Merce Cunningham NYTimes Obit

Below, the New York Times obituary by Alastair Macaulay, reprinted in its entirety.]

July 28, 2009

Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies
By Alastair Macaulay

Merce Cunningham, the revolutionary American choreographer, died Sunday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

His death was announced by the Cunningham Dance Foundation.

Over a career of nearly seven decades, Mr. Cunningham went on posing “But” and “What if?” questions, making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography. He went on doing so almost to the last.

Until 1989, when he reached 70, he appeared in every single performance given by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center. In April he observed his 90th birthday with the 90-minute “Nearly Ninety” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Even when it became known that he was fading, and friends began coming to bid farewell to him in recent days, he told one colleague that he was still creating dances in his head.

Mr. Cunningham ranks among the foremost figures of artistic modernism and among the few who have transformed the nature and status of dance theater, visionaries like Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine.

In his works, independence was central: dancers were often alone even in duets or ensembles, and music and design would act as environments, sometimes hostile ones. His movement — startling in its mixture of staccato and legato elements, and unusually intense in its use of torso, legs and feet — abounded in non sequiturs.

In his final years, while still known as avant-garde, he was almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest living choreographer. Mr. Cunningham had also been a nonpareil dancer. The British ballet teacher Richard Glasstone maintains that the three greatest dancers he ever saw were Fred Astaire, Margot Fonteyn and Mr. Cunningham. He was American modern dance’s equivalent of Nijinsky: the long neck, the animal intensity, the amazing leap. In old age, when he could no longer jump, and when his feet were gnarled with arthritis, he remained a rivetingly dramatic performer, capable of many moods.

International fame came to him before national fame. In due course he was acknowledged in America as one of its foremost artists, but for a time his work was known here only in specialist dance, art and music circles. Not so in London, Paris and other cities. There Mr. Cunningham was widely celebrated as the creator of a new classicism, as Diaghilev’s successor, as one of the most remarkable theater artists of his day. And it was in Europe that he was most acclaimed right through to this decade, with sold-out Cunningham seasons in Paris at the Théâtre de la Ville or the Opera.

Yet he was always a creature of New York. Close to the founding members of the New York Schools of Music, Painting and Poetry, Mr. Cunningham himself, along with Jerome Robbins and the younger Paul Taylor, led the way to founding what can retrospectively be called the New York School of Dance.

These choreographers both combined and rejected the rival influences of modern dance and ballet, notably the senior choreographers Graham and Balanchine. They absorbed aspects of ordinary pedestrian movement, the natural world and city life. They tested connections between private subject matter and theatrical expression. And they re-examined the relationship between dance and its sound accompaniment. With Graham and Balanchine, they made New York the world capital of choreography, and the New York School influenced the world in showing how pure dance could be major theater.

Many of the dancers who passed through Mr. Cunningham’s company, notably Mr. Taylor and Karole Armitage, went on to become prestigious choreographers themselves. Many other choreographers, notably Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, have paid tribute to his influence.

Mr. Cunningham’s most celebrated and revolutionary achievement, shared with the composer John Cage, his collaborator and companion, was to have dance and music created independently of each other. His choreography showed that dance was principally about itself, not music, while often suggesting that it could also be about many other things.

“Ambiguity” and “poetry” were among Mr. Cunningham’s favorite words when talking about choreography. So was “theater.” Wit and humor abounded in his work; his conversation was full of laughter and wry anecdotes. Partly because dance was the main subject of his choreography, and partly because he often created dances requiring virtuoso skill, he did more than any other choreographer to demonstrate that dance can be classical while being in most ways far from ballet.

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born on April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Wash., the third of four children of Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer, and the former Mayme Joach. (One brother died before Mercier’s birth.) His two other brothers, Dorwin and Jack, followed their father into the legal profession.

Like many artists, he grew up feeling different, “from about age 2.” Later, with this in mind, he made a solo for himself called “Changeling” (1957).

But he also took his birthplace with him. Even the names of Cunningham works like “Borst Park” (1972), “Inlets” (1977) and “Inlets 2” (1983), all made in New York, referred to parts of Washington. It was there that his interest in wildlife began. Although he did not enjoy country life, his series of “nature studies” continued for decades, from “Springweather and People” (1955) to “Pond Way” (1998). In “Solo” (1975), which he alone ever danced, he seemed to metamorphose from one animal into another.

