There’s nothing I can say about Ingmar Bergman that hasn’t already been said, but since I heard the news of his death yesterday, his films have been on my mind a lot and I just wanted to share why I love Bergman.

Film has always been my favorite art form. Even as a teenager I sought out on my own films that had value beyond just being entertaining. I was always looking for meaning, for some sort of substance, for exploration of life, love, and faith. While I enjoyed, and still do enjoy, fun, exciting films with little artistic ambition, the films I have the most affection for are those rare ambitious ones that want to say something meaningful about being human. I haven’t encountered a filmmaker more ambitious than Bergman.

I discovered Bergman thanks to Roger Ebert and Netflix. I’ve been reading Ebert for a long time and he frequently plugs Bergman. Every once in a while I would try to rent a Bergman film from the Blockbuster, but I never found what I was looking for. When Netflix with it’s huge library came around, one of the first films I put in my queue was The Seventh Seal. I remember how enthralling and exciting that film was for me. There was this knight character struggling with all of the big questions about God and death that have occupied my own mind and been part of my own struggle.

I’m still not familiar with all of Bergman’s work—I think I’ve only seen about a dozen of his films—but what strikes me about what I have seen is his compassion and humanity. He lets his characters be human and smart. Nobody is a caricature. Nobody is evil. People are people.

His films capture my attention and stick with me because they engage the mind so thoroughly. The drama and action is psychological, emotional, and spiritual. Lives and body parts aren’t at stake; hearts, relationships, faith, and happiness are.

I appreciate very much how he approaches religious questions. He has big questions and doubts and it’s clear that he personally can’t bring himself to believe in God, but I’ve never felt that he sneered at believers. Sometimes there’s even a hint that he envies believers, but this never comes across as patronizing. His films about spirituality don’t pretend to have the answers—they aren’t arguments or polemics—they illustrate how humans wrestle with the questions. His characters’ struggles with respect to the silence of a putative God is something with which most people who have given the question much thought can sympathize. I’m thinking especially about the doubting priest in Winter Light and the knight in The Seventh Seal. There aren’t many movie scenes more powerful than when the knight witnesses the burning witch and refuses to look into her eyes and witness the absence of God, as his squire goads him to do.

Every Bergman film I’ve seen has been an enthralling, engaging experience, even if I didn’t quite get it. Cries and Whispers, Persona, and The Silence are among those that I think I didn’t get, but the characters were so fascinating and the filmmaking was so beautiful and interesting that I enjoyed them anyways.

If you’ve never seen a Bergman film, my first recommendation would be The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries. These are the films that put him on the map in the mid-50’s. They aren’t difficult like I’ve found some of his later films to be, and they give you a good sense of what Bergman is all about. I read somewhere that Winter Light, which is about a clergyman in a crisis of faith, was Bergman’s own favorite, so that should be high on the list as well, though it’s a bit more ponderous and slow than the The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, as I recall.