Some of the best things I've read about Ingmar Bergman's place in cinema, written since his death (UPDATED 8/01/07):
E-mails to Roger Ebert from filmmakers and writers including David Mamet, Paul Schrader, Sally Potter, Haskell Wexler, Paul Theroux, Richard Linklater, Gregory Nava, Studs Terkel, David Bordwell, David Gordon Green, Paul Cox...
Gregory Nava: This was not the escapist fare of Hollywood, or the pat spirituality of Biblical epic films where God spoke in hallowed tones from a burning bush. With Bergman, God was a spider that lived in the upstairs closet! A shocking and necessary jolt to my Catholic sensibilities. Yes, these films changed me forever -- they cemented my dream to become a filmmaker because if film could do this -- then surely it was the greatest art form of our time. I will never forget the first time I saw the horses standing in the surf against a setting sun, and death with his black cape raised approaching the world-weary knight."I hope I never get so old I get religious." -- Ingmar Bergman
Peter Rainer, Los Angeles Times:
He worked out of his deepest passions and, for many of us, this made the experience of watching his films seem almost surgically invasive. He pulled us into his secret torments. Looking at "The Seventh Seal" or "Persona" or "Cries and Whispers," it's easy to imagine that Bergman, who died Monday, was the most private of film artists, and yet, no matter how far removed the circumstances of his life may have been from ours, he made his anguish our own."If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up!" -- Bergman actor Max von Sydow, in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters"Another way to put this is that Bergman -- despite the high-toned metaphysics that overlays many, though not all, of his greatest films -- was a showman first and a Deep Thinker second. His philosophical odysseys might have been epoxied to matters of Life and Death, of God and Man, but this most sophisticated of filmmakers had an inherently childlike core. He wanted to startle us as he himself had been startled. He wanted us to feel his terrors in our bones. A case could be made that Bergman was, in the most voluminous sense, the greatest of all horror movie directors.
View image Woody Allen's "Love and Death": A Bergman (and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy...) parody from someone who loved Bergman.
What he saw as God’s refusal to intervene in the suffering on earth was the subject of his 1961-63 Silence of God Trilogy, “Through a Glass Darkly,” “Winter Light” (a pitiless film in which a clergyman torments himself about the possibility of nuclear annihilation) and “The Silence.” In his masterpiece “Persona,” (1967), an actress (Liv Ullmann) sees a television image of a monk burning himself in Vietnam, and she stops speaking. Sent to a country retreat with a nurse (Bibi Andersson), she works a speechless alchemy on her, leading to a striking image when their two faces seem to blend.So great was the tension in that film that Bergman made it appear to catch in the projector and burn. Then, from a black screen, the film slowly rebuilt itself, beginning with crude images from the first days of the cinema. These images were suggested by a child’s cinematograph which his brother received as a present; so envious was Ingmar that he traded his brother for it, giving up his precious horde of 100 tin soldiers.
Michael Atkinson, Zero for Conduct:
Another thunder lizard falls – over a half-century after what has come to be known as "the art film" emerged onto postwar American screens, the Greatest Generation (semi-irony siren, please) takes another hit with the passing of an 89-year-old Ingmar Bergman, at once a dinosaur, a one-man New Wave, a mammoth formal influence, a pioneering pop existentialist, a despot in his own nation of cinematic currency, an unexploitable navel-focused artiste who did not bow to the world’s entertainment will but instead made it bow to him, an unestimable provider of cultural fuel to the rise of college-educated counter culture between 1959 and 1980, and, let’s face it, an astonishingly adventurous sensibility that embraced virtually every stripe of expression available to him, from melodrama to the world’s most overt symbolism to gritty realism to epic pageant, farce and avant-garde psycho-obscurism.
