Film: Before Them, Films Were Just Movies

(Note: This article will appear in this Sundays Arts & Leisure section.)

BY an awful and uncanny coincidence — the kind of occurrence that, in a movie, would have to be taken as symbolic lest it seem altogether preposterous — Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died on the same day. Since Mr. Bergman was 89 and Mr. Antonioni 94, neither mans death came as much of a shock, but the simultaneity was startling. Not only because they were both great filmmakers, but more because, in their prime, Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Bergman were seen as the twin embodiments of the idea that a filmmaker could be, without qualification or compromise, a great artist.

Not that everyone agreed or saw them both in equally glowing light. There will always be those who scoff at the idea of cinema as a form of art. And those who do embrace the notion have always been notoriously prone to quarrel and dissension. In Anticipation of La Notte, for instance, his touching, self-aware memoir of youthful cinephilia, Philip Lopate recalls being part of an undergraduate claque of film buffs in the early 1960s who worshiped Mr. Antonioni and disdained Mr. Bergman.

The title of Mr. Lopates essay records a giddy state of waiting for Mr. Antonionis sequel to LAvventura — before he went to see it on opening night, the author recalls, I began dreaming, for several nights in a row, preview versions of La Notte. It seems that he experienced no such ecstasy at the prospect of Mr. Bergmans Virgin Spring. (Not that ecstasy would necessarily be an appropriate response to that bleak, brutal film about rape and revenge in medieval Sweden.) Mr. Bergman was, as far as Mr. Lopate and his friends were concerned, the darling of the suburbs.

I once debated a fellow student for six hours, he remembers, because he called The Seventh Seal a great movie.

That argument ended long ago. Mr. Lopate, as his youthful ardor cooled and his critical sensibility matured, was able to see some of Mr. Bergmans virtues as well as Mr. Antonionis limitations. By the time I entered my own phase of undergraduate cinephilia, about a quarter-century later, Mr. Bergmans greatness was beyond dispute, and Mr. Antonionis 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.

Which is not to say that a passionate response to some of their earlier films — that feeling of profound disturbance, of being overpowered and rendered speechless that can signal the presence of genuine art — was out of the question. It did not always come easily, though. The institutions that keep art alive do so at the risk of embalming it. For generations that were not part of the great cinephile vanguard of the 50s and 60s, for those of us who grew up in the drab age in between the flourishing of the art houses and the rise of the Criterion Collection, the masterworks of modern cinema had lost their novelty. Their assaultive energies were ensnared in a version of the paradox identified by Lionel Trilling in his great essay On the Teaching of Modern Literature, first published in 1961, the year after Mr. Lopate dreamed of La Notte.

Time has the effect of seeming to quiet the work of art, Mr. Trilling observed, domesticating it and making it into a classic, which is often another way of saying that it is an object of merely habitual regard. University study of the right sort can reverse this process and restore to the old work its freshness and force — can, indeed, disclose unguessed-at power. But with the works of art of our own present age, university study tends to accelerate the process by which the radical and subversive work becomes the classic work.

The particular works Trilling had in mind were the (to him) still-fresh monuments of literary modernism, writings by the likes of Joyce, Eliot, Kafka and Yeats whose difficulty was not merely formal, but also, to use a word much in vogue at the time, existential. Their radicalism seemed to dwell in the challenge they posed to reflexive assumptions about society, consciousness, being and time.

Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Bergman, for their parts, were the supreme modernists of world cinema. Mr. Antonioni helped to push Italian film beyond realism, infusing landscapes with psychological rather than social meaning and turning eroticism from a romantic into a metaphysical pursuit. Mr. Bergman, heir to a Nordic strain of modernism represented by Strindberg and Ibsen, developed a film language dense with psychological symbolism and submerged emotion. The two of them upheld, as filmmakers, T. S. Eliots observation that poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. LAvventura and The Seventh Seal, though they have little else in common (apart from exquisite black-and-white cinematography, courtesy of Aldo Scavarda and Gunnar Fischer), are both hard to watch. Not because the content or the imagery is upsetting, but because they never allow the viewer to relax into a conditioned expectation of what will happen next or an easy recognition of what it means.

There was, among certain filmgoers in the 1960s, an appetite for difficulty, a conviction that symbolic obscurity and psychological alienation were authentic responses to the state of the world. More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value — that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure — enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is almost unimaginable today. We would rather be teased than troubled, and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness.

Given all that, it may be hard for someone who wasnt there — who never knew a film culture in which La Notte didnt already exist — to quite appreciate the heroic status conferred on Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Bergman 40 years ago. I dont believe that the art of filmmaking has necessarily declined since then (Id quit my job if I did), but it seems clear the cultural climate that made it possible to hail filmmakers as supreme artists has vanished for good. All thats left are the films.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?