He took his first dance classes in Centralia. In 1936, he went to Washington, D.C., to study at George Washington University alongside his elder brother Dorwin. He quit after a few months, but it was there that he first saw choreography that electrified him, in a performance by the Kurt Jooss company.

In 1937 he began study at the Cornish School in Seattle. At first he concentrated on theater but also started his first formal study of modern dance with Bonnie Bird, a young woman who had trained and danced with Graham and who went on to become an internationally renowned teacher. A clash with the drama teacher Alexander Koriansky (who disliked modern dance) led to Mr. Cunningham’s switching his first area of study from theater to dance.

In his mind, however, he never left theater. Under Koriansky he had begun to play in Shakespeare and Chekhov and to practice Stanislavskian methods. In later years he was excited by many radical figures in drama, not least Antonin Artaud, and in the 1960s, as he and his company began to tour internationally, theater figures like Lindsay Anderson and Peter Brook hailed his work as drama.

At the Cornish School Bird’s classes introduced him to modern dance as a rigorous discipline. He also started to choreograph. And he became close to Joyce Wike, an anthropology student who had privileged access to the Swinomish Indian tribe; he once watched an extraordinary dance ceremony from which nontribesmen were barred. (One of his first major solos for himself, from 1942, was called “Totem Ancestor.” ) His interest in anthropology became a permanent source of inspiration, most obviously in “RainForest” (1968), where he took ideas from Colin M. Turnbull’s account of life among African pygmies.

In 1938 Bird hired the young composer John Cage as her chief accompanist and music director. Bird and Cage introduced Mr. Cunningham and other dance students to the photography of Edward Weston (whose son was a Cornish student) and to the paintings of Paul Klee and Mark Tobey. Tobey’s work, like Klee’s, anticipated many of the 1940s breakthroughs of Abstract Expressionism, particularly in its decentralized use of space; Cage and Mr. Cunningham became devotees.

In 1939 Bird took her students to the first West Coast session of the Bennington College modern dance summer School at Mills College. Mr. Cunningham was 20. His extraordinary dance talent — his jump was phenomenal and remained so for many years — was immediately recognized. He accepted an offer from Graham, and that September moved to New York. Stepping onto a New York sidewalk for the first time, he looked at the skyline and, as he often recalled, said, “This is home.”

That December he danced on Broadway in a Graham season at the St. James Theater. His long neck and sloping shoulders reminded people of a Picasso acrobat.

Graham, unsure that her teaching methods were sufficient for him, sent him to study at the School of American Ballet. When Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of New York City Ballet, asked him why a modern dancer should study ballet — the two genres existed in virtual warfare at the time — Mr. Cunningham replied, “I really like all kinds of dancing.” Though he was not the first modern dancer to study ballet, his way of splicing elements from both genres in his own work was a breakthrough. He was soon invited to teach modern dance at the school.

The second man to dance in Graham’s previously all-female company, Mr. Cunningham remained a member of it until 1945, appearing in the premieres of masterworks like “El Penitente” (1940), “Letter to the World” (1941) and “Appalachian Spring” (1944).

Spending time alone in a studio, he began to explore his own ideas about dance. In 1942 Mr. Cage and his wife, Xenia, an artist, arrived in New York; Mr. Cunningham and Xenia appeared in a 1943 Cage percussion orchestra performance at the Museum of Modern Art, as a photo spread in Life magazine records. Cage urged him to choreograph, and the two began to develop what would emerge in the early 1950s as the most radical of their ideas about dance theater: that dance and music should be performed at the same time but prepared separately, both autonomous and coexistent.

Cage and Mr. Cunningham also became lovers, and the ensuing breakup of the Cages’ marriage was painful. For many years only a few people realized that the Cage-Cunningham relationship was sexual. Although their offstage partnership became an open secret, the subject was not open until 1989, when Cage, answering an unexpected public question about it, surprised everyone by replying, “I do the cooking, and Merce does the dishes.”

Mr. Cunningham began to present his own choreography in 1942. In 1944, with music by Cage, he presented a performance of dance solos that he later regarded as the true beginning of his career as a choreographer.

But his own dancing came first; he was the main dancer of his choreography for decades. His animal-like qualities of grace and intensity were as remarkable as his jump. His dance vocabulary owed much to both Graham modern dance (especially its use of the back) and to ballet (especially its use of the legs and feet).

