As an artist, Ingmar Bergman drew not just on the cinematic tradition, but on the great traditions of European art and philosophy. People such as Ibsen and Chekhov, Thomas Mann and Nietzsche are all there as influences. He drew on three centuries of European literature. Nobody else in the history of cinema was temperamentally capable of doing that. He was unflinching in his need to talk about the fundamental questions of life in a way that cinema didn’t do before him and has hardly done since. That is why he was, to me, the most significant person ever to make movies.
more from Rick Moody and a host of other Bergman admirers at The Guardian here.