A different kind of reading ... Ingmar Bergman in 1957. Photograph: Scanfoto/AFP/Getty
It's not only film-makers who owe the late Ingmar Bergman a great debt. Early in 2004, having just finished work on a novel, I decided a five-month break was in order. That would give me the end of spring and all of summer off and allow me to simply rest a while after four novels written back-to-back. I thought I'd spend those months reading all those books I'd been meaning to read for a long time; instead I sat down one evening to watch - for the first time - a Bergman film. The film was Through a Glass Darkly.
In the days and weeks that followed I watched Winter Light, The Silence, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, A Passion, Scenes from a Marriage, Wild Strawberries, After the Rehearsal, The Serpent's Egg, Autumn Sonata ... and those five months I was planning to spend away from novels stretched into 18 months.
It's hard to put into words the precise role Bergman's films played in that decision to step away from the novel long enough to try to empty my mind of every habit and shortcut I had accumulated over the previous decade. But I know that, as I watched all that Bergman could coax a face (or a shadow) into revealing, so much in novels - particularly mine - started to seem shoddy and second-rate.
I used to subscribe to the view that one of the novel's strengths compared with film was its ability to take you into the mind of its characters. In a film, I used to tell my creative writing students, you can't know what a character is thinking unless you use a clunky voice-over. Watching Bergman's movies I realised the camera could capture both thoughts and emotions without spelling them out, leaving an imaginative space for the viewer to inhabit. In other contexts, it could leave thoughts and emotions compellingly ambiguous.
Of course I could never replicate a camera's effect in prose - there is nothing in the writing I've done in the novel I started after those 18 months which I can point to as Bergman-influenced. But I know I'm writing differently now, and in large part that's because I watched Ingmar Bergman and everything stopped, and shifted.
There are film-makers aplenty who have already stepped up, and will continue to step-up, in the next few days to pay tribute to Bergman's influence on their work. But the finest of artists leap across mediums and throw their light in indefinable but deeply-felt ways on other forms. And no one did light - winter light, summer-night light, autumn-sonata light, virgin-spring light - like Bergman. It's a consoling thought to think of him capturing all the shadows of the afterlife now ...
