The mania over Sanjay Dutt's arrest resulted in a quiet burial in news pages for two significant events in world cinema. On July 30, a day before Dutt's verdict was announced, world cinema lost two of its most original and respected film-makers, creating a vacuum that perhaps will never be filled.

Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, bestowed with the epithet 'poet with the camera' by the critics, died at the age of 89 in his house in the tiny island of Faro in Sweden. Miles away, Italian film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni also passed away on the same day in Rome at the age of 94.

For film society activists like me, the loss of these figures is something I can't explain. Though they had virtually stopped being active film-makers at their age, the works left behind by both Bergman and Antonioni are so rich and distinct that the news made me restless and sad. I can't explain it in words, but the loss is similar to what I felt when I went to my native village in Konkan after 22 long years and discovered that the 600 year-old roof-tiled family house had vanished from the landscape. A modern, tony house had replaced the ancestral house a few years ago and the old house existed only in my memory. They don't make that kind of cinema anymore.

Bergman and Antonioni belonged to the long line of world cinema film-makers that left their mark on the next generations. This illustrious list includes French New Wave film-makers - Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette -, the Italian Neo-realists - Roberto Rosselini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, the Asian masters like Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa. Bergman and Antonioni were contemporaries of this extra-ordinary breed of creative artists but continued to make films till as late as 2003 and 2004.

Bergman stormed both the Academy Awards ceremonies and world's top film festivals with each of his films year after year. Three of his films won the Oscars for the Best Foreign Films - Virgin Spring in 1961, Through A Glass Darkly in 1962, and Fanny and Alexander in 1984. He was honoured with the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award by the Academy in 1971. But, ask any Film and Television Institute graduate and he would swear by the magic of Bergman in films like Summer with Monika (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries (1957) Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1973), Autumn Sonata ( 1978). He directed a total of 62 films and 170 plays, giving world cinema actors like Liv Ullman, Max von Sydow.

Film-makers as diverse as Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman in Hollywood, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky have acknowledged the influence of Bergman's work on their lives. Allen regarded Bergman as 'probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera'.

Like the French new wave film-makers, Antonioni worked as a journalist, and began his career in films with co-writing screenplays with Roberto Rosselini in 1942. His first internationally acclaimed work was L Avventura in 1960 followed by La Notte (1961), L' Eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964). He also made English films like Blowup (1966), Zabriskie Point (1970), and The Passenger (1975). Blowup won him the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards at the Academy Awards. The Passenger stars Jack Nicholson in what is regarded as one of his best ever roles. Years later in 1996, Nicholson presented him with a life-time achievement Oscar.

Bergman's autobiography Magic Lantern is a must-read for all cinema lovers, especially aspiring and practicising film-makers. What better tribute to these masters but a repeat viewing of their works.

Do check these resources:
The Ingmar Bergman Foundation
http://www.ingmarbergmanfoundation.com
Antonioni's interview with French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinema in 1960
http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/interviews/michelangelo_antonioni_510.htm