Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman with his son Daniel and wife Kibi Laretai. Photograph: Lennart Nilsson/AFP
Long before the end, Ingmar Bergman elected to live on a small island off the coast of Sweden. It was a way of saying he was alone with his work and his lovers - and probably no one knew the loneliness better than the lovers, and the children, who saw how he put their smiles, their eyes, their meals, their untidy beds on the screen.
They had to live with his ruthless, chilly and obsessive use of their smiles, their faces and their youth. It was not unkind, but it was not kind either, in the way of reassurance or loyalty. It told everyone that everything changes, yet remains the same. So he would live on an island and then perhaps the foolish film festivals of the world would stop asking him to come and be honoured. Didn't the film festivals know that making the films was the only thing that kept him alive or anywhere near calm?
The way in which Bergman's work and Bergman's pain were in equation struck me very early on and almost by chance. In 1957, he made Wild Strawberries in which a great man, a professor, is actually going to a kind of film festival to be honored for his career. His name is Isak Borg, played by Victor Sjostrom (the pioneering figure in the Swedish film industry and Bergman's mentor). But as he travels toward his honorary degree, so Borg dreams and remembers and feels shocked by the private failure of his life. We can see that he is a cold man attracted to the warmth of others - and I think Bergman saw himself the same way.
Wild Strawberries is a great film, struggling to reconcile inward failure and outward success. I realised that it was the same "story" as a film I had seen just two years earlier, whose black-and-white photography had moved me in the same way. That film was Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, in which an old man dies and has his last thoughts filled by the same grim debate: was I wretched in all my glory? Maybe all great films say the same thing.
No doubt the obituaries will all mention the way in which Bergman inspired and influenced Woody Allen - but that "praise" is so trivial. Allen is an Osric to Bergman's Hamlet. Bergman was the film-maker who saw the resemblance between the medieval dance of death and the modern waiting for apocalypse. But that tension was only the larger projection of a very small, ordinary anxiety: will love last or betray itself?
In fact, the director who strikes me as a more direct descendent is Andrei Tarkovsky - the latter's The Sacrifice is as true a Bergman film as Liv Ullmann's Faithless. But every great director, every one committed to the work, and prepared to live on an island as opposed to the Beverly Hills Hotel, has surely found themselves making their own variant of a Bergman film.
Cast an eye back over the great Bergman pictures, from Sawdust and Tinsel to Fanny and Alexander, from Cries and Whispers to Smiles of a Summer Night, and this is how you know them - there is hardly a special effect in the entire canon. Save one: the human face in joy and terror, lost or in flux. For Bergman, the face was always the same, always constant and always fresh.
