With the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman coming on the same day, the sense of an era of film forcefully, violently coming to a close (if it hadn’t already ended) is only heightened. No discussion about the “Golden Age” of art cinema, and especially art cinema in this country, is complete without mentioning Antonioni, one of the foremost directors of that much-idealized moment which found Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa jostling for screen space. Not nearly as prolific as Bergman, but equally as important in his efforts to tie the images employed in narrative filmmaking to a new symbolic order, Antonioni remains perhaps the most stubbornly “difficult” of the bunch, or at least the one whose films consistently defy the satisfaction of successful interpretation; one can imagine the firestorm of dinner conversation sparked by the mimed tennis match that closed Blow-Up. That sequence may now be considered somewhat passé, even pretentious, but when was the last time a film has sparked widespread debate about “meaning”? (Debating the identity of Kaiser Soze doesn’t count.)
His major works, almost willfully obtuse and given to frustrating narrative lapses, detours into dead space, and flirtations with the overtly surreal probably had about as much impact on me as those of Bergman did on my compatriot Michael. Red Desert seemed a transmission from another planet, full of unfamiliar languages and vistas; L’avventura was unmistakably earthbound, yet proffered a vision of our world gone musty with rot. I first caught glimpses of Zabriskie Point via a highlight reel which accompanied the presentation of his lifetime achievement Academy Award and was immediately curious as to what turn of events might prompt its famous hillside explosion. I couldn’t have been more surprised to discover that the film made answers to this query far from obvious, and that the same vision also held room for hundreds of naked bodies writhing in desert sand. (Most surprising of all may have been finding the echoes of a filmmaker so unfashionable today fully enmeshed in enfant terrible Bruno Dumont’s terrific Twentynine Palms.)
Antonioni’s cinema remained a doggedly pessimistic animal almost throughout. The only glimpses of positivity around human interaction in his films that I can readily recall comes in the mushy, wistful, late-period, Beyond the Clouds—Sophie Marceau fresh from bedding John Malkovich(!), shares a smile with herself as she walks back from the window where her mysterious lover recently bade her adieu. More typical was the architectural apocalypse of L’eclisse, which inexorably ground its characters into minority positions in forbidding landscapes until the film’s closing montage found humanity eradicated entirely.
Michelangelo Antonioni began his career as a documentary filmmaker in the aftermath of World War II, producing short commissioned works about the mundane—street cleaning in Rome, superstitions held among rural folk in Southern Italy. Who knows how much of this material survives, or if it will ever be made readily available, but it’d be fascinating to dissect in search of elements of his mature style. For all the ellipses in his narratives and baroque play with colors, his camera always seemed interested in catching events as they unfolded, by The Passenger’s landmark final shot providing direct documentary evidence of the filmmaker’s intensely choreographed cinematography. And there may be no filmmaker more attuned to the complexities of architectural space, except, perhaps, Tati who exhibited a similar, if more whimsical nervousness in the face of the explosion of modernist structures in the post-War period. Antonioni’s sixties films exist as a virtual catalogue of the physical changes Italy underwent as it repaired wartime destruction.
Unlike some of his compatriots of sixties art cinema, Antonioni turned his success in Italy into a ticket abroad, spending the decade following Red Desert making films, probably his wildest, most controversial, and most problematic outside of Italy. The idea of a filmmaker like Antonioni being pitched as a globetrotting “hot” filmmaking property seems almost quaint these days, but in 1970 no one probably batted an eyelash when MGM signed on for Zabriskie and stepped up again five years later for The Passenger. The trajectory from The Story of a Love Affair and The Lady Without Camellias to these later films isn’t direct, but even in his more “neo-realist” early films, there’s still a strangeness, a distance between the camera and his actors, that interest in plumbing grand landscapes. The turning point would be Il Grido, and after that, his famous trilogy fully staked out his focus on playing with narrative so as to obliquely capture the state of humanity, relationships, and Italy.
His last filmed work was his entry in the omnibus erotic film Eros, and it, for a brief few moments, conjures up the sense of mystery that marked his best films. He was hobbled by a paralyzing stroke in 1985, and it’s simply amazing he was able to keep working at all, much less produce a feature and a few shorts. Quibble with Beyond the Clouds all you like, but I’m as grateful for its existence as I am for all of Antonioni’s films. Perhaps more than any other, he’s the filmmaker who taught me not to fear the unknown in my viewing, demanding (successfully in my case), that expectations be left beyond the bounds of the frame, and that satisfaction be found not in conclusions or answers, but via ever-compounding and multiplying questions and ambiguities.
