View image "Zabriskie Point" -- an Antonioni movie on the cover of LOOK magazine in 1969: "Had he violated the Mann Act when he staged a nude love-in in a national park? Does the film show an "anti-American" bias? As a member of the movie Establishment, is he distorting the aims of the young people's 'revolution'?"
Watching Ingmar Bergman's "Shame" over the weekend (which I was pleased to find that I had not seen before -- after 20 or 30 years, I sometimes forget), I recalled something that happened around 1982. Through the University of Washington Cinema Studies program, we brought the now-famous (then not-so-) story structure guru Robert McKee to campus to conduct a weekend screenwriting seminar. McKee, played by Brian Cox in Spike Jonze's and Charlie Kaufman's "Adapation." as the ultimate authority on how to write a salable screenplay, has probably been the single-most dominant influence in American screenwriting -- "Hollywood" and "independent" -- over the last two decades. Many would say "pernicious influence." (Syd Field is another.)
It's not necessarily McKee's fault that so many aspiring screenwriters and studio development executives have chosen to emphasize a cogent, three-act structure over all other aspects of the script, including things like character, ideas, and even coherent narrative. Structure, after all, is supposed to be merely the backbone of storytelling, not the be-all, end-all of screenwriting. But people focus on the things that are easiest to fix, that make something feel like a movie, moving from beat to beat, even if the finished product is just a waste of time.
The film McKee chose to illustrate the principles of a well-structured story that time was Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring."
"Shame" is another reminder that Bergman's movies weren't solely aimed at "art" -- they were made to appeal to an audience. Right up to its bleak ending, "Shame" is a rip-roaring story, with plenty of action, plot-twists, big emotional scenes for actors to play, gorgeously meticulous cinematography, explosive special effects and flat-out absurdist comedy. I don't know how "arty" it seemed in 1968, but it plays almost like classical mainstream moviemaking today. (And remember: Downbeat, nihilistic or inconclusive finales were very fashionable and popular in mainstream cinema in the late 1960's: "Bonnie and Clyde," "Blow-Up," "Easy Rider," "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry"...),
It's important to remember that Bergman and his fellow Euro-titan Michelangelo Antonioni, who both died on the same day last week, were big-name commercial directors -- who also helped moviegoers worldwide see the relatively young, originally low-brow, populist medium in a new light: as a (potential) art form. (The Beatles, who in 1964-'65 were the most popular youth phenomenon on the planet, even wanted Antonioni to direct their second feature, after "A Hard Day's Night"!) And if they hadn't been so popular and famous, they would not have been so influential. These guys won plenty of high-falutin' awards at film festivals, but they were also nominated for Oscars in glitzy Hollywood.
Bergman was nominated nine times for writing and directing, and Antonioni twice, and their films, actors, and other collaborators received many more. (Fellini, their popular peer in the '60s, received 12 Oscar nominations.) Liv Ullmann was nominated twice for best actress, in Bergman's "Face to Face" and Jan Troell's "The Emigrants"; Ingrid Bergman received her sixth Oscar nom for "Autumn Sonata"; cinematographer Sven Nykvist won two Oscars for "Cries and Whispers" and "Fanny and Alexander"; and Bergman's Best Foreign Film winners include "The Virgin Spring," "Through a Glass Darkly," and "Fanny and Alexander." "Cries and Whispers" was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture of 1973 (not Foreign Language Film -- Best Picture, something that wouldn't happen again until 1995's "Il Postino"), Director, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, and Costume Design.
All of which is to underline that Bergman and Antonioni were among the most prestigious, popular, and widely-discussed European filmmakers of their day. No, they weren't Paul Verhoeven or Ang Lee (both of whom have made many more English-language films than Bergman or Antonioni), but they weren't Béla Tarr or Theo Angelopoulos, either -- the latters' international reputations, awards, and honors notwithstanding. Bergman and Antonioni, like Fellini, were brand-names recognized by much of the moviegoing public, even among those who had never seen their movies.
(By the 1980s and '90s, it didn't even matter if the audience actually knew Bergman's work when it was parodied on "SCTV" -- "Whispers of the Wolf" on Count Floyd's "Monster Chiller Horror Theater," or Martin Short as Jerry Lewis in "Scenes From an Idiot's Marriage" -- or, even more broadly, in "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey," in which Death challenges the heroes to a game of Battleship. The style and visual archetypes, like Antonioni's, were so distinctive they practically begged for parody. )
Even with the support of AB Svensk Filmindustri, Bergman had the same kinds of problems with financing, producers, and distributors, that most directors seem to have -- as did Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard and many of the well-known, critically hailed mid-century filmmakers. (Bergman and Antonioni are on record complaining about them -- in the DVD extras for "Shame" and "L'Eclisse," for instance.) And none of them ever met with unanimous critical approval. They've had prominent and influential detractors all along.
Jonathan Rosenbaum shouted a loud "No!" to Bergman in the New York Times Saturday, alleging that his work "isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard." I don't know what evidence supports this assertion, because Rosenbaum doesn't say, but the rather passionate comments here, at least, don't support Rosenbaum's claim. Unless his aim was really just to stir up the pot, and thus disprove his own thesis, I think he'll be surprised at how much mail that Op-Ed piece generates. It was a great publicity stunt, anyway.
Bergman and Antonioni have never been above criticism. But it's foolish (and pointless) to dismiss either of them -- now, more than ever.
As A.O. Scott wrote in the Times the next day ("Before Them, Films Were Just Movies"), though this was probably written before he read Rosenbaum's piece, Bergman and Antonioni were important:
... Not only because they were both great filmmakers, but more because, in their prime, Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Bergman were seen as the twin embodiments of the idea that a filmmaker could be, without qualification or compromise, a great artist.Scott cites critic Philip Lopate, an ecstatic Antonioni partisan, whose crowd dismissed the more popular Bergman as "the darling of the suburbs."Not that everyone agreed or saw them both in equally glowing light. There will always be those who scoff at the idea of cinema as a form of art. And those who do embrace the notion have always been notoriously prone to quarrel and dissension.
On the other hand, Manny Farber slammed Michelangelo: "Antonioni's aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance."
Andrew Sarris made fun of "Antoniennui." Pauline Kael hated "L'Eclisse" ("Some like it cold.... Even [Monica Vitti] looks like she's given up in this one"), and complained:
Will "Blow-Up" be taken seriously in 1968 only by the same sort of cultural diehards who are still sending out five-page single-spaced letters on their interpretation of ["Last Year at Marienbad"]?... [P]eople identify with it so strongly that thy get upset if you don't like it -- as if you were rejecting not just the movie but them.... Antonioni's new mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seems to have a kind of numbing fascination for them that they associate with art and intellectuality, and they are responding to it as their film -- and hence a masterpiece.Kael also wondered: "Was there ever a good movie everybody was talking about?"
After Antonioni's death last week, Dennis Lim wrote at Slate.com ("The laugorous, achingly hip films of Michelangelo Antonioni"):
While Bergman's status in the pantheon has diminished, his reputation somewhat dented by overexposure and caricature, Antonioni is very much back in vogue. [...]One of the most thought-provoking comments I came across last week, written before the news of Antonioni's death, was from Michael Atkinson, who wrote, "Today, we are aswarm with Antonioni imitators, but no one seems to want to be the new Bergman." Andrei Tarkovsky was influenced by both Bergman and Antonioni, but he died in 1986. Wong Kar-Wai certainly owes significant debt to Antonioni, and Lim also cites his impact on filmmakers from "Béla Tarr in Hungary to Abbas Kiarostami in Iran to Carlos Reygadas in Mexico to Jia Zhangke in China, Carlos Reygadas in Mexico to Jia Zhangke in China." There's Robert Altman (who also adored Fellini), Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Steven Soderbergh, too. Dennis Cozzalio adds Brian DePalma, Gus Van Sant, and Peter Weir. The Big Guys also influenced one another: Anybody fail to see some "L'Avventura" in the wide-screen spaces and architectural compositions of Godard's "Contempt"?If Antonioni's movies have proved more resistant than Bergman's or Fellini's to the tides of fashion, it's partly because they were often so achingly hip to begin with, so unmistakably adorned with the trappings of their period that they now serve as vintage time capsules.
