The private world of Ingmar Bergman

Video from W Magazine - accompanying the article 'The private world of Ingmar Bergman'.

For Bergman the Swedish island of Fårö (the most northern part of the island Gotland, located off Sweden's south-eastern coast) "was his haven, his creative wellspring and a central character in a number of his films.

Here he wrote his scripts, filmed several of his groundbreaking works and screened movies twice a day in a converted barn.

Unforgiving and elemental, with its rocky beaches and weather-beaten forests of gnarled pine, Fårö epitomized Bergman’s unsparing and unsettled internal world.

There’s a sensuality in its hardness that reveals itself only if you look closely: Fårö does its best not to charm you.

When Bergman saw it for the first time, in 1960, while scouting locations, he thought, 'This is your landscape, Bergman', as he recalls in his autobiography. Six years later, after returning to make Persona with Liv Ullmann, he built Hammars, a house on the edge of the sea near the spot where they’d shot the film and fallen in love.

From that moment, the windswept island became the stage on which Bergman’s artistic and domestic lives intertwined."

-- read the entire W magazine article here, and see Shephen Shore's photographs here.