This movie moment didn't happen on screen, and it was memorable for all the wrong reasons. But there was something deeply moving, as if it were a kind of plagal cadence for film culture, in the near-simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni in July. It was, in a way, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying within a few hours of each other on July 4, 1826. Bergman and Antonioni didn't care much for each other's films, and their major contributions lay well in the past. They shared a dual kinship, though: that of greatness (everything that rises really does converge when it rises as high as their masterpieces did) and of enduring importance, the sort of importance that pillars of a mighty house have - the house that shelters the republic of cinema.

MARK FEENEY