"Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence strike me as two of the most psychological films ever made. The former dramatizes madness, and it doesn’t shy away from the despair and horror of the subject. It is equally fascinated by the way that lives are halted, turned, and redirected by tragedy. The Silence is possibly the most Freudian film ever made, a fever dream about the short journey from sexual ecstasy to absolute despair. Fanny and Alexander was Bergman’s Amarcord, a melancholy epic punctuated by moments of unexpected joy. It’s an incredibly rich film, a culmination of a life spent mastering film and theater. All three of these movies were shot by the great Sven Nykvist."

"The voice-over in Shock Corridor affected me deeply. It helped me realize that as a storyteller, you really have all the freedom in the world to tell the story the way you want to. There’s a line in here where an inmate wakes our hero in the middle of the night, chewing gum, to tell him that if you chew enough gum your mouth gets tired and your mind gets tired and then you don’t feel crazy, and he shoves gum in our hero’s mouth and then goes to sleep. Everyone is coping the best they can, madness is in all of us, ambition will take you down and don’t you forget it—how comforting"

"This is a flawed film from the master, and I read in his autobiography that after it tanked, he tried to kill himself and did not make a film for five years. I love it! Such gorgeous vignettes, like the man who stops talking and loses all the color in his flesh after he finds out his wife cheated on him! Or the drunk couples who swap partners every night! He built a whole artificial dumpster on a stage and painted it in radiant colors, and then went about telling the most heartbreaking short stories of madness and despair in it. It’s like Raymond Carver on some very good acid, taking no prisoners!"

"This is a visceral tale of an artist (Max von Sydow) whose mind begins to unravel as he’s plagued by insomnia and macabre visions of demons. His pregnant wife (Liv Ullman) is so concerned by this that she begins to stay awake with him night after night as he tries to process his grief. This is clearly a very personal work for Bergman, who admirably attempts to grasp and explore an existential issue for all artists. The pursuit of knowledge or truth or clarity or enlightenment—whether by means of artistic expression, religious belief, or science—has the capacity to rend an individual’s personality to shreds. As the saying goes, there’s a fine line between genius and madness."