Borrowing from computer language you could call it a “double forward slash”. Mortality’s hissing blade, in two momentous down-strokes, closed off what had gone before. The worlds of cinema and of modern culture leaned, like parallel lines in the teeth of a gale, towards an uncertain future.

It couldn’t happen in fiction, but it could in fact. Two giants of international cinema died on the same day. Incredulous newspapers ran out of obituary space. Television news shows sought fresh phrases for successive epitaphs. And a filmmaking friend said to me, a minute after hearing of Antonioni’s death half a day after Bergman’s: “They were our fathers.” The best epitaphs are the most spontaneous.