David Bordwell weighs in on the Great Debate of August with a substantial post called "Bergman, Antonioni, and the stubborn stylists," in response to Jonathan Rosenbaum -- who gives his verdict on a recent viewing of "Fanny and Alexander."
First, Bordwell offers his perspective:
Timing aside, there wasn’t much in the piece that hasn’t been said by certain cadres of cinephiles for decades. Back in the 1960s, people called Bergman “theatrical,” “uncinematic,” pretentious, and intellectually shallow. He was even accused of hypocrisy. His spiritual, philosophical films always seemed to depend on a surprising number of couplings, killings, rapes, and gorgeous ladies, often naked. Rosenbaum contrasts Bergman with Bresson and Dreyer, more austere religious filmmakers as well as great formal innovators, and this gambit too is familiar from late-night film-society disputes. Jonathan’s case is news in the good, grey Times, but it’s an old story among his (my) generation.I think that this generational antipathy has many sources. While Bergman had considerable academic cachet, this may have hurt him with smart-alecks like us. Cinephile priests and professors told us that Bergman was a great mind, but we suspected them of snobbery, for they often disdained even foreign filmmakers who dabbled in popular genres. Kurosawa was admired for "Rashomon" and "I Live in Fear" rather than for "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo." And many of Bergman’s intellectual fans despised the classic tradition of American studio film. Hitchcock had not yet convinced literature profs of his excellence, and Ford was a gnarled geezer who made Westerns. Bergman and his acolytes seemed just too square. Our money was on Godard, especially after Susan Sontag’s magisterial essay on him. [...]
Speaking just for myself, I didn’t have a deep love for Bergman, and I still don’t. I was drawn to his early idylls ("Monika," "Summer Interlude") and impressed but chilled by the official classics ("Smiles of a Summer Night," "The Seventh Seal," "The Virgin Spring"). "Persona," I admit, was a punch in the face. Seeing it in its New York opening, I felt that all of modern cinema was condensed into a mere eighty minutes. But no Bergman film afterward measured up to that for me, and after "The Serpent’s Egg" I just lost interest, catching up with "Cries and Whispers," "Scenes from a Marriage," "Fanny and Alexander," and a very few others over the later decades.
We can talk tastes forever. Maybe you think Bergman is great, or the greatest, or obscenely overrated. I think that there’s something more general and intriguing going on beyond our tastes. What makes this hard to see is that the venues of popular journalism don’t allow us to explore some of the ideas and questions raised by our value judgments.Be sure to read the entire piece.Take some of Rosenbaum’s criticisms, which Roger Ebert has persuasively answered. I’d add that Jonathan is sometimes applying criteria to Begman that he wouldn’t apply to directors he admires. Bergman isn’t taught frequently in film courses? So what? Neither is Straub/Huillet or Rivette or Bela Tarr. Bergman is theatrical? So too are Rivette and Dreyer, both of whom Rosenbaum has written about sympathetically.
More importantly, Jonathan’s critique is so glancing and elliptical that we can scarcely judge it as right or wrong. A few instances...
And, in case you missed it, Rosenbaum offered his assessment of Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander" in a Scanners comment below:
Last night I saw the three-hour version of "Fanny and Alexander" -- the version that Bergman himself regarded as the compromised theatrical version (which is also the one that ranked so highly among critics in the Sight and Sound poll), not the much longer director's cut made for Swedish TV. The latter is also available in the same Criterion box set, though I haven't encountered much evidence that most of my colleagues outside of Scandinavian countries, including those who rank Bergman so highly and profess to be scholars of his work, have bothered to see it.
Sorry, guys, but I saw the three-hour "Fanny and Alexander" back to back with the 1953 "Sawdust and Tinsel," and I much prefer the earlier film. Both are impressive in some ways, but the earlier film is far more impressive to me. Maybe I'd feel differently about the five-hour version, but that's not the version people have been criticizing me for not seeing.
For a very smart and adept estimation of what's good and what's not so good in the three-hour "Fanny and Alexander," check out Pauline Kael's detailed review. Don't come back to me with Oscar nominations. After all, the vile racism of "The Deer Hunter" as well as what I assume is the boring wartime propaganda of "Mrs. Miniver" were both validated and ratified with best-picture Oscars.
To all the most vocally fervent Bergman and "Fanny and Alexander" supporters out there: when are you going to see the original 312-minute TV version and explain why the 188-minute version is presumably better? Even Kael seemed to imply that when she concluded her review by noting that Bergman ALSO made a TV version, failing to acknowledge that the shorter version was simply a digest that Bergman had to put together in order to get the film shown in theaters.
Rosenbaum is completely wrong about Bergman, which is fine, but the assumptions he makes are what makes his last couple of pieces so infuriating.
I have seen both version of Fanny and Alexander, first the "compromised" theatrical cut, and then the five hour cut. The three hour cut is a very good film, the five hour cut is superior, and one of the greatest pieces of cinema I've ever seen. Why he assumes those critics who voted in the Sight and Sound poll haven't seen the longer cut, I do not know. I myself have never read a piece arguing the superiority of the shorter version over the longer. It's also important to note that the television cut wasn't released commercial in the US until a couple of years ago.
There seems to be a tendency among critics (especially those who seem to be fading in relevance) to be detractors, yet hold on to the early work and what they see as the promise gone awry. I've been reading these pieces and seeing laziness at every turn. Yes, film is subjective, and there's some value in saying you prefer one work to another, but why not offer some insight into why you thought that, make some note of why you thought the film failed.
That's his assessment? He didn't say anything! He made references to a bunch of things, and then he forgot to actually say something about the movie! What did he tell us? He preferred Sawdust and Tinsel, he watched the 3-hour version instead of the 5-hour version, and then he goes on about this meaningless trivia! He didn't even say whether he liked it or not! He didn't say anything at all! "It's ok that I didn't see the long version because no one else does." "I liked this other film more." "Read someone else's review." Oh, there's what he said. He buried the headline. It's a Link Rant without the link.
I gave up on thinking Rosenblum was serious when he claimed he just wanted to "stir the pot." This is what you say when you try to re-brand an indefensible statement (or several) as a Socratic inquiry. And now he's trying to close the lid.
His "response" only confirms he doesn't take anyone else seriously either. It's incredibly tempting (and fun!) to go after your critics with terms like "Sorry boys!" and "Don't come back to me with . . . " Eric Idle perfected this when he was with Monty Python. Unfortunately, it doesn't really lend credence to your argument. I have to give John credit, though: I wouldn't have thought to try and discredit "Fanny and Alexander's" Oscar-accolades by naming two unrelated films that were 36 years apart (including one made 40 years prior to that under consideration).
I'm not the only person on Scanners who will be quick to say that the TV version of "Fanny and Alexander" is superior to the three hour version (I have seen both). I am not a Bergman apologist - his work varies between majestic and plodding, but I think the TV version of "Fanny and Alexander" is majestic. It has richer character details, like an extended bedtime story told by Oscar on Christmas Eve, and more dream sequences, including one at the end that I believe is the point of the whole extravaganza: Isak Jacobi tells the young pair an old Jewish story about people wandering in the wilderness, lost and thirsty, and when Alexander imagines this story in his head the fusion of character, music, and some quintessentially Bergman images is overwhelming. This sequence comes late in the five hour version, and it is worth the wait - it brings full circle the rejection of religion and joyful acceptance of paganism that defines "Fanny and Alexander."
Perhaps the reason Mr. Rosenbaum's "colleagues outside of Scandinavian countries" haven't seen the five hour television version is because it was largely unavailable in other countries. The Criterion DVD is the biggest exposure its gotten, and that only came out a few years ago. Those who defend the three hour version are defending a good film, but they really don't know what they're missing (and they can find out pretty easily).
Furthermore, I don't understand why Mr. Rosenbaum is provoking people to defend a version of the film that he has acknowledged Bergman didn't like; anyone who did defend the three hour version did so out of ignorance of the greater, larger whole. Surely Mr. Rosenbaum is not going to judge "Fanny and Alexander" on the incomplete cut just because Bergman's fans consider it canonical. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding his intentions. Nonetheless, I hope he does watch the whole five hour thing, even if I am doubtful of the outcome.
