixty films and directed some 170 stage productions.

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