View image Harriet Andersson in Ingmar Bergman's "Summer with Monika" (1953). US tagline: "A Picture for Wide Screens and Broad Minds."
Jonathan Rosenbaum puts another nail in Ingmar Bergman's coffin in today's New York Times ("Scenes From an Overrated Career"). As important as Bergman was to the rise of European "art film," especially in the 1950s and '60s, Rosenbaum says, Bergman -- who was more a theatrical director than a cinematic one -- wasn't really adding anything new to the art of film, and his work hasn't held up over time:
Sometimes, though, the best indication of an artist’s continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about. The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman 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. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson — two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday.Michael Atkinson, who I quoted earlier in the week, makes some similar criticisms, yet comes to a different conclusion: "[N]owhere... is there a lazy, unambitious or unoriginal directorial moment."What Mr. Bergman had that those two masters lacked was the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits, as Dreyer did when constructing his peculiar form of movie space and Bresson did when constructing his peculiar form of movie acting.
The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman’s films go down more easily than theirs — his fluid storytelling and deftness in handling actresses, comparable to the skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor — also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart. What we see is what we get, and what we hear, however well written or dramatic, are things we’re likely to have heard elsewhere.
So where did the outsized reputation of Mr. Bergman come from? At least part of his initial appeal in the ’50s seems tied to the sexiness of his actresses and the more relaxed attitudes about nudity in Sweden; discovering the handsome look of a Bergman film also clearly meant encountering the beauty of Maj-Britt Nilsson and Harriet Andersson. And for younger cinephiles like myself, watching Mr. Bergman’s films at the same time I was first encountering directors like Mr. Godard and Alain Resnais, it was tempting to regard him as a kindred spirit, the vanguard of a Swedish New Wave.
It was a seductive error, but an error nevertheless. The stylistic departures I saw in Mr. Bergman’s ’50s and ’60s features — the silent-movie pastiche in “Sawdust and Tinsel,” the punitive use of magic against a doctor-villain in “The Magician,” the aggressive avant-garde prologue of “Persona” — were actually more functions of his skill and experience as a theater director than a desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new. [...]
It’s strange to realize that his bitter and pinched emotions, once they were combined with excellent cinematography and superb acting, could become chic — and revered as emblems of higher purposes in cinema. But these emotions remain ugly ones, no matter how stylishly they might be served up.
I think there's some truth in both Rosenbaum's and Atkinson's assessments, but Rosenbaum seems more interested in asserting his own personal pantheon than in evaluating Bergman's oeuvre. Yes, the reputation of Bergman's work, and its former sense of vital importance, has undeniably receded. After all, it had practically nowhere else to go, given Bergman's overwhelming stature in the '60s and '70s. (On a personal note, I haven't felt compelled to watch or re-watched any of his films in years -- except "Persona" -- although I still treasure "Fanny and Alexander," and have fond memories of his early, funny pictures like "Smiles of a Summer Night" and "The Devil's Eye.") That's why, honestly, I haven't been able to write about Bergman myself this last week: He feels like an indistinct memory to me, safely enshrined as "classic" but almost taken for granted. Nevertheless, I've put some of his films at the top of my Netflix queue ("Shame," "Hour of the Wolf") in hopes of getting reacquainted.
People don't like good things anymore, apparently.
Hour of the Wolf blows my mind.
When I think of Bergman's films, the acting style and in-your-face symbolism, I consider the influence they has on the American public via Rod Serling, and the original Star Trek. Take that scene from Hour of the Wolf, remove the nudity, and imagine William Shatner looking up to see his past mistakes taunting him. Nobody makes TV or movies in the style of the old Star Trek or Twilight Zone anymore, but those shows were, for better or worse, very influential. I am not sure if what I just wrote would be considered a defence or an attack of Bergman...
