Light and Magic

Curiously, I'd expected Ingmar Bergman to keep going until he was around 120, making periodic returns from retirement every 20 years or so. The most recent of these, Saraband, exemplified quite why I love Bergman - its unrelenting cantankerousness and emotional barbarity conflicting and aligning with crystalline, harsh beauty. There's a version of him via Woody Allen that is worth ignoring - the overrated angst of Wild Strawberries, the drawing room wit and the solipsistic misery, but there was always Bergman the experimentalist - the mediascape running alongside the psychodrama and bared devices in Persona, the stark palettes of Cries and Whispers, the post-punk horror of From the Life of the Marionettes; and then there's Bergman the unreconstructed sensualist, as in the joyous carnality of Summer with Monika...and like Fassbinder (or Jarvis Cocker...) his best work was usually about women, and far from the peevish male self-dramatisations he's usually lumped in with. We shall never see the like, etc...