Ingmar Bergman died today and cinema lost the last of it's great masters.

Bergman was a director I felt I had to educate myself to and it was an uphill struggle as I was working so hard at them. Eventually I gave up and just started watching them as films and not as Monuments Of Cinema which needed to be genuflected before. That's when I started to appreciate them.
So many great films, so many great performances...

The beleaguered young couple in IT RAINS ON OUR LOVE, Harriet Andersson's luminous performance in SUMMER WITH MONIKA, the way Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Bjornstrand have to learn A LESSON IN LOVE to realize they are happier together and the remarkable one-two of SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT and THE SEVENTH SEAL. There are the female duels of Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom in THE SILENCE and Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in PERSONA as well as in the 1970s the painful-to-watch dissections of a marriage - Ullmann and Erland Josephson in SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE - and of the relationship between a mother and a daughter - Ullmann & Ingrid Bergman in AUTUMN SONATA. Bergman's other mainstay apart from his remarkable actors - Max von Sydow should of course be mentioned - was his brilliant cinematographer Sven Nykvist.

Of course not all the films are good - I will happily walk a mile in tight shoes to avoid seeing THE SERPENT'S EGG again - but dear Lord there is more to be gained by watching one of his worst than to view any number of other directors' best.