Back in 1965 my friend Jeff and I would go to UCLA every Wednesday to Royce Hall for film showings.

Jeff was a surfer and a gymnast. I was into folk music and politics. We had no common friends or other interests in common. Just movies.

But before the invention of video and dvd, you actually got to see great films, old films, art films, experimental films or foreign films on a big screen in the dark. The way they were made to be seen.

It was at the UCLA Wednesday film series that I received my education in the history of movies (not cinema).

I look back now on some of the films that moved me as a teenager and laugh. I once took my wife to see Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim because I loved it when I first saw it at UCLA as a teenager. She thought it was hopelessly silly, and in retrospect, so do I.

It is very hard to think of Ingmar Bergman’s films from the viewpoint of 2007 and as an alleged grown-up and not feel that their existential angst is goofy. But being a teenager and existential angst go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Still, Bergman was part of my self-education.  He died today at 89.

A Youtube parody of Bergman: