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Ingmar Bergman died today. I wouldn't call my self a scholar of Bergman, but I certainly would go out of my way to see his films. The first I saw was "Cries and Whispers" in Film 100 back in 1982. Terry Marner questioned the class about the symbolism of the colours in the film, but I'd have to admit that this line of inquiry was initially lost on my just-out-of-high-school self. In the years that followed, I saw everything I could and was particularly taken with "The Seventh Seal", although initially more for the visual approach than for the densely metaphoric tale. If there was every a film I wished to emulate, this was it. In 1990 I was living in an apartment behind the Golden Mile (south end of Regina) and was going through a long drawn out and depressing break up (certainly we were breaking up for longer than we were together) and there was a video store in the Gold Square (don't remember the name of it) that had a surprisingly huge collection of Bergman films to rent, at least a dozen different titles. Each night that my girlfriend and I had a fight, I would go rent another Bergman, at first to dwell on the dark side of life but I quickly fell in love with his earlier funny films. He was a filmmaker with a huge range and I will always remember nights he lifted my spirit.