While I probably agree with the general thrust of these critics, that Bergman does not measure up to the very best, the Godards, the Capras (ha! take that, Hollywood haters!), the Ozus and Mizoguchis and Renoirs - there's a long ways between that and a filmmaker we shouldn't still be paying attention to. The fact that he was taken, for a while, as the very exemplar of the art film director is reason enough to laud him - the length and breadth and depth of his career, the fact that all but the most desperate haters can find three or four films in there to love - makes him worth knowing, worth taking about, and worth celebrating, even if in the end it's back to It's A Wonderful Life or Tokyo Story or Rules of the Game when we want to see life and death and despair confronted in a completely satisfying and sophisticated and artistically inventive and profound way....
Except Bergman does say something new, at least to those whose previous experience with cinema is limited by popular culture... as he did for me, way back in my teenage years.
I suppose it's inevitable to compare the guy to his contemporaries and note his lapse in the official canon of film school, to say this or that director did X or Y better... but what of the people Bergman did impact, and the people he'll impact from here on out? Is being a gateway to (apparently) greater cinema such a disgraceful position to be in?
Well, I've always loved Rosenbaum if only because he is unafraid to trod down the contrarian path.
Personally I love "Wild Strawberries" sentimental as it may be and I'm equally fond of "Fanny and Alexander."
Rosenbaum has never been a sentimentalist and perhaps part of his distaste for Bergman stems from that. Despite Bergman's reputation as a stark, depressive filmmaker he was quite sentimental and optimistic in much of his work.
Cries and Whispers was a miserably boring film for me. Coming from a Tarkovsky fan, this means something. I didn't sympathize with his characters, even in their flashbacks. There was no life in them at all. It was all so robotic and un-human. A tissue of lies? No, dear; it's a tissue of boring.
It's sad to me to see some critics that I very much admire piling on Bergman so shortly after his death. Over the last year, I resolved to catch up on Bergman's filmography, and saw twelve of his films that were new to me (everything from "Winter Light" to "Saraband").
I came to Bergman with slight apprehension, as he has (as some have pointed out) come to represent the North American's worst fear of European "art" cinema. But what I discovered was an artist who still matters, who still spoke to me with his mixture of humanism and fatalism, and perhaps the greatest chronicler of the human face the cinema has ever produced.
Conversely, Jean-Luc Godard has always struck me as a director whose works are so self-conscious and overtly analytical that they fail to connect with me in any meaningful way. Rosenbaum may be able to make more of a case as to why Godard is a revolutionary director, or stands out more as someone who changed the medium, but I'll take Bergman's exploration of the human experience any day over Godard's snarky deconstructionism.
That is not to say Bergman is perfect. "Persona" has always struck me as overrated, and there were honestly times during "Cries and Whispers" when I wanted to stop watching and get some fresh air. "Hour of the Wolf", which you said you're about to catch up on, might be my least favourite Bergman film...it devolves into a Lynchian exercise in horror that Bergman doesn't really seem to believe in.
But "Shame" is his masterpiece, and if you're just now discovering it, I sincerely hope you're not disappointed.
As much as I respect Mr. Rosenbaum, I have to disagree with him a little bit.
As a somewhat younger film buff who has been discovering Bergman's work over the past few years, I've found his work to be generally nothing short of fascinating. "The Seventh Seal" was my first Bergman film, and I was struck by it's directness and uncompromising images. Bergman certainly grew subtler over the years, but his images, stories, and characters never grew any less potent.
I find myself frequently revisiting the films in Bergman's "Silence of God" trilogy, each one a meditative masterpiece. It's difficult to explain why, but every time I revisit a Bergman film, it feels very fresh, not losing any of it's dramatic impact. Jim, "Shame" and "Hour of the Wolf" are also tremendous films, I hope you'll feel compelled to share your thoughts on them.
I also think that Bergman's humor has been sadly overlooked, as even in the most solemn Bergman films, there are small touches of wonderful wit. People so often think of a movie like "The Seventh Seal" as being pretentious and grim, those who actually take the time to watch it will discover that the dialogue is often marvelously funny and sharp.
