I’ve been so busy lately finishing a book, keeping up with the new DVDs, watching The Bourne Ultimatum over and over, filing a VV package of reviews, and going to birthday parties (happy 29th, Mr. Walling!) that I haven’t even had a chance to grieve over the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.

For persons of my generation, Bergman and Antonioni, along with Fellini, Resnais, De Sica, Godard, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, and a few others, were our first experiences of “art films.” I saw his films over and over from high school on, always in a context that Bergman’s films were among the highest achievements of modern cinematic art. One could argue, as Jonathan Rosenbaum does in a New York Times op-ed piece, that ultimately Bergman was something of an overrated middlebrow trafficker in vague religious angst which comfortable Manhattanites could relate to, making him the ideal avatar for Woody Allen, who aspires to please the same constituency, but what I find disturbing is how much Bergman seems to have fallen out of favor.

Mr. Rosenbaum claims that Bergman isn’t even taught in colleges anymore (though I wonder how he compiled that fact). Bergman’s career is one more diverse than his eulogizers, even the supportive ones, give him credit for having, and it changed dramatically in the early 1960s, transitioning from rather ornate and solid theater-based dramaturgy to a modernist, if you were, neo-realism. It may be that atheistic college profs, a conformist lot at the end of the day, fear teaching a man who wrestled with religious ideas, not wanting to open that can of worms in front of a classroom of who knows how many quick-to-report-you-to-the-dean Christers. Or it may be that Bergman just doesn’t excite their critical acumen the way that, say, Hitchcock, Ford, Preminger, or Lang do, directors one is more likely to find enshrined in critical, academic papers than Bergman. The Swede’s films don’t really need interpretation. There is no subtextual film lurking below the surface like a palimpsest as there is in Ford and Lang and Hitchcock’s commercial works, meta-films that are fun to eek out. Bergman’s films are easy to understand (except for, maybe, The Silence).

What is less well known, and thus unmentioned in the obits for both Bergman and Antonioni, is how much the two directors hated each other. Bergman disparaged Antonioni in interviews, claiming that Fellini was his favorite competitor, and Antonioni returned the favor, having nothing positive to say about Bergman. That they died so close to each other suggests a competition between them to see who could hold out longer; having won, Antonioni was free to collapse the following day.

The two artists may have been mutually repulsed by their similarities to each other. Both created highly stylized, formally beautiful works, usually with a gorgeous woman at the center, that decried the moral corruption of the modern world. Though I esteem both directors, as a viewer, right now in my life, I have to come down on the side of Antonioni. If I were to choose a film from one of their catalogs to watch for pleasure, it would be one from Antonioni. Ultimately, he had the bigger influence on me. His surrealism and odd, hard-edged view of modern life always struck me as realism. Take Blowup (though my favorite of his films is L’Eclisse). It’s sexy (Vanessa Redgrave running around topless but for a scarf and a man’s sports watch), it’s funny (the odd things the main character sees on the street), it’s suspenseful (the protagonist’s various forays into the park where a murder might have happened), and it feels like observed truth (I’ve been in dance clubs like the one the hero enters, where the audience sways like zombies except for the one out of control flailer).

On the other hand, I could also easily re-watch my favorite Bergmans, such as Winter Light or Passion of Anna. You know, it is hard to choose. And in the world of cinema, one shouldn’t have to. There is room enough for both Bergman and Antonioni.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.