You keep doing this, Scott, and you'll push me into a full fledged Bergman festival.

Those interviews were nothing short of inspirational, not just in a cinema sense, but in a sense of life itself. You'd think the man behind Persona and Through a Glass Darkly would be a morose troll and yet he is nothing of the sort.

Well, off to cue up The Virgin Spring (or possibly Wild Strawberries) for tonight...

Jeff, so many of Bergman's films are remarkable, but perhaps his most noteworthy movie is Fanny and Alexander -- not only for its beauty and scope, but also because it is, at its core -- in my view -- a wonderfully hopeful movie, especially in comparison to many of Bergman's early movies.

BTW, when I went to Yale Divinity School for my M.Div., one year they screened one Bergman movie after another, which is where I saw most of his films. They were screened in the RSV room, where biblical scholars sat for months on end, translating the Bible into the Revised Standard Version. Since Bergman deals with issues of faith and loss of faith, I thought the setting rather fitting and ironic.

And of course Fanny and Alexander is probably the only Bergman film I HAVEN'T screened yet. I own it and I'm toiling daily to find a block of time to view it in one sitting...

That IS fascinating that the Divinity School would screen a library of Scandinavian films dealing with, primarily, the LOSS of faith and the ABSENCE of God. Brave and controversial on their part.