Ingmar Bergman the maestro of angst

As a community student in the Fifties, I sat in the dark watching, with uncritical admiration, of the like kind films as Sawdust and Tinsel, The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries. Along with the films of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman's questing, melancholy knights, shabby, emotionally trapped circus tribe and chilly, civilized doctors were part of my introduction to the European art film. I by and by learned that Bergman's films ranged from drab social-realist works like Brink of Life to airy, witty comedies like Smiles of a Summer Night, and to expressionistic films about artists and critics like