"poet with a camera"

"Persona"
1966

With one bold stroke of his cinematic brush Ingmar Bergman opened his 1966 film "Persona" with some of the most daring and disturbing images ever committed to film that in a way are a testament to his stunning career and his obsession with faith, death, love, sex, and everything else that makes the modern world so complicated and vulnerable for exploration. The Swedish master of the cinema of philosophy and psychology died today at the venerable age of 89.

Bergman's films are quiet and seemingly austere to a chill but profoundly provocative meditative examinations of a world around him that is redefining itself in its self-aware modernity. The cinema of Bergman feels like an interior dialogue between the physical self and psychological self. The palpable agitation between who we are in the present and the dramatic effects of our past selves is evident in almost any Bergman film. This tension often builds to an exact crescendo in which characters exercise their demons and perhaps gain a little more knowledge, or not, of who they are and how they relate to their environment where faith and love, in a romantic sense, are starting to decay and rot. In "Wild Strawberries"--such a beautifully poetic title-- a man searches for meaning in his vacant adult life. Nostalgia and memory, particularly from the prospective of childhood and its relationship to the family, are typical touchstones of Bergman territory. They imbue his films with a dark and dreamy surreality that is very much rooted in the quest for understanding one's own existence.

Watch as Bergman weaves time and place with his confused and curious leading character, Professor Borg. Experiencing a dream and remembering it as it were are two very different phenomenons but Bergman suggests that perhaps these worlds are not entirely polarized as some form self-actualization can be gained from either. The journey for personal fulfillment had never been so poetically expressed and singularly achieved as it was in Bergman films.

Bergman will sorely be missed and his passing signifies a passing of the torch to contemporary international filmmakers to continuously surprise us and have us in awe of the grand art that is cinema.