The Swedish film director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman died today, at the age of 88. Bergman was greatly admired by critics and achieved some success with U.S. audiences during the 1960s. Bergman’s films were known for their heavy intellectual themes and extravagant symbolism, perhaps most famously in the chess match between a knight and the Grim Reaper in The Seventh Seal.

As in that scene, Bergman was often given to heavy-handedness and pretension, and his films, although often powerful if one is sympathetic to their themes, could be somewhat weak and even risible when the director indulged too greatly in cinematic intellectualism.

Although he made an occasional comedy, such as Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman’s work was in the main fashionably depressive, and even his comedies were labored and rather glum.  He claimed that his upbringing made him so, as Reuters reports:

His cinematic masterpieces often dwelt on sexual confusion, loneliness and the vain search for the meaning of life — themes he ascribed to a traumatic childhood in which he was beaten by his father, a Lutheran minister.

He told Reuters in a rare interview in 2001 that personal demons tormented and inspired him throughout his life.

"The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times and create panic and terror," he said at the time. "But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage."

Not surprisingly given this claim, his films reflected an atheism of a particularly astringent and depressing kind, although it is possible to interpret his work as being hostile to religion and not to the concept of God. That seems a bit of a stretch, however.

In large part as a direct result of that attitude, film critics and cineastes greatly admired Bergman, and he received many honors throughout his long career. Among the most celebrated of Bergman’s 54 films are The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Virgin Spring, Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander.

Bergman was certainly an enormously skilled director, and a healthy person can learn much from his films, about both cinema and life.