I'll tell you something banal...

"I'll tell you something banal. We're emotional illiterates. And not only you and I – practically everybody, that's the depressing thing. We're taught everything about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of pi, or whatever the hell it's called, but not a word about the soul. We're abysmally ignorant, about both ourselves and others. There's a lot of loose talk nowadays to the effect that children should be brought up to know all about brotherhood and understanding and coexistence and equality and everything else that's all the rage just now...



... But it doesn't dawn on anyone that we must first learn something about ourselves and our own feelings. Our own fear and loneliness and anger. We're left without a chance, ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our ambitions. To make a child aware of its soul is something almost indecent. You're regarded as a dirty old man. How can you understand other people if you don't know anything about yourself? Now you're yawning, so that's the end of the lecture."
Ingmar Bergman

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photograph via

Quoting Ingmar Bergman

"I hope I never get so old I get religious."
Ingmar Bergman



photographs via

Akira Kurosawa writes a letter to Ingmar Bergman

"A human is not really capable of creating really good works until he reaches eighty."
Akira Kurosawa



Swedish director Ernst Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) retired after three Academy Awards, six Golden Globes, seven Cannes prizes, two BAFTAs, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, and many more honours. Once he said: "I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films."
In 1988, he received a letter (via) from Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998),  "Asian of the Century" and "the" filmmaker admired by Bergman, Fellini, Polanski, Bertolucci, Altman, Scorsese ... just to mention a few. Kurosawa was said to have expressed his engagement with ageing and spiritual search through the medium of film and that as he aged he, "appear(ed) to become more spiritualised, expressing transcendence, resignation and/or holy rage" (Geist quoted by Jones, 2002).

Dear Mr. Bergman,  

Please let me congratulate you upon your seventieth birthday.  

Your work deeply touches my heart every time I see it and I have learned a lot from your works and have been encouraged by them. I would like you to stay in good health to create more wonderful movies for us.  

In Japan, there was a great artist called Tessai Tomioka who lived in the Meiji Era (the late 19th century). This artist painted many excellent pictures while he was still young, and when he reached the age of eighty, he suddenly started painting pictures which were much superior to the previous ones, as if he were in magnificent bloom. Every time I see his paintings, I fully realize that a human is not really capable of creating really good works until he reaches eighty.  

A human is born a baby, becomes a boy, goes through youth, the prime of life and finally returns to being a baby before he closes his life. This is, in my opinion, the most ideal way of life.  

I believe you would agree that a human becomes capable of producing pure works, without any restrictions, in the days of his second babyhood.  

I am now seventy-seven (77) years old and am convinced that my real work is just beginning.  

Let us hold out together for the sake of movies.  

With the warmest regards,  

Akira Kurosawa

- Jones, K. (2002) The Spiritual Dimension: a gerotranscendental take on Akira Kurosawa's film, "Ran", via
- photographs of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa via and via and via and via