I don't know. Perhaps Bergman wasn't as groundbreaking or stylish as some of his peers, and perhaps much of what he had to say was also being said elsewhere. But for me, Bergman is unmatched in his ability to tell a story that will stay with you for a long, long time. Name almost any Bergman film, and it feels fresh in my mind. Though many other individual films can make that claim, I doubt there are many other directors who make such memorable films on such a consistent basis.
I think "The Seventh Seal" is one of the oddest and most entertaining cult films ever made, and I don't mean to denigrate it any way by placing it on the fringes of camp. I suspect that if I did not view it in such a manner, I would find it as nauseatingly tasteful as many of his other films. But in "Seventh Seal" I see Bergman at play, just for once in his life taking a little time to relax and not insist on making every single frame of cinema "pregnant" with meaning.
I think one reason Bergman does not resonate for me is related to something Rosenbaum touches one. Bergman was, as Jonathan says, essentially making intimate psychodramas. I would go so far as to call many his films melodramas. There's nothing at all wrong with that, but then you burden the melodrama with the importance of life, the universe, and everything, it proves unable to support the weight and collapses into a mess.
Also, as Jonathan writes, Bergman was essentially a very conventional story teller, creating carefully crafted narrative arcs about characters with struggles and obstacles they must overcome, almost always being brought to a neat conclusion (though not always the expected one) in the final act. Again, there's nothing wrong with this approach at all - most of the esteemed Hollywood directors of the so-called golden age can be described that same way - but I suspect this explains Bergman's tenuous status among the die-hard cinephiles who tend not to want their European art-house directors to be too much like their Hollywood craftsman. It's unfair, but I admit I do the same thing. I shy away from calling Kurosawa one of the greats because he's "too Hollywood" but do I have the same qualms about calling John Ford great? No, so I can't say it's a valid criticism.
On a simpler level, I just find Bergman boring. I can't go beyond that. Bergman and Fellini both put me to sleep, and I find it inexplicable that either man could make anyone's list of "Greatest Directors of All Time" but then again, I know some bright people who think otherwise. So there you go.
What a poor, silly article Mr. Rosenbaum has written! First he pulls out the old "stodgy, theatrical 'art cinema'" canard then proceeds to exclaim clichés backed by feeble generalizations.
Now, I'm no Bergman fanboy. The man's work has its bumps, but the usually coherent Mr. Rosenbaum is just being asinine here. This is a bad argument for a view that I kinda, maybe, sometimes, might sorta be more or less inclined to agree with, kinda. Maybe.
But every time I get down on the old Swede I go back to his work and, you know, actually watch the damn movies, where I find so many ecstatically awesome moments that my faith is renewed. Sometimes I think that people are bothered by the IDEA of certain directors, or distorted perceptions and memories of their films, that they just go kinda batpoopy.
I like Godard, but compare his last feature-length film, "Notre Musique," with Bergman's last, "Saraband."
i read the rosenbaum editorial, and it strikes me as funny that he equates a particular directors current relevance with how availible his films are on dvd. (some of the matrial to which i refer isn't up on the scanners blog, so i'll copy it here
"THE first Ingmar Bergman movie I ever saw was “The Magician,” at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in the spring of 1960, when I was 17. The only way I could watch the film this week after the Swedish director’s death was on a remaindered DVD I bought in Paris. Like many of his films, “The Magician” hasn’t been widely available here for ages."
is he insane? in fact, most of bergman's major works (and then some) have, thanks to criterion, been widely avalible here in the states for some time. as a young cinephile i caught his major works on dvd a few years ago. now there are only a handful of bergman films that you can't get. "the magician" is one of them, and it seems like mr. rosenbaum expoits this for his own purposes.
i don't much care for bergman myself, but it's silly to equate a directors relevance (or greatness) with the amount of his/her films you can find on dvd in america. the fact is that availibility can often have more to do with copyrights and the owners williness to invest. my second favorite bunel movie ("the exterminating angel") isn't here. "the magnificant ambersons" isn't here. "the crowd", most all of kenji mizoguchi, good potions of ozu, "shoeshine", even a few antonioni (one of mr. rosenbaums favorites) films like "red desert" and "zabriskie point" can't be found here.
mr. rosenbaum can be a wonderul, eye-opening critic. i found most of this editorial worth pondering. sometimes, though, he dosen't play fair.