So yet again Mr. Rosenbaum gives no real reason why he didn't like a Bergman movie, this time talking about "Fanny & Alexander". He just said he didn't like it, which is fine no matter how much I disagree, but he doesn't say why. I love it for a multitude of reason including the great acting, the beautiful cinematography, and the screenplay that felt like a great lost Dickens novel. I'm not going to say anything about Oscars to justify my position cause it personally doesn't mean anything to me ("Seven Samurai" won nothing, "Vertigo" won nothing, "Taxi Driver" won nothing, and "Dark City" was not even nominated for anything). But the real question is why, it's always why, not what. I rarely care if Roger Ebert, the late Gene Siskel, A.O. Scott or whoever doesn't like a movie, I care about WHY. I think that's one of the reasons that Ebert is always telling people to look past the thumbs up or down (which is the "what") and look to what they say about the movie (which is the "why"). Mr. Rosenbaum is typically a good critic, which is what has disappointed me about his "crusade" against Bergman (crusade is supposed to be hyperbolic here) because there has been a lot of "what" but not a lot of real "why".
P.S. I have watched the long version of "Fanny & Alexander" and think it is a better movie but being so long it is much less manageable to watch. I think the theatrical version gets the points and feelings across that Bergman wanted, the long version is just a richer experience. I would recommend it to Mr. Rosenbaum really only if he felt that the theatrical version felt a little truncated or rushed.
Over at my place, Self-Styled Siren, I already admitted that I was hardly going to batter Mr. Rosenbaum for not seeing "Fanny and Alexander" when I still need to do some catching up with Antonioni. It seemed to me that Mr. Rosenbaum had seen plenty enough Bergman to form an opinion.
I speak up, however, as a fan of "Fanny and Alexander," one who bought the Criterion special edition with her own pin-money (no promotional freebies, alas) and saw the five-hour version just last year. I do prefer the five-hour version, but then I loved the three-hour version so much I saw it three times in the theater during its first release (which I suppose may have eaten into my time for "L'Avventura," but we all have our little skewed priorities). The long version is much like the U.S. release, only more so, which explains both why I prefer the 312-minute F&A and why I think Mr. Rosenbaum would remain unimpressed. A particular delight is the long scene in which Uncles Carl and Gustav confront the terrifying Bishop, asking for their sister-in-law Emilie's release from her loveless marriage. The scene is also theatrical and conventional, with the camera mostly moving from a two-shot of the uncles to a medium shot of the bishop. Not what you'd call innovative. But funny, suspenseful, supremely well-acted, well-written and perfectly in keeping with the themes of the movie.
I found Kael's old capsule review of the movie here; I do not have a copy of the detailed original handy. Kael's capsule says "the conventionality" of Bergman's thinking in the film is "shocking," but I think she was bringing her own preconceptions to bear. Where Kael saw "gingerbreading," I saw some of the most beautiful cinematography I have encountered before or since; where she saw "Victorian health and domesticity" I saw an unapologetically carnal, live-and-let-live family that would have given the 19th-century bourgeoisie apoplexy. To worldly, cosmopolitan Kael, who was moving in New York intellectual circles with the revolutionary days of the late 60s and early 70s barely behind her, "Fanny and Alexander" probably did seem to lack the bomb-throwing, flashy fervor she admired in directors like Altman and Bertolucci. But for the Siren, fresh off the boat from Alabama, a movie that endorsed the warm and ultimately magic world of art and the theater over the chilly austerity of Protestantism was more than welcome, it was life-affirming.
Mr. Bordwell's essay lays the groundwork for an objective approach to the Great Debate and it's welcome.
Just a curious contrast I found amusing:
Mr. Rosenbaum:
Mr. Bordwell:
I'm glad someone has finally pointed out that the old "theatrical" tag isn't entirely founded in Bergman's work. I was going to comment on this on an earlier post, but ended up writing so much that it turned into its own blog post:
http://www.thesamedame.com/2007/08/bergman-most-theatrical-hack-to-ever.html
Uncharacteristically of Rosenbaum, the Times piece struck be as a bit lazy, rehashing lots of old buzz words without really doing anything to justify them.
Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the five-hour "Fanny & Alexander" was readily available back in Kael's day, and only became so when Criterion released it this or last year, so it might not be a big surprise that she didn't discuss it in depth.
Also, I would never counter-argue by tallying Oscars and nominations, but "what I assume is the boring wartime propaganda of 'Mrs. Miniver'"? Does that mean Rosenbaum hasn't slogged through Wyler's boring wartime propaganda firsthand?
I have to give Rosenbaum credit for being a stand up guy and seeing the film.
A thought has been kicking around in my mind this morning: In this age of TV series and boxed sets, is five hours really that unmanageable? They're broken up into episodes—you don't have to watch all five hours in one sitting!
It isn't perfectly clear to me at least that Rosenbaum was using "theatrical" in a pejorative sense. But the rush to vindicate Bergman of the charge is interesting. Just why is theatricality such a cinematic crime? "Theatrical" does not mean non-visual, as anyone who sees well-financed stage productions can attest, and many of the most cinematic directors show theater-like visual tendencies. As Stanley Kauffmann once pointed out, the light-dimming effects Ophuls uses in LOLA MONTES come straight from theater. De Palma, a paradigm of the cinematic, likes to shoot dialogue scenes as slowly moving widescreen shots in which the actors appear full-length, as they would on a stage. And Dreyer's GERTRUD is much stagier than anything I've seen by Bergman. In fact, pretty much any long take which reveals the space surrounding the actors will suggest a stage to some extent.
I actually dislike "The Deer Hunter," but is it really guilty of "vile racism"? I don't want to start a whole new debate about a movie I've only seen once about ten years back, but Rosenbaum's really throwing around the ad hominem attacks here. In any case, I'm sure John Woo would disagree with him, as his vastly superior "A Bullet in the Head" was an admitted homage.
(Rosenbaum might be thinking more of "Year of the Dragon", major parts of which really can be construed as racist, though I doubt that was Cimino's intention. He was just trying to do the ultimate homage to "The Searchers.")
And, by the way, I LIKE "Mrs. Miniver" and I don't care who knows it.
He was even accused of hypocrisy. His spiritual, philosophical films always seemed to depend on a surprising number of couplings, killings, rapes, and gorgeous ladies, often naked.
Really? People nailed him to the wall for that? I'm curious: Have any of these accusers actually read a religious text, from, ah... pretty much any religion? They're about the messiness of life, and cast in the wrong light they'd all seem exploitative or "unnecessarily lurid." Weird that such a puritanical streak would manifest to strike down a man so willing to ask the Big Questions.
Okay, maybe I should see "Mrs. Miniver"; I forgot Wyler directed it. As for "The Deer Hunter," if you don't see the depiction of those evil insect-like Vietnamese soldiers torturing poor American movie stars as racist, I guess we just have different takes on the film--and possibly on the war as well. At the time the film came out, given what American had just been doing to that country, I thought it was obscene, especially once the movie was handed an Oscar for best behavior. So maybe one could compare Cimino going on to make "Heaven's Gate" afterwards to Griffith making "Intolernace" after "The Birth of a Nation"-- unless you don't see what I mean about Griffith's racism, either.
I'm ready to rethink the issue of Bergman's theatricality, especially after flipping out over my recent reacquaintance with the mise en scene of "Sawdust and Tinsel", which at its best isn't theatrical at all. (Please forgive me, Kyle, for not writing my own review of the three-hour "Fanny and Alexander" just yet.) But I hope some of the bloggers heaping abuse on me might reconsider Bergman's ethics a little as well, at least if they believe it merits some thought. I have more to say on this subject
at http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/film/2007/08/07/memorium-ingmar/#comments
Thanks for continuing the discussion, Jonathan!
Not to get too off-topic, but your comments about "The Deer Hunter" remind me that it's a movie I've been meaning to re-watch for 20-something years.