Being a part-time blogger in the maddeningly fast-paced world of contemporary film criticism, in which instant responses are not only encouraged but now expected, I naturally scrambled early this morning to put together my thoughts regarding the death of Ingmar Bergman. He’s always been such a mainstay in my film education (a.k.a., my life) that his passing strikes me as profoundly sad, even if the man himself reportedly had stated many times that he was more than ready for it. The thought of assembling a quick tribute to a man so integral to my thought processes as a film watcher is daunting to say the least, so when indieWIRE contacted me to ask if I would like to write an appreciation, the answer was a momentarily reluctant, then emphatically positive yes. All I truly want to is shout from the rafters my love for Bergman, so coherent sentences seem a tall order. Nevertheless here goes.
The Start of a Journey: An Appreciation of Ingmar Bergman
I firmly believe that I can credit Ingmar Bergman with my understanding and appreciation of cinema as an art form. Looking back on my life, there have been distinct stages to my growing awareness of film as something more than entertainment, more than narrative, more than itself—in childhood, Fantasia clued me in to the essentials: sound plus image; in preadolescence, 2001: A Space Odyssey forced me to acknowledge that storytelling needn’t be cinema’s ultimate goal, and that the unknown is far more pleasurable than what’s understood; and in adolescence, when I began to crave even stronger stuff, there was Ingmar Bergman, whose provocatively titled, in-every-way foreign films lined the shelves of my local public library. Growing up suburban, I had no choice but to first witness all classic films in full-framed videotape, with resolutely unrestored transfer and sound, yet this hardly demystified the experience of discovering these new forms of cinema (that were sometimes as “new” as forty years old). Askew images stared back from the boxes, and in the case of The Seventh Seal‘s death figure, literally beckoned me.
Calling Ousmane Sembene merely Africa’s greatest filmmaker is to do disservice to one of world cinema’s finest practitioners and pioneers. With merely nine features and a handful of shorts left behind after a forty year career, the case for canonization might seem thin, but only for the uninitiated. That he started a cinema where there was none largely from scratch is an accomplishment worthy of a place in the history books on its own. But anyone who’s tracked his growth as an artist and social commentator across those nine unique features are more than aware of how the Nouvelle Vague-ish bent of first feature La Noire de… (which carefully, and perhaps more skillfully, probed the same post-colonial legacy Godard was contemporaneously wrestling with back in France) gave way over the course of its brief sixty-six minutes to indelible closing shots in which the repressed literally returned to the fore.
These closing images would reverberate throughout Sembene’s career as he attempted to crack the problem of updating African storytelling traditions (especially that of the Griot) and customs to his modern medium. As if creating an entirely new cinematic language (while also making the first films in Senegal’s native Wolof) weren’t enough of a political project, surrounded as he was by poverty, the ravages left by imperialism and the encroachment of soft colonial power, he also took it upon himself to chronicle and satirize his nation’s myriad ills. His early features Mandabi, Emitai, and Xala, rough-hewn all, represent a devastating batch of critiques in which Sembene berates respectively: the backwardness and corruption marring the newly freed Senegal, the tribal male indecision that helped abet the colonial state, and contemporary politicians who’ve turned their backs on tradition in favor of slavishly aping the customs of the West. His past-present approach across these films straddles a fine line; he’s never equivocating, merely trying to navigate complicated waters and put forward a comprehensive road map for the future of Senegal.
For me, his masterpiece remains the 1977 period drama Ceddo which fuses his core concerns into his most compelling narrative all coupled with simple but rich production design. Its story of kidnapped princess and internecine warfare is a world unto its own, but given that we’re dealing with a most political of filmmakers, its distant history concerning the introduction of Islam to Africa sends out a clarion call to the present moment: beware of interlopers.
His most famous works are probably his final three features: Guelwaar, Faat-Kiné and Mooladé, all of which find tradition and modernity crashing headlong into each other, and in the latter two, washing up at the feet of indomitable femininity. All three represent the maturation of his storytelling—the forced awkwardness of early attempts at re-structuring conversation cinematically (and Sembene’s characters almost never lack for words) has given way to a comfortable often joyous ease. Nothing feels quite like a Sembene film, and it’s hard to put a finger on what exactly that means except by saying that more often than not, he’s placed his camera somewhere unexpected and pointed it at something or someone you wouldn’t anticipate. One should expect a fair bit of humor as well. Unfortunately we won’t be able to experience the pleasure of re-discovering cinema through new Sembene films, but his unique vision is slowly starting to make its way to DVD. If you’re not familiar, you’ve got some homework to do.
