Yesterday, Ingmar Bergman finally confronted the great antagonist of his epic moviemaking career. The writer-director who created indelible images of mortality came face to face with Death.
At the age of 89, he died at his Faro Island home off the coast of Sweden.
Perhaps, like Max von Sydow's knight in The Seventh Seal, he cried out to a god "who must be somewhere." But one prefers to see him as the artist-juggler sees the knight in the haunting climax of that movie, dancing "away from the dawn" with a string of fellow travelers "while the rain washes their faces and clears the salt of the tears from their cheeks."
Mr. Bergman's movies faced death and transcended it. Even his darkest images are so fraught with power and feeling that they pay tribute to the artist's life.
A medieval knight plays chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. An aging professor dreams of his own funeral winding through a town under a clock with no hands in Wild Strawberries. In the delicious erotic farce Smiles of a Summer Night, a husband grasps the veil of his young wife who has just run away with his son as if it were a shroud for the lost prime of his life.
His characters may have been Western men and women caught in the tragedy and existential slapstick of shattered traditions and belief systems, but he compensated for the loss of religious epiphanies with his own cinematic catharses.
Bibi Andersson's extraordinary sexual monologue in Persona brought new insight into confession as an erotic act. The servant in Cries and Whispers comforting a woman on her mountainous breast evoked Madonna-like love, distorted sexuality and the basic, animal urge to do something, anything to heal the dead.
Mr. Bergman delivered experience with the white heat of revelation - and exotic or supernatural adventure with the detail and nuance of experience (as he did in The Seventh Seal and, in a different way, decades later, in The Magic Flute). He was often mistaken for a philosopher, but what made his films hypnotic and even, at times, seductively entertaining was not his intellect, but the touch, mind and blood of a poet. Around the world, men and women who came of age in the mid-1950s found themselves sparked into filmmaking when they saw his movies.
