Tomorrow, I'm taking an hour's trip to Boston's Landmark Theater, barring any traffic because hey, it's Boston. So, I'm headed there to check out Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, then Ingmar Bergman's latest film, Saraband. I've yet to see any of Malle's stuff, nor have I seen any classic cinema on the big screen. But, as neat as that will be, I'm infinitely more psyched about the Bergman.

Ingmar Bergman is my favorite filmmaker. Heck, if I idolized any person, it'd be him. And yet, I've never seen a single one of his pictures on the big screen. This, for me, is almost a pilgrimage in ways.

I remember, a while back, early 2002, I was just seriously getting into cinema. Like everyone else, I was loving Kevin Smith, so I bought Chasing Amy on DVD. I got the disc home and was surprised to see the loving care put into the DVD. From the great design, to the personal essay inside, to the information on the transfer, it really seemed like it was a labor of love. Watching the supplements, I got the same impression.

So, I started to investigate these Criterion folks and quickly realized I'd never heard of anything they put out. After researching, I blind-bought my first Criterion DVD because it was called an essential building-block of any film collection. That film was Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

So, I eventually got around to watching it, and I wasn't particularly impressed. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't used to watching foreign films, and Bergman's in partiular have a very deliberate pace. I did identify with the main character and his waning faith, and just his views on God and life itself. A while later, I checked out the commentary to see what I could find out about it and I was blown away. Partly because of everything Cowie explained that Bergman was expressing, but just because, seeing the film again, everything fell into place.

I checked out more Bergman, as well as other International cinema. I bought Wild Strawberries and fell in love with it. I bought Cries and Whispers and was kind of disappointed in the film itself. Now, I can see it for the masterpiece of expression that it truly is, but then, it didn't really strike me as anything special. I popped in the DVD to watch the hour-long interview with Bergman, thinking I'd get bored after a few minutes. The entire hour passed while I was enthralled.

To this day, I still don't know what it is I love about Bergman himself. Maybe it's his quiet demeanor, or the way he chooses his words and constructs his sentences. Just from interviews, reading his books (Images, The Magic Lantern) and of course, watching his films, I feel a deep connection. Yes, a connection with this 87-year-old man whom I've never met, nor spoken to.

"No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls." It's a famous quote from Bergman himself, and it helps to explain his films and my relation to them. Bergman is the first, and still one of the only people to convince me that cinema is a legitimate art, a form of expression. Films are made for many different reasons, sometimes to tell a story, sometimes to inform, sometimes just to entertain people. Of course, the most prevalent reason for making a film is to make money. Yet, Bergman doesn't particularly make films for any of these reasons. Bergman makes films to express himself, to exorcise his own demons, to release things from his soul in the way some would paint a picture, write a poem or compose music.

That's what I see when I see a Bergman film, I see a man exorcising his own demons up on the screen. That's kind of the same feeling I got when I watched Tarkovsky's The Mirror recently, one of the few times outside of a Bergman movie I've felt that. Bergman is simply a fascinating person, I could listen to the old coot speak forever. Even if you're uninterested, his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, is a fantastic read. Bergman kind of gives me hope that one day I'll find a means of expression and hopefully make a career out of it.

But, all corniness aside, I love Bergman. Hopefully, this explains why seeing what will most likely be his final film on the big screen is a big thing for me.