oh my God!

Ingmar Bergman - "the poet of the cinema" - has died, at 89. It's a great age, of course, but the event is important because it is the departure from our world of someone who gave us a great deal, to whom we are indebted probably in ways we don't quite know yet. The very fact that Bergman is so easy to lampoon shows that he did something new, that he gave us a way of seeing, a distinctive aesthetic framework for our own emotional experience.

I don't think this is overstating the case. Many of the most powerful and influential cultural moments of my life have been about Ingmar Bergman - and that's just the directly attributable ones.

I can't remember which was the first of his films I saw, but I know it changed the way I saw everything. Oh, wait. I remember going to see Autumn Sonata: amazing. Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman and an absolutely engrossing emotional world.

Fanny and Alexander came out pretty early in my serious filmgoing life. It struck a huge chord with me - just at the brink of the adult world and still able to feel things as a child. I think this really is a time of susceptibility to ghosts, whether actual or psychological ones, things that mill around half-seen and felt, and this is something Bergman knew. For many years I cited it as my very favourite film.

By the time I saw The Seventh Seal it was too late, of course: the experience was necessarily corrupted by all those Woody Allen films. But isn't it stupendous? They've just re-released it on the big screen, by the way. It's on at the Curzon Soho, this week only. Seriously. I'll be going.

In 1987, after Bergman had retired from filmmaking and was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, his production of Miss Julie came to the NFT. I was so excited: I borrowed the play from the bookshop where I worked, walked over Waterloo Bridge, and sat in the foyer brushing up my Ibsen while waiting for the cheap on-the-day tickets to come on sale. (The guy at the desk insisted on giving me a discounted student ticket in the end - the earthly reward for all my swotting up!) It was wonderful. Watching the play in a foreign language - even with Strindberg's words floating fresh in my head - meant I was double-alert to all the other indicators. It was extra-intense and even maybe extra-dramatic.

Bergman's use of visual cues, of colour to build atmosphere, the amazing simplicity of everything he does - even if it seems ornate it is always incredibly simple - his directness coupled with his subtlety of perception - the completeness of everything he made. These are wonderful things. If I shut my eyes and think of each of these films, I can see a colour impression. In the case of The Seventh Seal, it's light and shadow.*

In 1987 I read Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern. A brilliant, or at least it struck me so at the time, portrayal of how his creative life grew from childhood onwards. Bergman understood innately that everybody, no matter how insignificant they may seem to other people, has an inner life. During this part of my life I was hungry for knowledge - news, as it were - of how other people had navigated theirs, how they had translated thier experience into creation, and Bergman's was one of the most inspiring books I read. I still have my proof copy.

But actually, I've just remembered the biggest thing Bergman ever gave me. It was his Magic Flute that introduced me to Mozart when I was only 14 - changing the way I thought about movies at the same time, incidentally. My love for Mozart's operas is one of the main things in my pantheon of loves, so this was a big moment for the young Ms B!

Once again, this film conveys an incredibly subtle mix of innocence and sophistication, the darkness never quite concealed by the light, the richness and simplicity of Mozart's music and the broad music hall comedy - the stage flats, the backstage scenes... Everything fell open for me, the experience and all of its constituent parts. I can remember trying - and failing - to describe the impact it made on me to my dad, in his kitchen later. That girl in the audience, the one the camera keeps coming back to? I know she was a cinematic device to channel our experience of the play-within-a-movie, and all that, but forget that: I was her.**

Mozart was a natural chopice for Bergman: they are both very much concerned with redemption, with what is possible for the spirit precisely in the context of earthly living, both alive to the humour that co-exists with pathos, waiting to trip us up - both quintessentially alive. Both had a reputation for the ladies, too. And both made great art.

And another thing about Ingmar Bergman: people talk about the Gloomy Swede, but his films are so exuberantly observed, they are so drenched in awareness, that they seem more exhilarating to me than otherwise. And indeed, time and again in televised interviews Bergman appears giving great howls of laughter. His actors report much laughter on set. Really: however gloomy a vision may be, to communicate it, and to receive it, can be a matter of joy.***

"The people in my films are exactly like myself - creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking," Bergman said. "Mostly they're body, with a little hollow for the soul."

This quote, from the Washington Post, feels apt, today.


* Of course, Sven Nyqvist is a genius too.

** Somewhere in my mind is a pesky Simon Callow as Schickaneder that won't go away: I think that must have been in Amadeus. Ah well! Simon Callow - love 'im.

*** I had this experience at the age of 17, reading Crime and Punishment. I found it actually overwhelming, and was so happy I felt I might burst. On later rereading, I found many of the passages that had had this effect on me stultifyingly sentimental and overblown - but this only goes to prove that everything in art is about capacity, taste, experience. No matter; I've never lost the experience, anyway.