For many people Mr. Cunningham was also a superlative dance teacher, right up to this year. Although he often spoke of teaching as if it were a necessary evil, he was passionate about it. No other choreographer has asked dancers to move the torso with such rigor and intensity while also keeping the lower body busy. No modern-dance choreographer has ever made more brilliant use of legs and feet.

In 1947 Kirstein commissioned him to make a dance for Ballet Society (the 1946-48 precursor to New York City Ballet). When Mr. Cunningham asked what kind of piece he wanted, Kirstein, thinking he was being open-minded, said, “Well, I think it should have a beginning, a middle and an end.” Mr. Cunningham, however, steeped in Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” thought of how nature doesn’t have finite forms with beginnings and ends. Instead, his mind turning to Joycean and cyclical form, he choreographed “The Seasons” (1947).

Like Cage and other composers, as well as several painters, Mr. Cunningham also began experimenting with chance as a compositional tool. He used the I Ching in particular, but also cards and dice to determine which parts of the body would be used, which directions, how many dancers. The point had nothing to do with improvisation; Cunningham choreography was very precisely made. Rather, he wanted to banish predictable compositional habits.

The I Ching is the “Book of Changes,” and Mr. Cunningham’s choreography became an expression of the nature of change itself. He presented successive images without narrative sequence or psychological causation, and the audience was allowed to watch dance as one might watch successive events in a landscape or on a street corner.

“Psychology doesn’t interest him; zoology and anthropology do,” Mr. Cunningham’s leading co-dancer, Carolyn Brown, once wrote. When another dancer asked what “Minutiae” (1954) was about, Mr. Cunningham took her to the window of the New York studio, showed her the street below and said, “That.”

Zen Buddhism was another influence. Although Mr. Cunningham’s choreography often featured qualities of attack and conflict, it also expressed a Zen kind of acceptance. Mr. Cunningham, always a superlative dance soloist, now created a dance theater in which the basic condition was soloism. Even in a duet or a trio, each dancer retained marked degrees of independence and detachment.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave its first performances in 1953, at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. And it was there that Mr. Cunningham and Cage met the young painter Robert Rauschenberg, who embraced their ideas.

With Rauschenberg, the company became a three-way demonstration of the autonomy of the theater arts. The dancers often did not know what their costumes, décor or music would be until the dress rehearsal or first night. Mr. Cunningham, Cage and Rauschenberg all found this liberating, and the work cemented them as colleagues. In tours across America, Cage would drive the company van while Rauschenberg took charge of the lighting.

From the mid-1940s, Mr. Cunningham began using other composers as well, including David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Takehisa Kosugi. Brian Eno, Gavin Bryars and Sonic Youth have been among more recent musical colleagues.

Mr. Cunningham was himself a remarkable dance partner. One female dancer said the strength and focus he applied made a duet with him the equivalent of a profound sexual experience. Male-female duets always stimulated his creative imagination: he showed how people can be intensely involved and isolated at the same time in a relationship, both cooperating and independent.

Modern dance had been notable for its earnestness; Mr. Cunningham’s work was often characterized by humor. “Antic Meet” (1958), for example, seemed to satirize the more foolish mannerisms of the Graham dance theater. Much of Mr. Cunningham’s wit arose out of his concentration on pure form. An unpredictable change of rhythm or direction, a brisk figure of nifty footwork could provoke the same smiles and laughter as the jokes in a Haydn symphony.

Mr. Cunningham finally achieved international fame with a world tour in 1964. As soon as the curtain rose on opening night in London, at Sadler’s Wells Theater, the company members felt that they were receiving a quality of attention they had never received before. The tour included several other European cities and crossed Asia.

Once, discovering that the company was booked to perform in a space without a proscenium arch, Mr. Cunningham decided to arrange a one-off anthology of separate sections of choreography, using costumes and music different from those of their original contexts. This became a new and important Cunningham genre, the Event. Events provoked questions about how choreography could look when decontextualized and recontextualized. How would a solo from a 2002 work look between a duet from a 1982 work and a 1997 quartet, all before a 1953 Rauschenberg décor and in newly designed costumes?

Events also stimulated Mr. Cunningham’s love of unconventional spaces for performance; over the years they included the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Grand Central Terminal in New York and a beach in Perth, Australia.

