Obituaries

Ingmar Bergman Passes Away

What can I say. We all mourn for the passing of a true great.

Ingmar Bergman, the master filmmaker who found bleakness and despair as well as comedy and hope in his indelible explorations of the human condition, died today at his home on the island of Faro, off the Baltic coast of Sweden. He was 89.

His death was announced by the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.

Mr. Bergman was widely considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history. For much of the second half of the 20th century, he stood with directors like Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa at the pinnacle of serious filmmaking.

He moved from the comic romp of lovers in “Smiles of a Summer Night” in 1955 to the Crusader’s death-haunted search for God in “The Seventh Seal” in 1957; from the harrowing portrayal of fatal illness in “Cries and Whispers” in 1972 to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life a decade later in “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love. In his films, “this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory at best,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times Magazine in a 1983 profile of the director. God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires.

For many filmgoers and critics, it was Mr. Bergman more than any other director who brought a new seriousness to filmmaking in the 1950s.

“Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics — religion, death, existentialism — to the screen,” Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, said. “But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.”

He influenced many other filmmakers, including Woody Allen, who once called Mr. Bergman “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

Mr. Bergman made about 50 films over more than 40 years. He centered his work on two great themes — the relationship between the sexes and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in film, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.”

In a Bergman film, the mind is constantly seeking, constantly inquiring, constantly puzzled.

Mr. Bergman often acknowledged that his work was autobiographical, but only “in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.”

Way back when, when I was in the last days of being a largely unsuccessful medical student, I was dragged out to see a couple of art house films. One of them was 'Last Year In Marienbad' which left quite an impression, but the other was a more insidious mind-warp of a film called 'The Ritual', which was by Ingmar Bergman. I guess it was one of those nights that auger for one's future because by the same time next year I was studying film production at North Sydney TAFE.

During that time I would hang out a lot at Jeronimus' place and watch late-night films on SBS and of course one of the films I watched was 'The Virgin Spring' which s based on a Swedish saga. I kind of digested it without thinking about it too much, but of course, the key symbolism of the Crow and Odin and the pagan stuff stayed in my head. When I went to apply to the Australian Film Television and Radio School and got an interview, they showed me the first 10minutes of 'The Virgin Spring' and asked me to analyse it. Of course, being a bit of a Norse Saga buff as well as a Bergman buff I was able to bullshit my way into convincing them I knew *all about it*, which is always what you want to do in interviews.
So in a sense Bergman and his films not only pointed me towards Film, he helped me walk right into AFTRS.

At Film School, I read 'Bergman on Bergman', which was probably the most important interview book I read with regards to directing. In it he is asked about semiotic theory and how it applies to his films and he dismisses it quite harshly. In the interview he says the theory means nothing to him and bears no relationship to film-making. It wwas clear that Bergman wanted to draw a definite line between critical thought/practice and film-making thought/practice. Being in an institution that constantly wanted to blur the one into the other, it was the most revealing exchange. To this day, I value critical theory, but I have directed with full knowledge that directing theory is another thing altogether. And for that I thank Ingmar Bergman.

Even if weren't for any of that, then there is this image from 'The Seventh Seal' which we will always have:

Max Von Sydow playing chess with death in an attempt to prolong his life, and see out his journey home. The image reaches out to us from the recesses of Medieval consciousness. This isn't a showy explanation like 'Name of The Rose', this is the image itself, made to move. The rawness of that formation is still there when I see it, even with the symmetrical formal composition, the image bleeds with a passion rarely seen in cinema these days.

Michelangelo Antonioni Passes Away Too

Not to be outdone, the equally monolithic art-house director of the 1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni has died.

Tall, cerebral and serious, Mr. Antonioni, like Mr. Bergman, rose to prominence at a time, in midcentury, when filmgoing was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films set off long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cinephiles demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.

Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blowup,” a 1966 drama set in swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that a picture he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, obscured in the background, evidence of a murder.

But Mr. Antonioni’s lasting contribution to film came earlier, in “L’Avventura” (1960), “La Notte” (1961) and “L’Eclisse” (1962), a trilogy that explored his tormented central vision that people had become emotionally unglued from one another.

It was a vision expressed near the end of “La Notte,” when his frequent star Monica Vitti observes, “Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

In a generation of rule breakers, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most subversive and venerated. He challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for conventions like plot, pacing and clarity. He raised questions and never answered them, had his characters act in self-destructive ways and failed to explain why, and sometimes kept the camera rolling after a take in the hope of catching the actors in an unscripted but revealing moment.

It was all part of his design. As he explained, “The after-effects of an emotion scene, it had occurred to me, might have meaning, too, both on the actor and on the psychological advancement of the character.”

Until VHS came along, one of the hardest films to get to see was 'Zabriskie Point'. I didn't get to see it until I was actually a student at AFTRS. I still can't tell you for certain what it was about except it featured music by Pink Floyd, which was the original motivation to watch the damned thing.

These idiosyncratic directors like Antonioni, Resnais, Godard have left a legacy of the enigmatic Art House film, and the sad part is that because of the way the film industry is now structured , we may never see such things again.
Or perhaps not? Certainly there is great scope and promise in digital cameras - but as we are finding out each day the means of distribution has replaced the meas of production as the big bottleneck for films to reach out to the world.

The films of Antonioni promise agreat deal of potential in cinema itself. Films being films, motion pictures is given a great sense of meaning in his films such as 'Blow Up'. Sometimes you would see his shots and wonder what the hell was going on on set. Other times, you would be struck by the sublime quality of the shot or performance. It's still a mixed-bag of experiences when I reflect upon his films, but one thing is clear. They are totally unlike the completely stage-managed experiences provided by the cinema today.

At the ed of all this reflection I can only say that Antonioni looms larger today than he did 15-20 years ago, partly because there are so many munchkins posing as giants in the cinema today. All in all, his was a most mysterious, perplexing, challenging body of work.