Sad news: Ingmar Bergman died this morning, aged 89 years old.

One of the most famous and respected of directors and artists, it is a great honour to have him on the Marion Boyars list. I expect that there will be many obituaries in the next few days and is already by strange cooincidence a re-release of the Seventh Seal in cinemas in the UK running at the moment.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll find time to post an extract from his autobiographical essay The Snakeskin.

I'm afraid that I came across Bergman by the most obvious of routes: At around nine or ten years old the image of Death playing chess with the knight took firm hold of my imagination. Having just started playing chess myself I unfortunately missed all suggestion of allegory and was intrigued by the ticklish question of whether Death would be any good at chess and whether or not, if I worked very hard, I might be able to beat Him thus securing a rather geekish form of immortality. The only positive outcome from these angelsonpin type musings was that as I got older I was motivated to seek out Bergman's films – a great boon however it may have come about.

but enough from me - there's a lovely post from the Spurious blog and I'll keep up the links to all that's worth reading over the next few days.

Kit