For those who don't remember, "The Deer Hunter" (1978) was one of the first mainstream American movies after the fall of Saigon (1975) to show combat in Vietnam. In other words, after the war had become unpopular with most voters. (John Wayne had made "The Green Berets" in 1968.) The subject of America's "defeat" in Vietnam (I put it in quotation marks because, like the conflict in Iraq, no war was ever officially declared, and the bloody moral and political quagmire left no "victors") had been considered a very non-commercial one, until "The Deer Hunter" presented it as the subject of a "brave" (longtime Hollywood marketing term), harrowing prestige picture (not unlike what "The Killing Fields" and "Schindler's List" would do with other serious subjects).
The issues of racism and historical inaccuracy were much debated at the time. Again, I'd have to see the movie again to see what it looks like to me now, but while I think it was a movie about xenophobia, I don't know that it was in favor of it. The long wedding scene at the beginning established a community, and the first section of the film ends with the buddies at their local bar hangout toasting each other. Then there's a shocking cut into the chaos of Vietnam. (I confess, this is the only moment of the movie that I seem to recall fairy vividly.) The audience and the characters are plunged into an utterly disorienting (no pun intended) foreign world where they don't understand the first thing about what's going on, who the enemy is, or what they're fighting (for or against). It is the characters' first encounter with The Other, and that's all they see or know about the Vietnamese and Viet Cong.
Of course, the Russian Roulette stuff was an existential metaphor for the American experience in Vietnam (suicidal, random, pointless, nihilistic) -- and you can also argue (many have) that it was an unconscionable distortion of reality, and seemed especially so at the time when there was not much historical or emotional distance from Vietnam.
I certainly don't expect all the movie's fans or detractors to agree with my original reading of the film (I don't know for sure if even I would), but it seemed to me to be a variation on the themes of David Rabe's "Sticks and Bones," where characters named after the family in the classic TV family sitcom "Ozzie and Harriet" encourage their Vietnam-traumatized son into killing himself on the living room rug so that they don't have to be reminded of the horrors of Vietnam.
The toast just before the cut to Vietnam is about pledging to preserve these young men's sense of coummunity. It's repeated at the end as a toast to Christopher Walken's damaged character who basically kills himself to preserve the illusion of that community. They could never admit it, but they were terrified of having this post-traumatic stress reminder back in their midst. Walken couldn't "shake off" what he'd experienced, so (by the militaristic "one shot" code of his hunter-community), he had to sacrifice himself.
That was the way I saw it in 1978-79, anyway...
P.S. I remember "Go Tell the Spartans" (released earlier in 1978) with Burt Lancaster as a fine film about US military "advisors" studying the history (imagine!) of the failed French intervention in Vietnam and seeing that there was no sense in it. If someone had screened it at the White House in 2002... well, OK, it wouldn't have made any difference. They wouldn't have understood it, even if they had allowed themselves to.
I now return you to yo
dm494, it's quite possible to bring theatrical elements to the screen in a cinematic way, but I find that the "theatrical" label is routinely used to imply a lack of cinematic qualities. Maybe I misread JR, but he implied that a theatrical director like Bergman didn't innovate cinematically, like Dreyer and Bresson.
Don't worry, Bob. My mom loves Mrs. Minniver. And while I find it a tad boring, it has some emotional resonance—propaganda doesn't have to be bad. If you want to discredit Oscar counting, why not just play the "Sound of Music" card?
"Okay, maybe I should see "Mrs. Miniver"; I forgot Wyler directed it."
Mr. Rosenbaum, I enjoy your writing style, but I'm not a big fan of criticism based on assumptions and speculation.
If anyone, much less a film critic, says, "I haven't seen it, but it probably sucks," I tend to discount that opinion as completely invalid. I don't think I'm the only one.
Bob, Mrs. Miniver's pieties and class attitudes have dated it rather badly, but I think it has more than historical interest. It was one of those "of the moment pictures" that won the Oscar because it captured the mood. British critics, interestingly enough, hated it for the way Hollywood portrayed the British as having simply no idea war was coming (in 1939!!) and also the unquestioning acceptance of class distinctions. But it has some lovely performances, including Teresa Wright, and brings up some points seen in other WW II films. Like the episode of the wounded German flyer, which poses the question, what do you do with people who have been immersed in fascism? (Same issue comes up in Lifeboat.)
