Ingmar Bergman is Dead

I was in college the first time I saw an Ingmar Bergman film---it was The Seventh Seal. I was a casual movie watcher as a kid but I had never been exposed to the canon of international cinema until a friend, a film major, introduced me to Breathless. The Seventh Seal mesmerized me. Here was a movie that was asking the questions and dealing with the subjects that movies were supposed to avoid. There was no Joe the Explainer to guide the audience through the history of the crusades, no tacked on happy ending to make the prospect of death seem more palatable. Here was the human condition, in all its absurdity, filling the screen for 96 minutes.

The thought of casual conversation once the lights came on seemed obscene; how could we go back to talking about classes and romantic intrigues after having a gauntlet like that thrown in front of us?

And, I began to feel cheated. Film making around the world is a commercial enterprise but it dawned on me that cinema could be an art form as well, with just as much to say to posterity as literature. And yet, in my own country, we were being fed tripe that bore no relation to life as it was actually being lived. We experienced a vicarious thrill watching Rambo defeat the North Vietnamese army and departed the theater in the in the comfortable haze of complacency, but where were the films that could touch our lives or make us question the very nature of our existence?

I have a difficult time getting friends to attend Bergman films with me---he's too depressing is the reason usually given. I see him another way: in showing us people struggling with love, pain, alienation and ultimately death, he provides a powerful catharsis and reminds us that despite all we are not alone in the world. Today's Hollywood hacks---the explosion specialists and the post-modern jive artists alike---are not fit to carry his clapboard.