Masters like Ingmar Bergman can die only in the physical sense. He has been with me — as, I am sure, he has been with many others — ever since I discovered cinema as an art form. His work will live on forever for he has, through his huge body of work, defined the very contours of cinema for the modern world. You think of cinema, you think of Bergman.

I saw my first Bergman film when I was at the Pune film institute in the early 1960s. Although he had been making films since the 1940s, it was during the ‘50s that his work began to capture the imagination of the world. I was in the institute around the time that his major work was beginning to travel around the world. I saw Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers, The Seventh Seal, Through a Glass Darkly and many of his other important films at the institute and later at film festivals in Delhi and elsewhere. I have been an admirer of his cinema ever since.

One thing that I remember from my institute days is that Ritwik Ghatak wasn’t particularly fond of Bergman’s films. He would instead extol the style and panache of Luis Bunuel, “the Master from Mexico”, as he would call him. He obviously had his own logic for his dislike of the Swedish great.

But for most cineastes around the world, Bergman ranks among the greatest masters of the medium. For me, among the most striking aspects of his career was that he was as much into theatre as he was into film. He was a colossus in both spheres and that made him an artistic force of rare versatility.

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