Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni NEW YORK TIMES Article
A.O. Scott discusses Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in the New York Times:
"By the time I entered my own phase of undergraduate cinephilia … [in the mid-1980s], Mr. Bergman’s greatness was beyond dispute, and Mr. Antonioni’s reputation was only slightly less secure. The two of them — along with the other masters whose work had defined, from the mid-’50s through the late ’60s, a golden age of high-brow movie love — were pillars in the pantheon, canonical figures toward whom the only acceptable posture was one of veneration. They were discussed in seminar rooms, dissected in honors theses and ritualistically projected in darkened dining halls by the more serious of the campus film societies.
"This was truer of Mr. Bergman than of Mr. Antonioni, some of whose later works still carried a frisson of countercultural daring and disrepute: the desert orgy at the end of Zabriskie Point; the rock ‘n’ roll in Blowup; Jack Nicholson in The Passenger. But with both directors, the impulse that brought you to their movies was less likely to be aesthetic ardor than a sense of cultural duty or historical curiosity. This was true even though both continued to make films. Your appreciation of Fanny and Alexander or Identification of a Woman rested on the understanding that these were late works and that their authors belonged definitively to an earlier era."
What I find interesting about Scott’s article — and about most discussions of both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni — is that essayists ignore the fact that the real early work of both directors was actually quite accessible and remarkably different than their mid-career output. Bergman’s first film wasn’t The Seventh Seal. Antonioni’s wasn’t L’Avventura, or even Il Grido.
Check out It Rains on Our Love or Night Is My Future and you’ll get a very different Bergman than the one responsible for Wild Strawberries and The Virgin Spring. Antonioni’s Le Amiche is pure melodrama — highly effective melodrama, mind you, but melodrama nonetheless, and universes away from La Notte or Blowup.
(As an aside … I certainly wouldn’t classify either Blowup or Zabriskie Point — both of which, by the way, were made at the height of the counterculture movement — as "later works.")
Whether or not you like Roger Ebert, his essays on Bergman (here) and Antonioni (here) are very much worth reading.
UCLA’s International Preservation 2007 Series
Claude Miller’s UN SECRET to Close 2007 Montreal World Film Festival
Janus Films’ “Essential Art House” DVD Collection
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