Ingmar Bergman’s Moral Horror Show

It’s not exactly headline news if I insist that the Swedish auteur, Ingmar Bergman, was one of the very greatest filmmakers of all time, but when I immersed myself in his films while living alone last winter, they hit me with the force of a private revelation. I’d first been introduced to Bergman at university two decades earlier, and his doomy fretting about the silence of God appealed to the tortured, Dostoevskian 20-year-old I then was. But it took me until the age I am now — 40 — to really have my moment with him. The older self who feasted night after night on Bergman’s enormous body of work (he directed 62 films, of which I watched but a third) now came to him bearing a heavy freight of “life experience” — the polite term for wounds, regret, remorse, affliction and sorrows. In short, I came to him in the same condition as just about anyone who reaches this most interesting age.