Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman's cinema is built on faces. He and the cinematographer Sven Nykvist had settled between them that the mid-shot was dull and unnecessary; there is scarcely a mid-shot in Persona, only long and insistent close-ups. He went on working with the same performers: Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow, Erland Josephson, and Liv Ullmann, who took the lead in nine of his films from Persona through to Autumn Sonata. Two came out at once in 1957, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Most of Persona he shot on Faro; the island became his real home afterwards and he died there. He worked in the theatre as much as in cinema, putting his name to more than 170 stage productions, and he headed the Royal Dramatic Theatre between 1963 and 1966. Television he took for a medium of its own: Scenes from a Marriage was an SVT series in 1973, and Fanny and Alexander exists as a three-hour cinema version and a five-and-a-half-hour television one, the television version being what he said he had really wanted.