It Is Done: The Art of Ingmar Bergman

When a "celebrity" death occurs, I rarely take notice. For while the extent of their art is felt by many of my friends and family, I rarely have been influenced by their craft.

Today, Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman passed away. This is a loss to the film community that strikes a particularly sad cord in me, as he has been, by far, one of the most influential directors in my love of cinema and it's craft.

I still remember the first time I saw one of his films; it was The Seventh Seal, and I was watching it for a Film Directors class in undergrad. Given my past background with photography, I was immediately taken, enraptured by what was, and probably still is, what I believed to be the most perfect photograph, twenty-four frames per second. Each of the subsequent films we watched by him, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Fanny och Alexander all left similar impacts on me. Never before had I been exposed to a film director whose theatrical nature created such a strongly composed, edited, and scripted film as films were. Later on, as my academic pursuits took me to writing screenplays, Bergman's influence was inevitable (from the naming of characters to the themes and visuals). Ingmar Bergman was the one film director who showed me what it was I wanted as a young filmmaker, and inevitably taught me that few are as capable of his craft as he is.

It is done; but never over. I can't help but feel there is some poetry in his death and the final scene from The Seventh Seal.