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Kurosawa in the raw is not everybody's meat. Not since Sergei Eisenstein has a moviemaker set loose such a bedlam of elemental energies. He works with three cameras at once, makes telling use of telescopic lenses that drill deep into a scene, suck up all the action in sight and then spew it violently into the viewer's face. But Kurosawa is far more than a master of movement. He is an ironist who knows how to pity. He is a moralist with a sense of humor. He is a realist who curses the darkness—and then lights a blowtorch.
Death of the Heart. Kurosawa made moviegoers sit up and take notice, and the next thing they noticed was Ingmar Bergman. As a man he didn't look like much—just a gangling, green-eyed, snaggle-toothed son of a Swedish parson. But as an artist he was something unprecedented in cinema: a metaphysical poet whose pictures are chapters in a continuing allegory of the progress of his own soul in its tortured and solitary search for the meaning of life, for the experience of God. In his early films (Illicit Interlude, Naked Night), Bergman struggles to free himself from the fascination of the mother, the incestuous longing for innocence, safety, death. In the dazzling comedies of his second period (A Lesson in Love, Smiles of a Summer Night), he fights the inevitable war between men and women. In The Seventh Seal, he plunges straight down into the abyss of God and wanders there among the gnarled and leering roots of living religion. In his recent films (The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light), God is present again and again but always in dreadful or ambiguous wise: as a spring of water, as a giant spider, as a silence. Never as love, never in the heart's core.
And so the search goes on. It is conducted with intelligence and irony, with a beauty that endlessly inveigles the eye, with a sense of form that is subtle but perhaps more theatrical than cinematic, with a gift of intuition so intense it sometimes seems insane. But Bergman is not a sick man; he is a sick genius. His sickness is the sickness of the times: the death of the heart, the separation from the source. His genius is the genius to say what all men suffer.
Bergman hit Paris like a wild north wind. In 1957, when a cycle of his films was first shown at La Cinémathèque Française, the main film library in Paris, hundreds of cinémanes stood in line night after night for three nights to get seats. "We were absolutely overthrown," says Director Truffaut. "Here was a man who had done all we dreamed of doing. He had written films as a novelist writes books. Instead of a pen he had used a camera. He was an author of cinema."