At the end of the 1964 tour, Rauschenberg and some dancers left the company. In the years afterward the group’s designers included Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

Mr. Cunningham continued to experiment. In the 1970s he became fascinated by filming dance. But one of the most controversial elements in Cunningham dance theater in recent decades was Mr. Cunningham himself, now aging visibly. Often he gave himself roles in which his seniority was an element in the drama.

In 1989 he began to explore composing dances on a computer; his first dance made this way was “Trackers” (1991). This became, until late in his life, his main method of dance making. He also increasingly resorted to using a wheelchair and stayed at home while his company toured. He is survived by his younger brother, Jack, of Centralia.

John Cage died in 1992. Although he had advocated the autonomy of the arts, he was often a controlling figure. Mr. Cunningham once said of life without Cage: “On the one hand, I come home at the end of the day, and John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home and John’s not there.”

Mr. Cunningham’s dance invention remained fecund after Cage’s death. “Biped” (1999), with computer-generated visual imagery suggesting many aspects of transcendence, proved the single most sensational dance choreographed by anyone in the 1990s.

Mr. Cunningham remained a man of secrets. Few people knew he had taught himself Russian or had written his own translation of “The Bear” by Chekhov. When he invited Baryshnikov to dance a duet with him in his New York 80th-birthday season (“Occasion Piece,” 1999), he surprised Mr. Baryshnikov by writing to him in perfect Cyrillic script. He took up drawing, frequently combining features of two or more different species to create a convincing but fictional animal.

Mr. Cunningham often spoke and wrote movingly about the nature of dance and would laugh about its maddening impermanence. “You have to love dancing to stick to it,” he once wrote. “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

[photograph by Jack Mitchell from the New York Times website slide show. Caption: "With his collaborator and life partner John Cage, the composer, in 1986."]

Smultronstället

[The New York Times article below is reproduced in full.]

July 30, 2007
Ingmar Bergman, Famed Director, Dies at 89
By Mervyn Rothstein

Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said. Bergman was 89.

Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors — the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa — who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century.

He moved from the comic romp of lovers in “Smiles of a Summer Night” to the Crusader’s search for God in “The Seventh Seal,” and from the gripping portrayal of fatal illness in “Cries and Whispers” to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life in “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films, “this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times Magazine in a profile of the director. God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires.

For many filmgoers and critics, it was Mr. Bergman more than any other director who in the 1950s brought a new seriousness to film making.

“Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics — religion, death, existentialism — to the screen,” Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, once said. “But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.”

He influenced many other film makers, including Woody Allen, who according to The Associated Press said in a tribute in 1988 that Mr. Bergman was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

In his more than 40 years in the cinema, Mr. Bergman made about 50 films, often focusing on two themes — the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.”

In Bergman, the mind is constantly seeking, constantly inquiring, constantly puzzled.

Mr. Bergman often acknowledged that his work was autobiographical, but only “in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.”

He carried out a simultaneous career in the theater, becoming a director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater. He married multiple times and had highly publicized and passionate liaisons with his leading ladies.

Mr. Bergman broke upon the international film scene in the mid-1950s with four films that shook the movie world, films that became identified with him and symbols of his career — “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Magician.”

He had been a director for 10 years, but was little known outside Sweden. Then, in 1956, “Smiles” won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, the haunting and eloquent “Seventh Seal,” with its memorable medieval visions of a knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death in a world terrorized by the plague, won another special prize at Cannes. And in 1959, “The Magician” took the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Audiences flocked to art cinemas all over the world to see his films. Then, in 1960, “The Virgin Spring”, told of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; it won the Academy Award as best foreign film. In a few years, he had become both a cult figure and a box-office success.

Throughout his career, Mr. Bergman often talked about what he considered the dual nature of his creative and private personalities. “I am very much aware of my own double self,” he once said. “The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional.”

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in the university town of Uppsala, Sweden. His father, Erik, a Lutheran clergyman who later became chaplain to the Swedish royal family, believed in strict discipline, including caning and locking his children in closets. His mother, Karin, was moody and unpredictable.

“I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”

The young Mr. Bergman accompanied his father on preaching rounds of small country churches near Stockholm.

“While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened,” he once recalled, “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”

His earliest memories, he once said, were of light and death:

“I remember how the sunlight hit the edge of my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvelous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated.”

At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world, he later recalled, in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts.

He entered the University of Stockholm in 1937, nominally to study the history of literature but actually to spend most of his time working in amateur theater. He soon left home and university for a career in the theater and the movies.

