I’ve left off writing about Ingmar Bergman’s death for a week now. I kind of wanted to see how things would shake out in the press, and I guess it’s happened by now. We’ve seen both pans and praise, retrenchment and reassessment, and I’ll stop with the alliteration now, but the responses have run the gamut. My favorites are the extremes, exemplified by Jonathan Rosenbaum’s hatchet job and Roger Ebert’s passionate rebuttal. I like the former for its excessiveness (I love a bomb-thrower) and the latter for it’s incredulous tone, as if Ebert is taking all of it personally, which he probably is.

In a highly controversial move, Michaelangelo Antonioni chose the same day to die, thus ensuring that he and Bergman would be linked, at least for the short term, no matter how much bald-faced evidence there is that comparing the two is about as specious as comparing elephants to moles–both are mammals, both have hair, and that’s about it. Both Bergman’s and Antonioni’s films consist of strips of still images projected successively at 24 frames per second (give or take a few frames), and often involved actors doing fictional things.

And so, people have taken to comparing their ongoing impact upon film . . . which is a reasonable thing to do, I suppose, but is this the right time to do it? It seems to me that you can’t even begin to do that until we’re at some historical remove–that is, until enough time has passed so that at least some objectivity is possible.

Until then, we can do a couple of things. We can mourn the deaths of two of the giants of cinema, and we can in requiem watch as many of their films as we can get our hands on. This last is as fitting a tribute to their genius as I can imagine.