And, in a far more disturbing way, a version of that question--what happens to our opponents after the war?--relates to The Deer Hunter, because it is never even asked. Like a lot of (most?) American movies about Vietnam, we are the ones doing the real suffering, and the Vietnamese only exist as agents of our self-awareness.
Jeremy, there's no question that JR was criticizing Bergman on formal grounds, just as there's no question that "theatrical" is commonly used in film circles as a term of abuse. But I wasn't sure that Rosenbaum wanted us to connect his use of that adjective with his complaints about Bergman's formal shortcomings, and it interested me that eveyone leapt to the conclusion that he did, as if there's no way "theatrical" wasn't meant pejoratively. To me, all this suggests some strange and less than enlightened attitudes towards the theater, ones that connect with the low esteem in which many cinephiles hold the ability (which Bergman clearly had) to direct actors or, for that matter, acting itself. You don't hear people accuse films of being "painterly," although there are plenty of examples of such films (e.g. THE LADY AND THE DUKE, which, incidentally, is also very theatrical).
But I agree with Mr. Rosenbaum that the controversy regarding his criticisms of Bergman's filmmaking has distracted people from addressing his claims about the man's "pinched" emotions. There are some remarks about Bergman's supposed religiosity at the end of Vernon Young's Bergman book, CINEMA BOREALIS, that strike me as quite astute and relevant to that debate.
I was going to pull some examples to demonstrate why I interpreted JR's syntax to relate "theatrical" to "not innovative," but the Times now wants me to pay for the article so I can't. (How's that for a pinched emotion?)
I do remember, however, a paragraph that said Bergman was only interested in theatrical stuff, and therefore didn't innovate with the cinematic form. His talents were devoted to an old art form, JR said, not a new one.
There is much of the theatrical arts that translates to cinema. I grew up with theater, though now I spend much more time with film, my true and more affordable love. However, that doesn't mean that I overlook the critiques implied when a film is called "theatrical." A film can be theatrical and cinematic at the same time, but in the case of JR's piece, the implication was that Bergman wasn't cinematic because he was theatrical. I don't see where a lack of education or appreciation of theater plays into the reading. I know theater critics who complain when movies are too stagey.
Somewhere on this blog or linked to it is a comment about the lack of recent Bergman books. I can’t relocate the comment but will assume I wasn’t hallucinating. First, I agree with the comment that Marc Gervais’ book is mediocre. I think it’s unfortunate that he, of all Bergman experts, was given the enviable job of doing commentary tracks for the PERSONA, HOUR OF THE WOLF, SHAME, PASSION OF ANNA DVDs recently. They’re pretty worthless, sad to say.
There are a number of other books, recently published or about to come out worth mentioning: THE FILMS OF INGMAR BERGMAN (Cambridge Film Classics) by Jesse Kalin (Paperback - Oct 13, 2003) and THE FILMS OF INGMAR BERGMAN: ILLUSIONS OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS by Laura Hubner (Hardcover - May 29, 2007). I just started the latter and it’s quite good. Forthcoming we have: INGMAR BERGMAN, CINEMATIC PHILOSOPHER: REFLECTIONS ON HIS CREATIVITY by Irving Singer and the anthology INGMAR BERGMAN REVISITED: PERFORMANCE, CINEMA AND THE ARTS ed by Maaret Koskinen.
Also, may I put in a plug for GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN THE FILMS OF INGMAR BERGMAN by Marilyn Johns Blackwell (1997). It was published by a “vanity press”—not a good sign, but I think it’s great. It answers many of the feminist criticisms of Bergman made over the years.
Of course the issue of there not being many Bergman books recently is another bogus point to make in an attack on Bergman’s legacy. These things come in cycles, and a new cycle started about two years ago with Bergman, resulting in some very good criticism.
If you're an avid PS3 gamer, then you know the importance of saving your progress for future game play.
Pls, help me!
If you're an avid PS3 gamer, then you know the importance of saving your progress for future game play.
Pls, help me!