Alternative Film Guide

Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman in "The Man Who Asked Hard Questions" in the New York Times:

"I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you. No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the end of The Seventh Seal. And so, on a summer’s day in July, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.

"I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life. This would have given him roughly 60 more birthdays to go on making movies; a remarkable creative output. And there’s no doubt in my mind that’s how he would have used the extra time, doing the one thing he loved above all else, turning out films."

Martin Scorsese on Michelangelo Antonioni

Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni NEW YORK TIMES Article

Defending Bergman and Antonioni

FANNY AND ALEXANDER

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

SHAME

Liv Ullmann’s New Film Project

Michel Serrault

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