“No single artist can stand for all the traditions of film (and film itself plays a more limited and ambiguous role in the media economy than it used to), and Bergman was undeniably a middle-class white European from an affluent, highly homogeneous society. Maybe we can agree that Bergman was the greatest of the 20th-century artists who tried to adapt the traditional craftsmanship of European theater to a new cultural form. Maybe we can agree that he believed in art as a redemptive, spiritual, even magical force, and did much to carry that ancient view of art into the movie theater.”