Bergman, ever the provoker

"He's dead. That's it then." These are the words I hear on Monday morning when I answer the telephone. They arrive with a sickening, dull thud and are spoken by my friend Leon Vitali. We spend the next hour mourning our way through this news by exchanging snippets of dreams we cannot forget -- dreams belonging to Ingmar Bergman, the first filmmaker to ever seriously approach the archetypes once reserved for novelists and playwrights like his fellow countrymen August Strindberg and Hjalmar Söderberg, and Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. But Bergman belonged to all of us. He was our tunnel man building the aqueducts of our cinematic collective unconscious. Supplying water to a people who heretofore didn't know they were thirsty.

Of course it is impossible to write anything about Ingmar Bergman without breaking into anecdote or hyperbole. There is a reason his name is an adjective for the psychology of abstraction, depression and the long shadow cast by postmodern life. Like a patient reclining on a by-the-hour Jungian couch, his work demands analysis. Try watching "Nattvardsgästerna" (Winter Light), "Tystnaden" (The Silence), "Jungfrukällan" (The Virgin Spring) or "Fanny och Alexander" (Fanny and Alexander) with the subtitles off and see what happens. There is something present underneath the pretense of language that allows you to engage the narrative in a way similar to how you experience instrumental music -- completely unburdened of the literalism of "reality."

It is hard to believe now, but there was a time when Ingmar Bergman, the poster boy of the European "art house," became unfashionable. He found himself accused of being earnest -- of residing in an austere, pseudo-serious pose. Many of his biggest supporters jumped ship and ran straight to Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave, with the excitement of a hand-held, jump-cut image and cartoon story line. I think this must have really made Ingmar angry. He once famously remarked, "Godard is a . . . bore."

Bergman was of the theater first and foremost and stayed with it until the end. He compared theater to a faithful wife -- over his lifetime he would have five wives -- and film to the costly, exacting mistress. But it seems of the two, he was in awe of the mistress. "No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul."