In a career spanning 60 years and more than 40 films, Ingmar Bergman, who died on Monday aged 89, established himself as one of the greatest European filmmakers of all time. No other writer-director has made a more eloquent case for cinema as the home of tragic drama in the modern age.

Bergman’s parallel career as a theatre director made him familiar with stage tragedy from Shakespeare to Strindberg. For his films he took the essence of that tradition – the flaws of character that combine with fate’s machinery to bring about human downfall – and modernised it for the age of agnosticism, psychoanalysis and fear of planetary doomsday.