Ingmar Bergman: A morally flawed recluse, but a director touched by genius

"He doesn't have to meet people here. He can be alone with the stones and the heavens. It is good for the soul," the actress Barbro Hjort af Ornas said of Faro, the remote, windswept island in the Baltic Sea where Ingmar Bergman died yesterday.

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She first met Bergman in the late 1930s, when she appeared in amateur plays that he directed. As a Faro resident, she understood why he sought refuge there. "The air is different, the light is different. There is a peace you can get here - an absolute peace. No one to see and nothing to disturb you, just nature."

When we were on Faro last month for Bergman Week, a series of lectures and screenings dedicated to him, it was midsummer. It didn't get dark at all. Not that this changed the island's eerie atmosphere. As Bergman testified, "my ghosts, my demons, phantoms and spirits never appear at night. They often appear in broad daylight."

Bergman would have wanted Faro to be his last resting place. In January 2004 he emptied his apartment in Stockholm, quit his office at the Dramatic Theatre, anddeclared that he would never leave the island again.

The attendees at the Bergman Week knew that Bergman wasn't well. He had had a hip replacement and was reportedly confined to a wheelchair. His eyesight was fading and he had stopped watching films in that specially built cinema where he used to screen Charlie Chaplin's The Circus every Christmas. There were rumours that he was beginning to deviate from the rigorous daily routine he had followed for so long - brisk early morning walk, three-hour writing stint, lunch, reading and then an afternoon film. Now, his main consolation was music. On Sunday evenings, his former wife Kabi Laretei - a concert pianist - would play music for him.

Even so, no one suspected quite how fast he was fading. After all, last year, when Ang Lee had visited the Bergman Week, the director himself had been much in evidence, attending talks on his work, joshing from the audience with Harriet Andersson and debating the religious themes in one of his starkest films, Winter Light, with a leading theologian. We all hoped we would spot him this year too, but he didn't show. Kenneth Branagh, the event's special guest, was unable to meet him. (Bergman was aware of Branagh's work, and had screened Branagh's In The Bleak Midwinter in his cinema.)

Everyone was looking forward to his 90th birthday next July. Events were being planned all over the world: retrospectives, travelling exhibitions. Now, one guesses, these events will be rushed forward.

Death was Bergman's subject. As he told the film-maker Marie Nyrerod, "not a day has gone by in my life when I haven't thought about death." It is there in one way or another in almost all his films. Don't just think of the (now clichéd) image of the Knight playing chess with the grim reaper in The Seventh Seal. Death comes in all different ways in his work.

In Wild Strawberries, the mood is lyrical as an old man looks back over his life. Contrast this with the misogynistic fury of the killing of the prostitute in From the Life of the Marionettes, one of his most disturbing and underrated films. There is the ballet dancer lamenting her lover who died in freakish circumstances in Summer Interlude. In The Serpent's Egg, set in 1920s Germany as the seeds of fascism are sown, death is as brutal as in any Hollywood revenge thriller.

Bergman's magisterial autobiography The Magic Lantern is full of death. He writes vividly - and with an occasionally morbid relish - about relatives killed by trains, pregnant servant girls who commit suicide and drowned bodies with eels coming out of all their orifices.

In some quarters, there will be relief at Bergman's passing. The Swedes, who sometimes gave the impression of being embarrassed by this monumental figure in their midst, will be able to honour him without reservation. The old spats - the battle with the tax authorities that led him to live in exile, the debates about his stifling effect on younger film-makers - will be forgotten. He will take his place in the list of their major cultural figures, at least the equal of his beloved Strindberg.

His achievements are indeed remarkable - more than 50 films, over 120 major theatre productions, the radio plays, the TV dramas and the books. In sheer volume and consistent quality, it is hard to think of anyone who matches him.

Bergman possessed a relentless artistic drive. Even in the 1930s, when he was directing amateur drama, Barbro Hjort af Ornas testifies that he was already subject to his famous tantrums. By his own admission, Bergman wasn't the perfect family man. "I've been married five times, I won't deny it," he told Marie Nyrerod. Most of his marriages lasted five years, but he was self-evidently more obsessed with his work than with his children. "I've been family lazy. It is quite simply that. I haven't put an ounce of effort into my families."

He told one devastating story about how he broke with his wife after falling in love with the journalist Gun Hagberg. He returned home, sat on the bed and told his wife (who was delighted to see him home sooner than expected) that he was leaving her - and then off he went. "It still feels terrible to think that I could have been so incredibly cruel ... but ... I was."

It may be prurient and reductive to pore over the messy private lives of artists. In Bergman's case, it is unavoidable. He drew so heavily from his private life in his work that some knowledge of the former can't help but elucidate the latter.

The affair and subsequent marriage to Gun Hagberg was traumatic, but it was a tremendous stimulus to his creativity. Hagberg became the model for many women in his films. As late as 2000, when he provided the screenplay for Liv Ullmann's Faithless, he was still raking over his relationship with her and the feelings of lust, jealousy and anger it engendered.

There is one central paradox - how could someone who wrote so creatively and attentively about childhood be so uninterested in his own children's lives? Anyone who has read The Magic Lantern or seen Fanny And Alexander will realise that Bergman had an uncanny ability to capture a child's-eye view of the world in all its innocence and perversity. Perhaps, though, the only childhood he was interested in was his own.

It was understandable that critics were sometimes wary of him. He claimed to have a black book in which he jotted down the names of all the people he didn't like. There was one famous occasion on which he slugged a reviewer who had panned his work - an action he later regretted.

One shouldn't discount his humour, which was often at his own expense. In The Magic Lantern, Bergman wrote in entertaining, self-deprecating fashion about his chronic stomach problems, his early misadventures in masturbation, his adolescent gawkiness with girls, and his egotism as a young director.

There was something Prospero-like about Bergmanon his island. He would talk without irony about the spirits who surrounded him on Faro. He needed his demons - his fear and rage. "Of course the demons have to be around," he told his friend and fellow film-maker Jorn Donner. "But as long as I am in the studio or theatre, I control the universe and so the demons are automatically kept under control."