Mark,
I'm not sure what your point is. "Notre musique" was one of the best films of 2004, and definitely ranks in the upper half of Godard's work. I thought it was a near-masterpiece. I also thought "Saraband" was pretty good, probably one of Bergman's better films of the past 20 years, but still nowhere close to "Notre musique" or, for that matter, just about anything Godard has done recently. JLG is still cranking out great films and videos.
Nathan,
You're right. There are plenty of great directors whose films aren't available in America.
And while I think Mr. Rosenbaum is right that Bergman is not taught much in film schools, it isn't necessarily because he isn't considered relevant. Rather, it may be due to the way that film classes are generally organized - either by genre or by film movement. Since Bergman can't easily be fit into a particular genre (though he could be part of a melodrama or horror class) and doesn't fit into any "important" film movement (there was really no Swedish New Wave) he gets left out, while filmmakers like Godard and Antonioni tend to fit the curriculum much more neatly.
This kind of article is really pointless.
All it proves is that Bergman is currently out of style with cinephiles and quasi-academic critical types (I haven't heard any filmmakers bad-mouthing him), who are notorious for their proclivities for groupthink.
If you've studied literature, you understand that an author's works go in and out of fashion over time - sometimes being out of favor for centuries. The kind of summary statements that the Rosenbaums try to foist upon us as fact are perhaps true for a certain time and place, or for him and his friends, but don't really mean anything. They are just a game critics play in order to be seen as The One Who Knows What They're Talking About, or if they're academics, in order to secure tenure.
Blah.
By the same token, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal were excellent.
Nathan--you make a good point. If he's equating relevance with DVD availability, then Bergman is leagues ahead of Godard, Bresson, Ozu, and Mizoguchi.
Chris L,
I disagree entirely. Godard has produced plenty of fine, intellectual work, don't get me wrong, but Notre Musique is nowhere close to the brilliance of Week-End or Contempt, whereas I consider Saraband to be one of Bergman's best (and I would hope that since it's his only feature film in the past 20 years, that it would be among his best of the same time period). Notre Musique was Godard trying to play as Chris Marker and missing the target altogether. There are some images and ideas (namely in the "heaven" segment), but for the most part he simply failed to engage me with anything. Godard is at his best when he at least TRIES to mix his intellectual/political ideas with his "characters" (a term that should be used loosely with Notre Musique), but it was like a bad philosophy course at college, only worse because I didn't grasp anything from it at all. Maybe I merely missed what he was trying to say, but the movie comes off as a mess. I don't regret seeing it, but I'm glad I only saw it through Netflix rather than paying $8 at my local art house.
I think that William makes an excellent point, which is that Rosenbaum's article unfortunately uses as the crux of its argument the fact that Bergman isn't currently in fashion among so-called cinephiles. The history of film, and as William said of all works of art, is one of changing moods, in which some artists are considered great, then forgotten, then rediscovered.
Look at the ways in which Chaplin and Keaton have been neck-and-neck with each other in the public eye. First Chaplin was up, then Keaton, then Chaplin, and now Keaton seems to be making a comeback.
As for current tastes, I have noticed that Bresson seems to be particularly fashionable right now, and any film that aspires to Bressonian aesthetics (from the works of the Dardennes to "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu") gets heaps of praise (and I don't mean to suggest that the praise isn't deserved).
Cinephiles seem to be finding a strong, moving spirituality amongst the minimalism of Bresson's films. I admit to being sadly underexposed to his work, something I will try to rectify in the coming year. "Au Hasard Balthazar" was a great film, I thought, but "The Diary of a Country Priest" left me bored and distant. Nevertheless, Bresson and Dreyer are currently the "in" directors among the greats, while Bergman and Kurosawa seem to be falling out of favour. In twenty years, it will be interesting to see how the pendulum has swung.