Glenn Kenney ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ingmar Bergman") responds to Atkinson, saying that "nobody can be the new Bergman."
Unlike a lot of younger filmmakers today, Bergman was a highly, richly cultured individual. He knew the Bible backward and forward, Shakespeare too; fine art, music, and so on. All of his knowledge did more than inform his work—his work is suffused with it, it gains much of its texture and heft from it. Of course, Antonioni is similarly cultured, but his depth in this area doesn't play so much upon the surface of his work; it motivates the form, rather than thickens it. Today's young filmmakers aren't, for the most part, as polyglot. For a lot of them, all the culture they've got is film. And Antonioni's got a signature style that's accessible to them, and seems imitable: shoot some architecture and negative space, have characters disaffectedly utter banalities, and you think you've got it. To emulate Bergman, you've got to know what he knew, and knowing that...go on to be yourself.Peter Nellhaus noted that in user polls at IMDb, 46 percent of (random) respondents report never having seen a Bergman movie, and 64 percent have never seen an Antonioni movie. Which prompts me to wonder: Who are these people? Maybe they're young and just beginning their movie education/experience (I hope that's the case). But, despite Rosenbaum's mysterious contention, Bergman's best-known films are all available on Region 1 DVDs (I count 22 titles on the first page of Amazon.com's results for Bergman, alone including "Monika," "Through a Glass Darkly," "Winter Light," "The Silence," "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries," "The Virgin Spring," "Persona," "Scenes From a Marriage," "Fanny and Alexander"); and Antonioni's famous trilogy -- "L'Avventura," "La Notte" and "L'Eclisse" -- are also available, the first and third in two-disc Criterion editions. "The Passenger," starring Jack Nicholson, was released with much fanfare in a restored DVD version just last year.
These movies are easier to see now than they have been since they were originally released.
If you're at all interested in the major new art form of the 20th-21st century, being unexposed to Bergman or Antonioni is like someone interested in 20th-century music being ignorant of Stravinsky or the Beatles, or someone interested in 20th century painting having never seen a Jackson Pollack or Andy Warhol. It's not possible! To say you've never seen any of their movies is to say you're not very serious about movies. You don't have to like 'em, or even "understand" 'em, but you can't be unexposed to them.
While you're waiting for the discs to arrive, check out the round-ups of viewpoints on Bergman and Antonioni at David Hudson's essential Greencine Daily blog. Then tell me we're not going to continue passionately debating these guys for a long time.
So glad you discovered "Shame" for the first time...as I've said before, I consider it Bergman's masterpiece, and one of the finest films I've seen.
You're absolutely right, by the way, it is accessible and almost mainstream, but that doesn't stop it from being equally profound and truthful. Bergman finds a perfect, almost surreal tone for presenting the realities of war.
By the way, when I first saw "Shame", I was struck by the stylistic and thematic influence it seemed to hold over Spielberg's "War of the Worlds". I wonder if this is just a coincidence (or, more likely, my attempting to draw links between two filmmakers I very much admire)...but Spielberg has mentioned in the past that he was a great fan of Bergman's, and I wonder if he used "Shame" as something of a template for "War of the Worlds". It may seem odd to link these films, but in their approach to stories of civilians stuck on the peripheries of war and their insistence on chronicling the human face as it registers the toll of carnage, "Shame" and "War of the Worlds" seem spiritually linked. The hillside scene in "War of the Worlds" seems particularly influenced by a similar scene in "Shame". Also, the ending of "Children of Men" (my favourite film of the past five years) echoes the ending of "Shame", but where Bergman's adrift rowboat represented only death, in "Children of Men" it encompasses birth, life and death.
Your point that Bergman and Antonioni were essentially commercial filmmakers seems to extend (at least in the case of Bergman) to their own particular tastes in movies. Look at these quotes from a 2002 interview with a Swedish magazine, in which he was asked about certain filmmakers:
"Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh — they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's "Traffic" is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is "American Beauty" and "Magnolia." (Incidentally, Bergman just happened to single out my two favourite films of 1999, and two of my all-time favourites).
Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola...hardly obscure directors languishing away on works of art too profound for the uncomprehending masses.
And what of his feelings for an art-house favourite like Godard?
"I've never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a f***ing bore. He's made his films for the critics. One of the movies, "Masculin, féminin", was shot here in Sweden. It was mindnumbingly boring."
Ouch. (Right on, Iggy!)
So apparently, Bergman the moviegoer was not above resorting to the same criticisms that, ironically, have unfairly plagued Bergman (i.e. boring, overly symbolic, etc.). It seemed like, as a filmwatcher, Bergman preferred somewhat more mainstream fare, films that weren't made "for the critics" but rather for audiences interested in exploring both the human condition and the limits of the cinematic medium. That Bergman could have such commercial aims and yet still be, in my opinion, a great artist is proof of the duality of cinema...the best films, like "Shame", can keep us riveted as base entertainments while still using film as an art form to make us question what we know about life, death, and everything in between. That's what Bergman did so well.
P.S. I also saw that poll on the IMDB about Bergman, and was saddened (yet not at all surprised) to see 46 percent say they hadn't seen a Bergman film. The sad reality is that my generation (twenty-somethings) are sadly illiterate about film history, even those who consider themselves film buffs. One co-worker of mine writes film reviews for a local newspaper, and he hadn't seen a single Bergman film (I doubt if he's seen many films that came out before the 1980s). Another co-worker, who is extremely intelligent yet jokingly mocks his own crassly commercial taste when it comes to movies, overheard me talking about Bergman and said:
"I heard about him dying. He was supposed to be this great, but I'd never heard of him. They showed some of his movies, and I'd never heard of any of them. They looked like they sucked...there weren't any explosions or anything."
He said that last line somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but how sad is it that he probably speaks for many people today?
Bergman and Antonioni (along with Fellini) were undeniably the dominant non-Nouvelle Vague figure of the 1960s and perhaps the ealry part of the 70s, but I'm not buying the argument that they are the first two directors who proved that filmmakers could be "great artists."
I think rather they happened to arrive at a time when film criticism had taken a leap forward, and also a geographical leap from the pages of Cahiers du Cinema to the eager hands of young acolyte Andrew Sarris. Combined with the emergence of film study programs in American universities, the time was ripe for the auteurs du jour to be hailed as "serious artists."
But you can go back at least to Eisenstein if you want to start talking about directors who were talked about as "serious artists." Heck, Arnheim wrote "Film as Art" in 1932. And even before that, the surrealists had raided the film scene, written their manifestos, and produced some pretty astonishing and challenging work.
Maybe Bergman and Antonioni, arriving as they did when the critical apparatus of cinema had just achieved, well, critical mass, can be seen two of the flashpoints for promoting the notion of "film as art" to the pop culture mainstream. But I'd hesitate to take the argument much farther than that.
Chris L: I think I put it a little less broadly, saying they were "big-name commercial directors -- who also helped moviegoers worldwide see the relatively young, originally low-brow, populist medium in a new light: as a (potential) art form."
It's mighty true, though, that Swedish imports like Victor Sjostrom ("The Wind," with Lillian Gish) and Mauritz Stiller (early director of Greta Garbo) helped pave the way for the likes of Bergman.
Perhaps Chris you were responding to A.O. Scott's sentiments, "Before them Films were just movies." Again, as you said Chris, from Eisenstein to Vigo to Bunuel to Renoir to Welles there was a great deal of challenging material thrust onto the scene well before the sixties.
As for Farber's dismissal of Antonioni, it's not too surprising. Farber was never a fan of the "art" film by any stretch of the imagination. Although to a minor degree I agree with him only that I find Bergman's films don't feel as, I don't know, "forced" as Antonioni's. That's probably the wrong word to use but I can't think of a better one right now. For instance, the mimes "playing" tennis at the end of Blow Up is precisely the kind of "artiness" that Farber is deriding and that Bergman avoided. When Bergman used overt symbols in his films, like Death in The Seventh Seal he played with it and had fun. When Antonioni gave us symbolism he was deadly serious and humorless.
I think they are both great filmmakers but I think Bergman's better and has more resonance with each passing day.
I have to say right now that I thought Zabriskie Point was a real mess of a film that destroyed Antonioni's career. (If you look at his filmography, he never did recover.) Dull characters in uninteresting situations. A very unfocused story. Occasionally some very gaudy art direction as well; the famous house explosion scored to Pink Floyd's "Come In, Number 51, Your Time's Up" could almost have been the work of Ken Russell. Of all the films from which you could have chosen publicity materials...
Alex Murillo-
Bergman isn't alone in his distaste for Godard. Werner Herzog once said, "Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film, a Fred Astaire picture, or a porno."
I like the reminder that these were commercial film directors. In my provincial town anything with subtitles is billed as an "art house" movie unless it involves flying fists and/or daggers. With those labels so firmly ensconced is it surprising that the only such films to play here are things like "Cinema Paradiso" or "My Life as a Dog" (no disrespect to these intended)? And I can't blame the theaters. I saw "Triplets of Belleville" and "Howard's End" (that was in English,a s I recall) on the opening Friday nights of their surprising appearances and my friends and I were literally the only ones in the house.
And so, of course, I'm not surprised by the poll data, either. Unlike with arts like painting, poetry, or interpretive dance there are millions out there who think attending a new flick every Saturday makes them an expert. (As does listening to the commercial music station.) And this internet thing here has, along with reality TV, made people extremely unshy about speaking from, if not boasting about, their ignorance. Now as for Stravinsky...you're kidding, right, Jim?
Dane: Stravinsky totallys blow your mind, dude. I used to visit friends in San Francisco in the mid-'70s (students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music) and we would smoke dope and play the Solti/Chicago "Rite of Spring" and the Boulez "Firebird" -- along with Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" and other current records -- and just wig out at how great they were. The thing is, I still feel that way 30+ years later and totally sober!
I'm serious: The Solti/Chicago "Rite of Spring" will (aside from being a spectacular performance of a magnificent piece of music) push any music system you have to its very limits. (And, yes, it's trippier than "I Am the Walrus"...)
Then again, if you really want your head and your stereo to explode, listen to the first movement of Mahler's 8th Symphony by Solti/Chicago or Bernstein/NY Philharmonic. You will never be the same again.
Jim, you convinced me to give Stravinsky a try. I've only heard his stuff in passing and in a non-herbalogical state of mind and I couldn't get into it. Mahler I love.
The point I tried to make, though, was just a caution against coming on like Harold Bloom. Or a film-fundamentalist, to connect to the other posts. I know your mind is wide open and that you aren't stuck in some previous era or some particular continent. These are good things. But I always cringe a bit whenever I hear that someone can't be this or that if they haven't seen or heard this or that. It's a valid point when spoken to critics or anyone who has just made some sweeping statement based on scant knowledge, but when made to some Joe Average filmgoer it's a turn-off, man, and will not, I guarantee, open that guy's mind. Better to find a comparison to something he's into and watch him grow inch by inch. Liked a remake? Try the original. Not bad, huh? I guess maybe they did make some good stuff before you were born. Maybe even in black and white. In my tiny sphere of influence I've worked this on a tiny sphere of people. It's slow but rewarding. And I send some of these people to IMDB, now and again, to check stuff out. It worries me to think they might be blasted for passion combined with ignorance which would surely cause backsliding. Believe me I tried the blasting first. Got nowhere.
Overall, I think the way novices feel comfortable enough to jump into the discussion about movies is one of the good things about the medium. One of the biggest challenges, too.
Hey, just heard there is a Friedkin pictures in the works that has something or other to do with Stravinsky. Spooky. Made my head turn right 'round.