The news of the death of another essential American film artist got somewhat washed away by all the tears for Robert Altman: Betty Comden, who along with Adolph Green (who died in 2002), formed the dynamic duo that penned a series of Broadway shows and then MGM musicals (as well as such songs as “Make Someone Happy” and “Just in Time”), died on Thanksgiving, in New York City, at age 89. In addition to the exemplary wit and timing the duo displayed in their writing for such Freed Unit films as The Band Wagon and On the Town, Comden and Green contributed what might be the best comic screenplay of the Fifties to, of course, Singin’ in the Rain. When the list of those responsible for Singin’’s sheer genius unspools, often their contributions are named somewhere below Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Donald O’ Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, and even Cyd Charisse. Yet where their other musicals of the era, such as Band Wagon and It’s Always Fair Weather, may have displayed similarly impressive acrobatics and devil-may-care, almost anti-authoritarian flouncing of strict cause-and-effect genre rules, Singin’ remains the most tightly focused, quickest, and slyest of all.
For each of the moments often, and legitimately, sighted as the film’s highlights (O’ Connor’s rubber-faced, spaghetti-limbed “Make ‘Em Laugh” routine, the showstopper of all time; Kelly and Charisse’s gravity-defying dream ballet; Jean Hagen’s nasally obnoxious brilliance in, well, every scene she’s in) there is another, equally dazzling passage, direct from the screenplay: the ingenious opening ten minutes at the red carpet premiere (“Dignity, always dignity”), a textbook example of brilliant narrational irony, in which all of pompous star Don Lockwood’s self-aggrandizements are countered onscreen by the more truthful flashbacks; Don and Cathy Selden’s first, fortuitous, drop-in meeting, a rapid-fire exchange of wits so full of hidden flirtation and ego deflation it puts to shame most of Hepburn and Tracy’s shtick; any of Hagen’s self-centered, idiotic rants (“Well, I can’t make love to a bush!”), as delightfully deluded as any of Jennifer Coolidge’s elaborate dum-dum routines in the Christopher Guest films. Yes, Singin’ in the Rain is unthinkable without its actors’ exuberance, its nonstop Technicolor eye candy, and its roster of standard tunes, but the film remains so much more than a gleeful toe-tapper to this day because of its bullet-paced, forthright plunge into the grandiose, egomaniacal zeal of Hollywood. I’ll take Comden and Green’s bedazzling cynicism over any concurrent Billy Wilder frolic any day of the week.
Robert Altman has died today at age 81, and it’s hit me hard. Having heard him speak just a few months ago at the Museum of the Moving Image after a special screening of Kansas City and to promote the imminent opening of his wonderful A Prairie Home Companion , I can say that Altman seemed vibrant: perhaps frailer or slower moving than in the past, but sharp, wonderfully targeted as ever to the day’s hypocrisies, wise about his career, the industry, his own legacy, and always, always, always the modest man and artist. Even if he wouldn’t have it, we would call him something of a genius: his genius lay in his ability to let his cast riff, sparkle, shine, and flutter, and in his own refreshing inability see how exacting his camera was in allowing them to accomplish this.
How fitting that his wonderful Prairie Home was his unintended swan song—as he said, gloriously, touchingly, back in May, about the film: “Everybody dies. But they sing. And they’re happy.” Even without Altman’s sudden death, that’s a statement I would never have been able to shake. Altman’s passing, which was hopefully as simple and resigned as his final film, does not simply signify the passing of an earlier generation of filmmaking: were it that easy. The fact is, irrefutably, A Prairie Home Companion is one of the very finest, freshest, most pragmatically emotional films of this year, a jewel in a particularly muddy sea, putting to shame the works of whatever trendy indie filmmakers or foreign film darlings put forth recently—we’re not just losing one of the all-time greats; we’re losing one of the best working contemporary artists.
“The death of an old man is not a tragedy,” says the lovely, ethereal angel of death Virginia Madsen in Prairie Home. That’s a tough idea to swallow today, but maybe we can all take comfort in the fact that it was one of Altman’s last statements. I feel it’s too soon to expound on his entire, worthy career, so I’ll just leave us with some images from my very favorite films of his.
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