"De Düva: The Dove" -- a staple pre-feature short in art houses, late into the 1970s.Still, he hasn’t been missed much – today, of the Art Film era uber-auteurs, Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, Truffaut, Kurosawa and Bunuel remain potent currency in one form or another (new work, old scripts, reissues, docs, tributes, etc.), but Bergman seems to have faded dramatically from view. Clearly now, the respect he received was always on the verge of dissolving into contempt; going back as far as the 1968 short ""De Düva," things "Bergmanesque" – bald-faced psychological symbology, brooding seriousness, spiritual crisis, Scanda-angst – have been remarkable grist for farce. (Saturday Night Live, Second City TV and Johnny Carson all had their sport back in the day, and there’s no counting the Bergman citations in the history of The Simpsons.) For people who never cared to know from imported cinema, Bergman represented the self-aggrandizing absurdity of Euro-film, even more so, remarkably, than Fellini – perhaps because Federico’s excesses exuded a carnivalesque pandering toward the eternal low-brow. Bergman always aimed high and deep, philosophical and God-searching and proto-Freudian, and his doggedly literal questions were more vital to him and his devoted audience than Yankee ideas of showmanhip. His only competition for Bullgoose Depressive was Antonioni, but Antonioni had the advantage of modern Mediterraneanism, cool-hip visuals and urbane desolation. Bergman had only the dayless winters, the Svealand plains and a seemingly neverending supply of Protestant guilt. Today, we are aswarm with Antonioni imitators, but no one seems to want to be the new Bergman.
[Editor's note: This was written the day before the news of Antonioni's death.]
[...]
But nowhere, not even in the gradually reevaluated "The Serpent’s Egg," is there a lazy, unambitious or unoriginal directorial moment. It doesn’t happen every day that we lose one of an entire art form’s aboriginal movers. When will he reenter the pantheon?
Dan Callahan, The House Next Door:
After a while, life and work and a few laughs turn us all into Mary Wilke (Diane Keaton) in Woody Allen’s "Manhattan": “I mean, the silence, God’s silence…OK, OK…I mean, I loved it at Radcliffe, but alright, you outgrow it!” Surely Allen means us to reject the self-loathing, brittle Wilke, who churns out novelizations of popular movies instead of trying to create serious art. But her comments nail the Bergman/Antonioni pretensions and the mindset that would most appreciate them. She also sees Bergman’s “fashionable pessimism” as “adolescent.” This hits even closer to the bone. Wilke has a point. Several points, actually. She is also evil. Her pop mindset rules today, and we have to do everything we can to topple it. Paying attention to the virtues of Bergman and Antonioni is definitely a step in the right direction....[...]
If being unforgiving is adolescent, then Bergman was adolescent until the end. But his images of bliss linger as much as his vicious dialogue (and the nastiness was always mitigated by the lilting music of the Swedish language).
More as I find them. If you have some favorites, please leave 'em in Comments...
I don't feel I'm as worthy as others to comment on one of the most respected directors in the history of cinema. Also, those who know me might wonder why a "horror guy" like me might be interested in Bergman.
However, as Peter Rainer noted, Bergman could be seen as one of the greatest "horror" directors ever. His best work explored the biggest, most truly frightening questions: Is there a God? Is so, does He care about us? What happens when we die? Is there an afterlife, or oblivion? Are we given a few short years, much of it spent in emotional or physical pain and then-nothing? These are the questions that Bergman faced, head on, in his work. Now he has his answers.
The clip below is from Hour of the Wolf, the closest he came to making a true horror film. In it, an artist (played by the great Max Von Sydow) is haunted by demons from his past. Watch for the shot of his inner demons mocking him from a nearby window. It is one of the most haunting, eeriest shots I've ever seen:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5U0uwXGJeqw
From imdb:
The Hour of the Wolf which Bergman describes is "the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are more real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. The Hour of the Wolf is also the hour when most children are born."
Jim, I'm glad you haven't just reported about Bergman's death and then moved on to the next story. You realize (as a movie fan) what the passing of a legend like this means to the rest of us movie fans out here. After watching "Fanny & Alexander" again after first hearing of Bergman's death I realized again how sad it is that much of Bergman's reputation paints him as a depressing director. However, as the great Roger Ebert has always said "No good movie is depressing, all bad movies are depressing" and again watching my favorite of his movies I was struck by how wide the breadth of emotions is in it. "Fanny & Alexander" is so rich with humor, sadness, happiness, suspense, beauty, and just plain life that even in the 5 hour TV version I would love to spend more time in this world. This is how I'll remember Bergman's legacy, as a guy who thought deeply, felt deeply, and made movies more deeply than just about anyone else ever.
I was also wondering Jim, what are your thoughts on Bergman. You haven't given much personal insight into the matter, not that I remember anyway. This could be a slightly volatile question seeing as he's just passed, but I thought I'd ask anyway. I know you disagree with me about the greatness of Kurosawa (my 2nd favorite director after Scorsese and before Hitchcock), and I, for the most part, disagree with you about the greatness of Kubrick ("2001" and "The Shining" are his only great movies, in my opinion). But I will be happy to hear your views on Bergman.
Woody Allen's review of Ingmar Bergmans autobiography is heavily quoted in this post on the NYTBR blog "Paper Cuts."
Kyle: Thanks for asking. I'm still mulling over thoughts about Bergman and Antonioni. For many years at various daily newspapers, I was the movie-obit guy. When somebody would die, I would have to instantly produce an appreciation. It was especially hard to grapple with the deaths of people whose work I loved deeply.
I can't say I'd put Bergman or Antonioni on my "Top Ten Directors" list, but they are important to me. And since I'm not under deadline pressure, I'd like to ponder my own angle for approaching their legacies...
P.S. I don't dismiss Kurosawa at all, even though I value the other of the Japanese "Big Three" -- Mizoguchi and Ozu -- more highly. But Kurosawa made some magnificent Westerns! (And "Ran" is one of the greatest Shakespeare adaptations ever.)
No, "Throne of Blood" is one of the best Shakespeare adaptations ever!
I admit that Bergman was never a favorite of mine. Hs metaphysics always grated on my nerves, and I have little patience for heavy-handed symbolism (don't get me started on Angelopolous). Still, he made some beautiful films (thank you Sven Nykvist) and it's fair to say that he is easily the most recognized of all European art-house directors. Has any art-house director ever crossed over to pop culture awareness as much as Bergman? Part of it is probably due to Woody Allen's endless homages, but for my money the best Bergman parody ever is "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey."
Bergman may also have the distinction of being the only director that John Simon ever really liked. That's not easy to do! :)
Jim, thanks for a great answer (that's not sarcasm, I promise, I really do like that answer). It always sucks when we lose more than one legend at a time (who could forget the ridiculously sad week that we lost both Jimmy Stewart and Robert Mitchum?) and it does take some re-evaluation time to really come up with a good appreciation for them. I've only recently (past 2 years or so, give me a break I'm only 24) gotten into Bergman, so his great work was fresh in my mind. I hate to say it, because he did just die, but I've yet to really experience much Antonioni and wasn't that big of a fan of what I did see. "Blow Up" was good, but I thought it was better when Coppola remade it a few years later as "The Conversation". "The Passenger" was ok, but I wasn't crazy about it. However, I have yet to see "L'Avventura" or "La Notte", so maybe I'll discover Antonioni eventually.
P.S. I knew you didn't dismiss Kurosawa, I just knew you had liked his stuff but not loved it like I did ("Seven Samurai" being only behind "The Godfather" on my favorites list). That's basically the way I feel about Kubrick so I was drawing a comparison. "2001" and "The Shining" are two of the all time greats, but I was bored by the parts of "Dr. Strangelove" that didn't have George C. Scott and/or Peter Sellers, "Clockwork Orange" has the worst acting Kubrick ever put in a movie (outside of Malcolm McDowell, who is really good in it), although it is one of my favorite opening shots. "Full Metal Jacket" is first half great movie, and second half poor man's "Platoon". And "Barry Lyndon" might be the most beautiful movie ever made, but it left me feeling cold. I didn't feel like Kubrick cared about Barry, so why should I? Like I said, it just seems like you view Kurosawa the way I do Kubrick: Some really good stuff, some not, but not as great as most people say. I know this is a Bergman post so I apologize for ranting a bit, but who can really keep from ranting when it comes to movies?
Re Paul Theroux's comment on Bergman's death, Bergman and other great directors continue to remind me that Medford Massachusetts is still not the world, even if it's my address!
Kyle, I felt the same way you did about Antonioni, but then I saw "L'Avventura," and now I get it.