The legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman has died—a man Woody Allen called “probably the greatest film artist…since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

Some have also said, in this modern world, Bergman’s films are just too existential and slow. Indeed, I have heard that Bergman himself has said he can’t watch some of his films anymore because they’re too depressing. That’s the line of a true comedian.

Either way, his influence on film, by all accounts, has been profound and wonderful and original.

The chess mention in the title, by the way, is from the opening of The Seventh Seal (1957), where Max von Sydow (as a Knight in a the plague-riddled Middle Ages) returns from a Crusade and challenges the personification of Death to a game of chess, to buy a little time to get a chance to get back home and see his family before, like all of us, getting check-mated.

Here’s an excerpt from a good link on NPR about Ingmar Bergman:

At the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, the figure of Death stands on a rocky beach and presents himself to a knight just returned from the Crusades. Death is entirely cloaked and hooded in black, in stark contrast to his doughy white face. The image is still one of the most haunting pictures ever put on a movie screen.

Bergman, who died Monday at the age of 89, took on the biggest subjects — life, death, the existence and the silence of God.

The full article is here.

I heard a quote from Roger Ebert:

Films are no longer concerned with the silence of God but with the chattering of men. We are uneasy to find Bergman asking existential questions in an age of irony.

It is doubly ironic that, to take Ebert’s point even farther, I have read (I can’t remember where or in what scripture) that actually being bored with human stories – “the chattering of men” – and more interested in transcendental stories is a sign of deepening spiritual growth.

Wherever Ingmar is or isn’t, may the lighting be good.

And given that it is all so temporary, in an eternal sort of way, love more. Your move,

Pete xox

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