Hey Jim: I don't know if you've seen the two recent IMDb polls. 46 percent have never seen a Bergman, and 64 percent have never seen an Antonioni film when people were asked to name favorite films by those two filmmakers.
JE: Yikes. Makes you wonder: Who the hell ARE those people and what would they be looking for in a reference database like IMDb?
There seems to be an easy-to-follow narrative for Ingmar Bergman's reputation among critics and cinephiles. When Bergman first "broke" he was praised with a kind of hyperbole that any filmmaker would have trouble living up to. Some time in the seventies, Bergman fell out of favor for a variety of reasons. His reliance on signs and metaphors, portrayed with a theatrical obviousness, is kind of insulting to cinephiles - if you look at the rhetoric behind the over-the-top praise of Bergman in the fifties and sixties, there's all sorts of discussion about this idea that Bergman was actually making film into an ART for the FIRST TIME, and it had to do with this sort of ponderousness weight coming from theatrical signification/metaphor. His films are so meaningful, etc. Well, after the initial amazement wore off, I think cinephiles went too far back in the other direction: Bergman was the extreme embodiment of high modernist art, and critics and cinephiles were starting to catch on that "low" filmmakers like Howard Hawks, Buster Keaton, etc were in fact great artists. Bergman was embraced in a very literary kind of way, while the film world was moving towards establishing a more cinematically-based mode of appreciation and critique. Bergman seemed old fashioned, a relic of the old ways.
Some time in the past decade or so, those of us who didn't have to live through all that awful, eye-rolling analysis searching for bits of metaphorical meaning in every frame, have slowly discovered Bergman not as the greatest artist ever to work in the cinema, but as an intelligent, talented filmmaker whose films are well-made and entertaining when they move quickly, and are, when heavy on the moralizing, deadly punishing and unpleasant to watch. A more tempered but generally (sometimes highly) positive opinion, in other words. Rosenbaum seems stuck in the backlash that began 35 years ago, or maybe earlier.
I guess Bergman passed first, so he got the bigger headlines, but as far as lasting relevancy and impact, Antonioni is the comparative giant. Only the most famous of his major films are available on dvd, but he's revived as often as the studios allow, a major component of film studies (as someone who really did expand the language and possibilities of cinema, rather than as a generic or national filmmaker), and stands alongside Godard as the only major personalities of the European art house movement (of which Bergman was long the most respected figure) whose reputations have in fact grown since that first wave of cinephilia first hit.
I agree with what William wrote above. Bergman has been out of fashion for quite some time and I've never considered that a comment on Bergman, just a comment on the times. Also, great artists have a way of pissing off critics and scholars, who find much more glory or publishing opportunities in lauding lesser artists.
Critics tend to prefer filmmakers who are stylists, journalists or polemicists. Filmmakers who are true auteurs are often dismissed because they provide their own distinct interpretation of the world, leaving less room for critical explanation. This, I think, can be very useful. I find it more entertaining and enlightening about culture to read Pauline Kael's reviews of Brian Depalma movies than I do to watch them. But when it comes to what I watch over and over again, I'll take Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and Kubrick any day.
(Besides that, I think it's so lame that the NY Times has to trash Bergman less than a week after he died. Bruce Weber wrote the same kind of piece for the Times on Fellini back when he passed. Does Mr. Rosenbaum desire to see his name in the TImes so badly? Pathetic.)
Bergman has been out of fashion for quite some time and I've never considered that a comment on Bergman, just a comment on the times. Also, great artists have a way of pissing off critics and scholars, who find much more glory or publishing opportunities in lauding lesser artists.
Critics tend to prefer filmmakers who are stylists, journalists or polemicists. Filmmakers who are true auteurs are often dismissed because they provide their own distinct interpretation of the world, leaving less room for critical explanation. As such, I find it more entertaining and enlightening about culture to read Pauline Kael's reviews of Brian Depalma movies than I do to watch them. But when it comes to what I watch over and over again, I'll take Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and Kubrick any day.
