As promised, here’s a master list of Bergman obits and tributes. Everything I’ve come across today is linked here; if you’ve written or read something I’ve missed, please leave a link in the comments to this post.

Most recent updates follow immediately after the jump.

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Last updated August 7, 2007

“Well, goddamnit.” — Keith Uhlich, The House Next Door

“Non-cinephiles likely have heard of Bergman even if they somehow think that the woman from Casablanca directed a seminal foreign film about death.” — Aaron Dobbs, Out of Focus

“I wonder how many under-35s have even seen a Bergman film. The Bergman art-house aesthetic of the ’50s and ’60s is about as far from the Tarantino film-geek attitude as you can get.” — Jeff Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

“Dozens of us [film critics] have the same story of teenage revelation: of seeing a Bergman movie, usually The Seventh Seal, and saying, “This is what I want to study, devote my life to.” Here, we saw, was no mere director, collaborating on scripts with other writers, but a full-service auteur.” — Richard Corliss, TIME

“Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films…God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires” — Mervyn Rothstein, New York Times

“His vision encompassed the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, its glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the Baltic islet of Faro, where the reclusive artist spent his last years.” — Louise Nordstrom, AP

“That says it all, really: Bergman offers the penis up, unannounced, but part of an incredible sequence; Fincher promises it, then never delivers.” — Brendan Connelly, Film Ick

“It’s important to remember that Bergman and his fellow Euro-titan Michelangelo Antonioni, who both died on the same day last week, were big-name commercial directors — who also helped moviegoers worldwide see the relatively young, originally low-brow, populist medium in a new light: as a (potential) art form. (The Beatles, who in 1964-’65 were the most popular youth phenomenon on the planet, even wanted Antonioni to direct their second feature, after “A Hard Day’s Night”!) And if they hadn’t been so popular and famous, they would not have been so influential. These guys won plenty of high-falutin’ awards at film festivals, but they were also nominated for Oscars in glitzy Hollywood.” — Jim Emerson

“If you Google “Ingmar Bergman” and “great,” you get almost six million hits. Sometimes, though, the best indication of an artist’s continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about. The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum, NY Times

“I was very saddened by the death of Ingmar Bergman. He was a friend and certainly the greatest film artist of my lifetime. He told me that he was afraid that he would die on a very, very sunny day. and I can only hope it was overcast and he got the weather he wanted.” — Woody Allen, via Nikki Finke

“In 1975 I visited the Bergman set for “Face to Face.” He took a break and invited me to his “cell” in Film House: A small, narrow room, filled with an army cot, a desk, two chairs, and on the desk an apple and a bar of chocolate. He said he’d been watching an interview with Antonioni the night before: “I hardly heard what he said. I could not take my attention away from his face. For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.” — Roger Ebert

“His influence was felt not just in the art-house, but even in the grindhouse; slasher-movie king Wes Craven launched his career by remaking Bergman’s The Virgin Spring as Last House on the Left. And of course, the influence extended to Broadway, where Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night became A Little Night Music and spawned Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns.’” — Gary Susman, Entertainment Weekly

“Once on an airplane ride I sat next to a Jesuit priest who wrote best-selling books. We spent the entire time talking passionately about Bergman. It was what we had most in common.” — Robert Stein, NewCritics

“There’s never been a better movie about childhood and about magic than Fanny and Alexander. There’s never been a better movie about men and women and what they do to each other than Scenes From a Marriage.” — Dan Leo, NewCritics
“His serial affairs with actresses resulted in children he largely — and stubbornly — ignored. It’s not so much that he was a monster; if we judged solely on that basis, we’d have to disqualify the work of 90 percent of our greatest artists. It’s that the life sometimes stunted the work.” — David Edelstein, NY Mag

“In my lapses of workaday self-pity, I stare out the window and think, ‘It’s like a scene from a Bergman film.’ Well, of course it is. Everything is like a scene from a Bergman film.” — Stu VanAirsdale, The Huffington Post

“Bergman gave me the tools with which to learn the language of cinema, to use an overextended yet here applicable expression. The Swedish master filmmaker’s death this week at age 89 strikes film culture hard, partly because it seems to close another door on an era of moviegoing that seems more and more distant…” — Michael Koresky, indieWIRE

“Sadly, not one of his many remarkable films made the final 100 on the list put together by The Online Film Community announced yesterday. Hopefully, in my just-waking-up haziness, I can do at least a somewhat reasonable tribute to the Swedish filmmaker.”– Edward Copeland on Film

“But let’s be honest: How many of you have seen a Bergman film outside a film class in college? (Recognizing the fact that Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey parodies The Seventh Seal by setting up a chess game with Death doesn’t count.)” — Hank Sartin, Time Out Chicago

“Was Bergman in touch with the European mind of his generation? Perhaps he simply was the mind of his generation.” — Peter Bradshaw, Guardian Film Blog

“Bergman’s influence was most notable on Woody Allen who both spoofed the master filmmaker, and made films about existential angst in a similar style.” — Peter Nellhaus, ScreenHead

“Bergman wasn’t all about gloom and doom: his 1955 period yarn [Smiles of a Summer Night] is practically a farce and — like almost everything else in his oeuvre, was expertly filleted by Woody Allen, in this case in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. It’s a turn-of-the-century house-party rom-com, with relationships threatened on all sides… it’s a real, if overlooked, gem.” — Andrew Pulver, Guardian Film Blog

“Forget Allen, it is Andrei Tarkovsky who is the more direct descendant of Ingmar Bergman.” — David Thomson, Guardian Film Blog

“Suffice it to say that without Bergman, we never would have seen this SCTV Bergman parody in which Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Levy whisper fake Swedish at each other.” — New York Magazine

“Bergman gave us some of the most riveting films in the history of the moving image.” — Chuck Tryon, The Chutry Experiment

“Other directors might entertain an audience through plot just to arrive at some golden moment of meaning. Bergman strived to make films that were all meaning, that revealed themselves and kept revealing themselves, peeling away layer after layer, and finding a deeper truth.” — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

“I was a Bergman fanatic in college. I was profoundly moved in every conceivable way by Persona. I called it my alltime favorite film then, and still consider it my alltime favorite. Bergman has created a massive body of work, and I look forward to filling in the gaps of my knowledge.” — Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer [via GreenCine Daily]

“Bergman filmed some shockingly honest interchanges between characters. You can hardly believe anyone could admit such naked and brutal things to another person, let alone film them.” — Cinecultist

“I herewith commit to watching at least one Bergman film this week in honor of this monumental talent.” — Anne Thompson

“His films were often dedicated to exploring aging and death, but there was always a youthful spirit behind so much of what he did.” — Matt Dentler

“His career survived occasional failures and even a huge shift in his personal philosophy — while his early work was steeped in the search for faith, when he stopped fearing death, salvation became a more tangible, human construct.” — Monika Bartyzel, Cinematical

“One of the titans of 20th century cinema…” — Scott Macaulay, FILMMAKER

“The game of chess is finally over. May he rest in peace.” — The Visitor, Twitch

James Israel
Ray Pride
Xeni Jardin