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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 289023" data-attributes="member: 22">MC: Can I ask about looking and ageing, Nigella? When I was making The Story of Looking (book and film), I was moved by two images of Ingrid Bergman, 36 years apart. The exact same composition, but I found myself imagining what the older woman had seen that the younger hadn’t – the birth of her twins, the end of the second world war etc. The older Ingrid had more images in her head.<img src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5daa4bb8e627966330537a502b94e8b22679fdf1/211_283_1450_870/master/1450.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=dc29c739eac018a86a2adbfeae9b60ae" alt="Two images of Ingrid Bergman (in Casablanca, left, and Autumn Sonata), 36 years apart, as seen in Mark Cousins’s film The Story of Looking." class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />As I get older, I feel I’m on a physical decline but an imaginative incline. We accrue as we get older, don’t we? Older Ingrid is more alive than younger Ingrid?NL: I reacted in two opposing ways to that double image [in the film]. My instant reaction was to feel how cruel it must be to have such a witness to the (to use a cliche, sorry) ravages of age. But that was replaced by the feeling that the older Ingrid is so much more of a person; she inhabited her face, herself, so much more. Of course, there are other factors: when young, women are too often – as you said in your film – “looked at but not seen”; when older, perhaps it becomes easier for us to take up space less pleadingly, less ambiguously. I don’t know. Most generalisations are problematic.I used to feel slightly squeamish about old age. I’d look at a wrinkled old apple lingering in a bowl (I promise I will try not to let fruit in bowls be my standard reference here!) with all the juice gone from it, and see it as analogous with the ageing process in us. And there is something disconcerting about the notion of withering on the vine. I feel now that the physical depredations of ageing – in aesthetic terms – don’t matter. What makes a difference is health (obviously) but also curiosity. You’re absolutely right to say that by the time we’re older we have accrued – images, ideas, experience, life – but what’s vital is keeping open to more. Once people lose curiosity, and see worth only in what’s in the past (in a personal and political sense) we atrophy as people (or as a country, you could say).[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/aug/29/nigella-lawson-and-mark-cousins-in-conversation[/URL]</blockquote>

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