He split his time between film and theater beginning in the early 1940s, when he first was taken into the script department of Svensk Filmindustri — a youth, as his first boss described him, “shabby, rude and scampish with a laugh born out of the darkest depths of the inferno.”

In his theater career, he became head of the municipal theater in the southern Swedish city of Halsingborg in 1944; in 1946, he switched to Goteborg for four years, then spent two years as a guest producer in a couple of cities before going to Malmo in 1952 to become associated with the municipal theater there.

In films, he wrote many scenarios as well as directed. His name first appeared on the screen in 1944 in “Torment,” which he wrote and Alf Sjoberg, one of the dominant figures in Swedish film, directed. The film, based on a story Bergman wrote about his final, torturous year at school, won eight Swedish awards as well as the Grand Prix du Cinema at Cannes. It made an international star of its leading performer, Mai Zetterling, who portrayed a shop girl loved by a young student and shadowed by the student’s sadistic teacher.

Mr. Bergman got his first chance to direct the next year. His early films were essentially training films — basically soap operas that enabled him to experiment with directorial style.

Most experts agree that his first film of note was “Prison,” his sixth movie and the first all-Bergman production. The film is the story of a prostitute who committed suicide. He made it in 18 days, and while critics have called it cruel, disjointed and in many ways sophomoric, it was an early favorite of his.

In the next few years, he made “Summer Interlude” (1950), a tragedy of teen-age lovers; “Waiting Women” (1952), his first successful comedy; “Sawdust and Tinsel” set in a traveling circus and originally released in the United States as “The Naked Night”; “A Lesson in Love” (1953), a witty comedy of marital infidelity, and, finally, “Smiles of a Summer Night” and “The Seventh Seal,” his breakthroughs to fame.

In 1957, the same year as “Seventh Seal,” Mr. Bergman also directed “Wild Strawberries,” ["Smultronstället"] his acclaimed study of old age. In the film, the 78-year-old Isak Borg (played by the silent-film director and actor Victor Sjostrom), drives through the countryside, stops at his childhood home, relives the memory of his first love and comes to terms with his emotional isolation. “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through,” Mr. Bergman has said. “I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.”

Mr. Bergman won his second Academy Award in 1961 for “Through a Glass Darkly,” and then came the turning point in his career — “Winter Light,” which he made in 1963, the second of his trilogy of the early 60s that ended with “The Silence” and portrayed the loneliness and vulnerability of modern man, without faith or love. Many of his earlier films had been animated by an anguished search for belief, Ms. Kakutani wrote, but “Winter Light” — which shows a minister’s own loss of faith — implies that whatever answers there are are to be found on earth.

Mr. Bergman explained that the philosophical shift occurred during a brief hospital stay. Awakening from the anesthesia, he realized that he was no longer scared of death, and that the question of death had suddenly disappeared. Since then, many critics feel, his films have contained a kind of humanism in which human love is the only hope of salvation.

Some critics lashed at individual films as obscure, pretentious and meaningless.

But every time he made a failure, he managed to win back critics and audiences quickly with such films as “Persona” — in which the personalities of two women break down and merge — “The Passion of Anna,” “Cries and Whispers” — a stark portrait of three sisters — and “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman often used what amounted to a repertory company — a group of actors who appeared in many of his films. They included Mr. von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and, above all, Liv Ullmann, with whom he had a long personal relationship and with whom he had a child. He also for many years used the same cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.

The ideas for his films, he said, came to him in many ways. “Persona,” the study of two women in neurotic intimacy, came to life, he said, when one day he saw two women sitting together comparing hands. “I thought to myself,” he said, “that one of them is mute and the other speaks.”

The germ for “The Silence” — in which a dying woman and her sister are in a foreign country with no means of communication — came from a hospital visit, he said, where “I noticed from a window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park.”

“As I watched,” he said, “four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind.”

In other cases, films were suggested by essays, novels, pieces of music. In every case, he said, some outside event had turned the key on some deep-seated memory — each film was a projection of some past experience.

“I have maintained open channels with my childhood,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was — with lights, smells, sounds and people . . . I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.”

