Thoughts On: Bergman and Antonioni

Thoughts On: Bergman and Antonioni

On July 30, 2007 world cinema lost two of its pioneering geniuses. Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, aged 89 and Italian filmmaker Michaelangelo Antonioni, 94 were structurally asymmetrical. One was a Malmo theatre director whose assimilation into the world of film began to fill in his empty summer schedule; the other a journalist turned documentarian and then feature filmmaker.

Yet, in the late fifties and early sixties, the pair separately popularized not only foreign-language cinema in North America in particular, but also imbued the screen with a meditative seriousness the medium had been lacking for decades. Their works eschewed sentiment and entertainment in favour of intellectual dissection and analysis. Bergman filtered his personal angst into films dealing with existential crises between the sexes and God.

A lifelong sufferer of depression, his semi-autobiographical works provided an array of characters tormented by personal pain and anguish often brought upon by self-doubt, mistrust and loneliness. Bar a brief flirtation with the cinematic avant-garde during "conscious cinema" phase of the late sixties and early seventies, Bergman's style was direct, classic and unobtrusive. The pain of morality pressed upon his characters provided the rich substance of his films, unlike Antonioni whose aesthetical interests often outweighed his interest in structured narratives.

Famously Bergman relied on his brilliant cache of talent: repeatedly utilizing a personal repetory company of cast and crew members for his films including Erland Josephson, Liv Ullman, Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson and Gunnar Björnstrand, as well as noted cinematographer Sven Nykvist. Interestingly, despite his admiration for Blow-Up and La Notte, Bergman notably decried Antonioni for making too many "boring" films.

With their snail-like pace and open-ended structures, Antonioni's films were art cinema at their highest definition. As demonstrated in his classic film L'Avventura, Antonioni cared little for orthodox characterization or plot structures. His films emphasized long-takes which were as interested in the visual architecture and topography of the background as much as the characters in the foreground. In Antonioni's world, each minute detail captured through his lens was to represent the empty alienating feelings of his malevolent characters.

The ennui they emitted may have become fodder for critics such as Andrew Sarris to smear all of Antonioni's projects, but they spoke of a world different than Bergman's: a Godless, morally corrupt universe that emphasized the seductiveness of materialism and the reduction of sexual relations to mere instruments of indidivual power politics rather than deep, intimate union. Antonioni was also able to assemble some of cinema's greatest talent in his films including Alain Delon, Jack Nicholson, Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and most famously Monica Vitti.

To the first generation of university-trained film students and their successors, these two men shaped world cinema forever in radically different forms. Figures such as slow-paced Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky found an affinity with Bergman in his Christianity. Fellini called Bergman his "spiritual brother," while Woody Allen frequently utilized Bergman's imagery and ideas during his golden period in comedies such as Love and Death to serious films such as Interiors. Antonioni enabled avant-garde directors such as David Lynch to enjoy successful critical careers by popularizing non-linear, unorthodox cinema along with French directors such as Jean-Luc Godard.

Individually Bergman and Antonioni shaped new paths for cinema, while jointly bringing about a change in the academic deconstruction and intellectual appearance and content of cinema. Together they shall be equally missed.

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque