“When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” Ingmar Bergman once said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It's like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.” When Bergman died this past July at age eighty-nine, it was something to make a fuss about. A defining figure in the art-house cinema of the fifties and sixties, Bergman shaped our ideas about what films could be. He saw the cinema, he said, as “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul,” one that could speak of the big questions: faith, mortality, the nature of human connections. In the luminous images of cinematographers Sven Nykvist and Gunnar Fischer and the performances of an extraordinary company of actors-Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, and especially Liv Ullmann-Bergman's cinematic language, as sensual as it was metaphysical, found its eloquent expression.
Our selection of Bergman's films offers a chance to remember and rediscover-or discover for the first time-this marvelous director. On the big screen, Bergman's light still shines.