Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer who shot Ingmar Bergman‘s best films with some of the most exquisite black-and-white compositions in film history, has died. I admired his color photography on Woody Allen’s Another Woman and especially Crimes and Misdemeanors, but deep down he will always be the silver-monochrome painter who shot Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, The Silence, Persona, Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly. I met him on the set of King of the Gypsies in Manhattan back in ’78 or thereabouts. Sven was only 83 years old. He lived his last days in a Stockholm nursing home where he was being treated for(this is awful) a form of dementia called aphasia, according to Carl-Gustaf Nykvist, his son.