Mr. Bergman used his memories in many other films: “Scenes From a Marriage” (which was originally done for television), “Autumn Sonata,” “From the Life of the Marionettes,” “Hour of the Wolf,” “Shame,” “Face to Face” and his version of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” considered by many to be the most successful film ever made of an opera.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Bergman maintained his successful theatrical career in Sweden. It was while rehearsing Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 1976 that he was arrested for tax evasion. The incident received a great deal of publicity, and while the charges were later dropped and the Swedish Government issued a formal apology, Mr. Bergman exiled himself from Sweden to West Germany, where he made “The Serpent’s Egg.” He had a nervous breakdown over the incident and was hospitalized for a time. The exile lasted for a number of years and he only returned permanently to his native country in the mid-80s.

In 1982, Mr. Bergman announced that he had just made his last theatrical film — it was “Fanny and Alexander,” a look at high society in a Swedish town early in the last century that was in part inspired by his own childhood.

“Making ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was such a joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn’t understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt.”

“Fanny and Alexander” won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984.

Mr. Bergman did not, however, leave the world of film altogether. He spent much of his time on Faro, a sparsely populated island that visitors described as chilly and desolate but that he considered the one place he felt safe, secure and at home. And he would devote his mornings to working on his plays, novels and television scripts.

He made a television film, “After the Rehearsal” — about three actors working on a production of Strindberg’s “Dream Play” — which was released theatrically in the United States. He wrote “The Best Intentions,” first as a novel and then in 1991 as an eloquent six-hour film directed by Billie August about Mr. Bergman’s parents’ troubled marriage just before his birth.

“The slightly fictional Anna and Henrik Bergman are complex, stubborn, well-meaning people who share a heartbreaking inability to be happy no matter what they try,” Ms. James wrote, and Mr. Bergman “is a benevolent ghost hovering over the film.”

Mr. Bergman said in an interview in Sweden that the act of writing the film had changed his attitude toward his parents. “After this,” he said, “every form of reproach, blame, bitterness or even vague feeling that they have messed up my life is gone forever from my mind.”

“The Best Intentions” was one of three novels he wrote in the 80s and 90s about his parents. The second, “Sunday’s Children,” was made into a film and directed by his son Daniel. The third, “Private Confessions,” about his mother, became a film directed by Ms. Ullmann.

In 1997, he directed a two-hour made-for-television movie, “In the Presence of Clowns,” set in the 1920s and based on a story he discovered among the papers left by an uncle who appeared as a main character in “Fanny and Alexander” and “Best Intentions” and was played in all three films by Borje Ahlstedt.

He directed two plays every year at the Royal Dramatic Theater. In May 1995 the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a New York Bergman Festival that included retrospectives by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Television and Radio, presented the Royal Theater in two plays Mr. Bergman directed, Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” and Yukio Mishima’s “Madame de Sade.”

He also directed operas, and wrote many plays and television dramas, several novels and a 1987 memoir, “The Magic Lantern.”

[In the fall of 2002, Bergman, at age 84, started production on “Saraband,” a 120-minute television movie based on the two main characters in “Scenes From a Marriage,” The Associated Press reported. In a news conference, the director said he wrote the story after realizing he was “pregnant with a play.” “At first I felt sick, very sick,” he said. “It was strange. Like Abraham and Sarah, who suddenly realized she was pregnant,” he said, referring to biblical characters. “It was lots of fun, suddenly to feel this urge returning.”]

In addition to Oscars and prizes at film festivals, Mr. Bergman’s films won many awards from the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics, among others. In 1977, he was given the Swedish Academy of Letters’ Great Gold Medal, one of only 17 people to have received it in this century.

Mr. Bergman’s fifth wife, Ingrid Karlebo Bergman, died in 1975. They had no children, but he had many children from his previous marriages and relationships.

Once, when asked by the critic Andrew Sarris why he did what he did, Mr. Bergman told the story of the rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral in the Middle Ages by thousands of anonymous artisans.

“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”

Mr. Bergman’s celluloid carvings often revealed an obsession with death. But in later life he said that the obsession had abated. “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” he said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

According to The A.P., which cited TT, the Swedish news agency, the date of Mr. Bergman’s funeral has not been set but will be attended by a close group of his friends and family.

[first photograph from the New York Times. Caption: "Ingmar Bergman with Liv Ulmann in Stockholm in the 1960s during a theater rehearsal. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images." Second photograph from the Guardian film web log. Caption: "Master's piece... Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman on the set of Saraband, a film made when he was 84. Photograph: Bengt Wanselius."]