Swedish Director Probed Darkness of Human Psyche

Bergman received favorable attention in the United States with "Smiles of a Summer Night" (1955), which blended Shakespearean farce with a disquieting sexual undercurrent. Critic Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times, called it "delightfully droll," and the film won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes.

"It was an attempt to be witty," Bergman said in the book "Bergman on Bergman." "People were always bawling me out for being such a gloomy guy."

That film's plot was adopted by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler for their musical "A Little Night Music" and Woody Allen for "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy."

Bergman showed some other lighter touches when he filmed Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute" (1975) as well as "The Devil's Eye" (1960), about Don Juan's ascent from hell to seduce a minister's virginal daughter. According to the film, its title came from a Swedish proverb, "A faithful woman is a sty in the Devil's eye."

One of his best-known films of the period, "The Seventh Seal," was a forewarning of nuclear devastation even though it was set in the 14th century.

Von Sydow played a knight who returns from the Crusades to his plague-infested homeland and finds Death waiting for him. While buying time by playing chess with Death, the knight leads an anguished search for meaning. He crosses paths with a society of fools and self-flagellating fanatics and finds Death the game's victor.

"Wild Strawberries" (1957) was Bergman's next major project, and years after its release, film critic Leonard Maltin wrote that it remained a "staple of any serious filmgoer's education."

The main character was an old, emotionally distant professor, played by the silent-era film director Victor Sjostrom. He picks up a series of passengers during his car trip to collect an award, and they prompt him to reflect on his life and realize, too late, his human flaws.

Bergman made a series of films in the early 1960s that focused on the search for a lost faith: "Through a Glass Darkly," about a woman's mental and spiritual breakdown; "Winter Light," about a widowed country pastor unable to persuade a parishioner that life is worth living; and "The Silence," about two sisters whose emotional and erotic tensions reach their peak while staying at a strange hotel in an unfamiliar country.

"The Silence" -- with its explicit treatment of masturbation, lesbianism and masochism -- shocked audiences and became one of Bergman's most financially successful films.

As with "The Silence," his 1966 film "Persona" was essentially a two-woman tour de force. "Persona" showed a mute actress (Liv Ullmann) and her caregiver (Bibi Andersson) spending time alone by the barren seashore.

Ultimately Bergman shows their faces morphing into the same image, leaving it unclear whether they were ever two separate people in the first place.