The New York Times' Mervyn Rothstein reports that Ingmar Bergman died today on the small island of Faro, on the Baltic coast of Sweden, according to Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation. Bergman was eighty-nine. Critics called Bergman one of the directors who dominated the world of serious filmmaking in the second half of the twentieth century. His films dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Bergman’s films, "this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory," Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times Magazine in a profile of the director. "Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics—religion, death, existentialism—to the screen," Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, once said. "But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity." In his more than forty years in the cinema, Bergman made about fifty films, often focusing on two themes—the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, "a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect."