It made me vow to expose every cut and every banning of every movie from then on, a campaign of ridicule that eventually helped put an end to all such cultural barbarism.

Bergman bitterly resented the censorship of his films in Ireland, particularly because it was partly based on puritanical disapproval of his private life. Michelangelo Antonioni, another great director who by a sad irony has died within days of Bergman, shared this anger. When I wrote to him keeping him up to date on what was happening, he replied: "In reference to your letter, I am not astonished. I am deeply angered. To cut a film made with artistical intent is an insult not only to the author but to the culture and the public. I don't know what kind of cuts they made to my film . . .

Zabriskie Point . . . but in any case they do reveal lack of sensitivity and narrowminded moralism. You may publish these statements because I would like everyone to know exactly what I think of censorship."

For all the darkness of Bergman's themes, his movies . . . much like Beckett's plays . . . were compulsive viewing: they held a mirror to the 20th-century soul. He dissected marital relationships and alienation . . . "the gulf between what we are with others and when we are alone" . . .with clinical compassion.

He won me over as a student with Wild Strawberries. Last year when it came to naming 200 movies that mattered most in my 40 years as a reviewer, Persona, Cries And Whispers and Fanny And Alexander were all musts. "When I was younger I was haunted by death, " Bergman told me in Cannes in 1973. "It followed me like a shadow. Then I had a small operation. They put me asleep for five hours. But when I woke up I thought it had only been a second. Five hours were missing from my life. From that day I have felt death to be like that. It's just a switchoff. Now I have the feeling that death is almost a friend at the end of life."

As in The Seventh Seal, that friend called last Monday, but this time sadly there is no waking up. Ciaran Carty