It would be wrong to call Bergman one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of modern cinema, as most people do. For he did not make movies for fame, nor even to push the boundaries of film making. Instead he made films to push the mental limits of his viewers, to force them to confront uncomfortable questions, to expose them to images that peer straight into their souls. The outcome was everything the world lauded or hated Bergman for.

“I came out of that movie house reeling like a drunkard, drugged speechless, with the film rushing through my bloodstream, pumping and thudding,” said actor Gunnel Lindblom, who would later act in Bergman’s ‘The Silence’,  her first Bergman film. This is still the kind of reaction that reverberates across the world.

Born in Sweden, Bergman was from a conservative family. He grew up around religious imagery and discussions and his parish minister father would and was punished Bergman for his slightest faults by locking him up in dark closets. In this darkness he discovered the magic lantern of imagination that would show him the most beautiful and tormenting images and later lead to volcanic spurts of creativity in an attempt to share it with the world.

The crisis of faith, the inability of religion to answer the most basic questions of life, became the drive and motive in many of his early films. In ‘Winter Light’, a pastor realizes his inability to defend his own carefully created image of God from reality after a man contemplating suicide asks him, “why must we live?’. ‘The Seventh Seal’, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’ and ‘Virgin Spring’, all deal with this confusion of faith.

Like masters before and after him, Bergman too was caught between the need for creative expression versus commercial success. Hence, when two of his expressionist and realist films, ‘Sawdust and Tinsel’ and ‘Summer with Monika’ failed at the box office, he made the dark comedy ‘Smiles of a Summer Night’ in 1955. The film was an international hit, setting cash registers ringing and winning at Cannes.

It was at this point that Bergman subtly pushed before his producers, the script of a film that would immortalize him, cause an unprecedented cultural impact on the world of cinema and become a landmark in film history. This low-budget film released in 1957 was ‘The Seventh Seal’, the story of a knight returning from the crusades, who engages death in a game of chess. His second film released in the same year, ‘Wild Strawberries’ was another critical success. After these films, no serious discussion of cinema could ever be complete without a mention of Bergman or his movies.

Yet, many critics argue, that his best came much later. After some films made post 1957 Bergman ‘regretted’ making those films, and he set out to reinvent his own cinema. The results were three loosely interlinked films, known now as the ‘Faith Trilogy’ - ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, ‘Winter Light’ and ‘The Silence’.

Bergman’s film career was briefly interrupted by his engagement as the director of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 1963. In 1965, he resigned from the post, and checked himself into a psychiatric clinic. It was here, that the physical similarity between Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, struck him and led him to make, what a group of critics call his best film, ‘Persona’ - an ambiguous psychological war between two women.

His notable films after ‘Persona’, were ‘Hour of the Wolf (1968)’, ‘The Shame’ and ‘A Passion’.

The 1970’s were a highly productive and rewarding period for Bergman. His films of the time brought him multiple Oscars and the highest awards at Cannes while being commercial and critical success. ‘Cries and Whispers’, ‘Scenes from a Marriage’, and ‘Autumn Sonata’, were products of this period. ‘Fanny and Alexander’, a mini TV series, came in the 1980’s and again won him acclaim and multiple Oscars.

Bergman made very few films after this, spending the last 25 years of his life writing screenplays, books (two autobiographies, novels and short stories) and directing TV productions.