Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death ‚Äî this infantile fixation of mine ‚Äî was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry ‚Äî with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, ‘Here is a painting; take it, please.’
Maybe when you remove the anxiety, you die peacefully. Bergman appears to have led an ideal life. I have admired him for many years because he is one of the few who is not afraid to “go there.” Being a devoted Woody Allen obsessive for most of my adult life I could not have not gotten to Bergman eventually but the film that hooked me was Through a Glass Darkly, the one about the writer father observing his daughter’s illness. It is a painful, truthful look at art and life and how removed you have to be sometimes to get it right, what you have to shut off and whom you have to exploit. I read the script for it before I saw the film. The film is breathtaking. The Silence, Persona, Wild Strawberries.
Here is a weirdly cheerful scene, the final scene, for Smiles of a Summer Night:
I guess his death seems to drag with it all that was great about writing and directing once upon a time. Artists today don’t have the same staying power. Their courage is driven by a bottom line. Many, when they get good, are spoiled by being given too much money and they lose the reasons they got into it in the first place. We emphasize A-list success too much in this town. There isn’t enough creative ambition lately because films cost too much. And those that are on the indie circuit are pretty much relegated to festivals and art houses and never seen or heard from again. Hopefully, Bergman’s passing will invite other filmmakers or would-be filmmakers to strive for something other than what Spielberg has achieved. Bergman always did it his way. What could be more comforting in one’s final hours of being awake.
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