(Besides that, I think it's so lame that the NY Times has to trash Bergman less than a week after he died. Bruce Weber wrote the same kind of piece for the Times on Fellini back when he passed. Does Mr. Rosenbaum desire to see his name in the TImes so badly? Pathetic.)
Mark,
We'll have to agree to disagree about "Notre musique" though I do think your comparison to Marker is off the mark (no pun intended). At least, "Notre musique" is no more like Marker than most of Godard's films (they certainly have plenty in common) and, in fact, "Notre musique" is very much of a piece with two of Godard's earlier films, the brilliant "Germany Year 90, Nine Zero" and the not-so-brilliant "For Ever Mozart." And if you're looking for a filmmaker who is concerned with "engaging you" then Godard is not your man.
Another argument I'll add to the mix is that the waxing and waning of Bergman's popularity among critics may also be correlated with the similar rise and fall of psychoanalysis as a primary conceptual model. Psychoanalysis was THE critical tool in the 60s, but cognitivist, semioticians, and sundry post-modernist philosophers have since assured that psychoanalytical theory has fallen almost entirely out of favor. If ever a director was born to be grist for the psychoanalytical mill, it was Bergman.
Thanks Jonathan Lapper for pointing out this belated entry to Contrarian Week.
Who says people don't argue passionately about Bergman anymore???
Jonathan: Rosenbaum's contrarianism is part of what I've long valued in his writing, too -- a seductive error on my part, but an error nevertheless? In recent years he seems to me to have become... well, not necessarily a Dedicated Follower of Fashion (as the Kinks put it), but someone who seems overly concerned with dictating it. As I said, I agree with many of his criticisms of Bergman. It's the pedantic, paternalistic tone ("It was a seductive error, but an error nevertheless") that riles me. Maybe he just wasn't up to making a passionate argument against someone whose work he claimed wasn't being debated passionately anymore....
"but I suspect this explains Bergman's tenuous status among the die-hard cinephiles who tend not to want their European art-house directors to be too much like their Hollywood craftsman. It's unfair, but I admit I do the same thing. I shy away from calling Kurosawa one of the greats because he's "too Hollywood" but do I have the same qualms about calling John Ford great? No, so I can't say it's a valid criticism."
I agree that solely being like Hollywood is not a fair criticism. But I don't think that's what Rosenbaum or I would argue.
First, of course, Bergman isn't like Hollywood in numerous important ways. And Rosenbaum doesn't argue that Bergman = Hollywood, just that there are similarities that make watching Bergman comparatively comfortable for someone weaned on Hollywood fare to view.
What I would argue is that Bergman's sentimentalism added to his comparative seeming inability to quite grasp the film medium as medium added to being very close to a well known literary tradition creates a figure that would seem startling to an American in the 1950s, for instance, but whose faults came to eventually retire him from the absolute top rank. That's why the correct comparison of Rosenbaum of Bergman to Cukor (and both Cukor and Bergman produced some films of the absolute highest level, as both I and Rosenbaum would agree).
sorry about the double post ... i was trying to edit my bad writing. i'm a moron. i enjoy the comments here, though
Burritoboy,
I agree with you completely. On another site, I wrote that Bergman's propensity to lay it on so thick reflected either a lack of trust in himself, a lack of trust in the audience, or a lack of trust in the medium of film itself. If I had to guess, I would suppose it's more the latter.
"To lay it on so thick..."
That's a funny way to put Bergman's work or vision. I've always found the way he presents his ideas to be emotionally raw. His characters don't hide behind "film techniques" or "amazing shots". They are always front and center. There's a scene in "Winter Light" when the Pastor is reading a letter from an ex-lover, Bergman keeps the shot positioned on her for nearly 6 minutes as she looks directly into the camera...it's inescapable, her gaze peering right through us. Or the beginning of "Hour of the Wolf". But I feel I'm jumping onto this post a little late...I'll move on to a later one.