He has an empathy for actresses,
in whom he has awakened, in the words
of one critic, “dormant genius”: Ingrid,
Eva, Harriet, Maj-Britt, Bibi, Liv.
His films gave an uncompromising form
to the existential angst that was
the fashion of nineteen-fifties Europe.
Loss under everything : love, sex, faith, self.

Once, still a prodigy, he was with a girl.
She thought they were deep in love. He told her
the truth:
“I’m not going to marry you.
I don’t love you in that way.” He loved her
in another way:
 “I want to fuck you.”
It is the will manifest in his work.

1 June 1999