autodidact自學 , smiles of a summer night.

 "I've had to learn everything about movies by myself. For the theater, I studied with a wonderful old man in Goteborg, where I spent four years. He was a hard, difficult man, but he knew the theater- and I learned from him. For the movies, however, there was no one. Before the war, I was a schoolboy. Then, during the war, we got see no foreign films at all. By the time it was over, I was working had to support a wife and three children. Before, fortunately, I am by nature an autodidact, one who can teach himself, though it's an uncomfortable thing at times. Self-taught people sometimes cling too much to the technical side, the sure side and place technical perfection too high."

The scene near the end of "The Seventh Seal" (1957) in which Death is dancing away with his followers was shot when some of the actors had gone home for the day, using some technicians and a few tourists as stand-ins. Director Ingmar Bergman conceived the scene on the spot, and had to improvise quickly because of an interesting cloud formation that he wanted in the background.

The representation of Death as a white-faced man who wears a dark cape and plays chess with mortals has been a popular object of parody in other films and television.

Several films and comedy sketches portray Death as playing games other than or in addition to chess. In the final scene of the 1968 film "De Düva" (mock Swedish for "The Dove"), a 15-minute pastiche of Bergman's work generally and his "Wild Strawberries" (1957) in particular, the protagonist plays badminton against Death, and wins when the droppings of a passing dove strike Death in the eye.

The script is based on a one act play Bergman wrote 1953-1954 as an exercise for the acting students at the Malmö City Theatre. He asked the pupils to suggest roles that they wanted to play. Based on this he wrote a few pages of monologues. After the exercise, Bergman processed the material to the finished piece called "Wood Painting." "Wood Painting" has many similarities with "The Seventh Seal.". The script was initially rejected, and Bergman would end up rewriting it five times. It was only after the success of "Smiles of a Summer Night" (1955) at Cannes that it started to be considered more seriously. (IMDb/Wikipedia)

Happy Birthday, Ingmar Bergman!