The death of Ingmar Bergman coincides with the re-release of his greatest film, The Seventh Seal (1957), a meditation upon death and the fear of godlessness set in the middle ages but inspired by the nuclear terrors of the Cold War. The bleakness of Bergman’s oeuvre is undeniable, but his films were not cold: there are few more affecting explorations of the life of the elderly than Wild Strawberries, or poignant explorations of a relationship than Scenes from a Marriage or its recent sequel Saraband. Fanny and Alexander is, amongst many other things, one of the most visually sumptuous films of the twentieth century. So many directors wanted to be Bergman, not least Woody Allen whose various homages to the Swedish master occasionally strayed into parody. Let his epitaph be not his imitators but the stunning scene in which the world-weary knight Max Von Sydow plays chess with Death: a game that, as Bergman knew even half a century ago, could only postpone the inevitable mortality that has at last consumed him.
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