Antonioni and Bergman, RIP

[Anton]

Two great film giants, although from what I've heard, neither was on very friendly terms with Welles. Strange coincidence that they would die pretty much one right after the other.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Perhaps Welles didn't much care for Ingmar Bergman when he came across the following quotes from an interview that appeared in the Swedish daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet:

On Orson Welles:

Bergman: For me he's just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of - is all the critics' darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it's a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie's got is absolutely unbelievable.

Question: How about The Magnificent Ambersons?

Bergman: Nah. Also terribly boring. And I've never liked Welles as an actor, because he's not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that's when he croaks. In my eyes, he's an infinitely overrated filmmaker.

_________________

Bergman certainly pulled no punches in this interview. What a harsh evaluation and outright dismissal of Welles' prodigious talents. Bergman had equally nasty things to say about Michelangelo Antonioni, who also happened to be Welles' least favorite film director, whereas Alfred Hitchcock is said to have wanted to emulate Antonioni's "white-on-white" style in his 1967 Frenzy project, which Universal nixed.

[Glenn Anders]

Interesting remark, Harvey, about Welles' opinion of Antonioni.

From seeing some extended footage of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, I would conclude that, on the evidence of scenes from his almost finished movie, J.J. "Jake" Hannaford is attempting to make a trendy art film in the Antonioni style: all those desert planes, steps, screens, and phallic symbols.

If I'm correct, Welles was settling old scores and making final judgments there, too.

Glenn

[Christopher]

I had no idea that Bergman was so negative about Welles and Antonioni. How very sad that the greatest movie directors of our time could not have more respect for one another. A case of professional envy?

[Anton]

From seeing some extended footage of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, I would conclude that, on the evidence of scenes from his almost finished movie, J.J. "Jake" Hannaford is attempting to make a trendy art film in the Antonioni style: all those desert planes, steps, screens, and phallic symbols.

If that's the case, then Welles may have been embarrassed by how quickly the Antonioni style became obsolete in the wake of the Lucas and Spielberg revolution. Like "F For Fake's" take on the Irving/Hughes scandal, Welles's parody of Antonioni would have been a too-late comment on something that was already being forgotten.

[Glenn Anders]

You make an excellent point, Anton, in my opinion.

It's very like the one I tried to make over on my "Welles . . . 'Quietened by his own genius'" thread:

"What is a prophet once his fiery sword becomes deed? What does he have to say? What is left of the paranoid style when all the suspicions come true? Of course, a first rate literary intelligence can eventually meet a world where reality acknowledges the properties of his style by turning them into parody, and in these circumstances, which are DeLillo's with this particular novel, the original novelist may be said to be a person quietened by his own genius. This is another American story -- the story of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles -- and it gives a clue to the weakness of Falling Man."

-- Andrew O'Hagan, reviewing Don DeLillo's novel, Falling Man

Welles, all his life was a visionary, seeing things looming in the future, but his vehicles often looked both forward and back like the Janus, in order to catch the popular imagination.

When he used H.G. Welles' "The War of the Worlds" to comment upon our fears of future war and catastrophe, science had pretty well ruled out the possibility of Little Green Men, at least on Mars. [It would be ironic if the new probe would dig something startling out of that planet's northern ice cap.] And when he inserted his "News on the March" parody into CITIZEN KANE, he was recapitulating his Radio experience, but also riding Time's current newsreel magazine sensation, THE MARCH OF TIME, which was already beginning to lose its appeal -- to such an extent that the short subject would soon become an excuse for a mass smoke break outside many theaters. The documentary scenes from "The Death Camps" shown in THE STRANGER had already been shown in newsreels, but he was the first to use them in a Hollywood feature, suggesting a fascist threat to the American Republic in the Post-War World.

Of course, Welles might have been just shrewd enough, by 1974, to have sized up Antonioni, whose major career was virtually over when he tried to go Hollywood with 1970's ZABRISKIE POINT. Welles' would have made a subtle critique in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND of something the hipper movie audience of the day had already figured out, that Antonioni was a limited artist, and a deadend for anyone trying to emulate his style or ideas.

------

Christopher: It is sad when major artists are petty toward each other in such an ephemeral vehicles as an interview. Bergman, though a great director, was a hard man on himself and everyone around him.

It is to Welles' credit that he made very few cruel judgments of his equals, in public. Remember how he asked Peter Bogdanovich to cut most of his remarks about other directors from the tapes which were the basis for This Is Orson Welles?

He may have held such views, but he was wise enough to limit them for publication. What we remember is his generosity toward other artists, especially older ones, those he had admired in his youth.

Glenn

[purplepines]

I know I read or heard Orson say that he thought the takes were too long in Antonioni films.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Ingmar Bergman on Michelangelo Antonioni: "He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realizing that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don't feel anything for L'Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitta was a terrible actress."

That's rich, Bergman criticizing a film for being too sad. I became clinically depressed after seeing Cries and Whispers in 1972. After that ordeal, I vowed: "No more Bergman! I can get depressed on my own time." I made one exception: The Serpent's Egg, because it starred David Carradine and was set in Berlin in the early 1920s. The Serpent's Egg was probably the closest Bergman came to directing a thriller, albeit a very depressing one.

Bergman's assessment of Antonioni's skills as a filmmaker are more even-tempered than his attack on Welles. At least Bergman is willing to concede that Antonioni made two worthwhile films.

Contributors to this message board are quick to knock Antonioni, but I don't find his work dated at all. Zabriskie Point failed because the attractive (and now forgotten) young leads couldn't carry the picture, although Rod Taylor was good in a supporting role. Zabriskie Point is very much of its time... the work of a man in his late fifties trying to connect with the hippie/free love/anti-consumerism phenomenon of those halcyon days. The Passenger was a return to form for Antonioni, concluding with that astonishingly complicated 7-minute tracking shot... the one that rivals Welles's long take in the opening scenes of Touch of Evil. I saw The Passenger again recently and it was still so modern in conception and execution that it could have been filmed yesterday instead of 32 years ago. The Passenger also featured one of Jack Nicholson's greatest performances, devoid of his usual ingratiating mannerisms. With minimal "overt acting", Nicholson conveys a terminal world-weariness throughout The Passenger, right up until the final scene where he lies down to die in the Spanish hotel room.

[Tony]

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes in the NYT today about how Bergman is overated, and it's Welles, Hitchcock, Godard and Tarkovsky remembered and studied in the schools:

August 4, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Scenes From an Overrated Career
By JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
Chicago

THE first Ingmar Bergman movie I ever saw was “The Magician,” at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in the spring of 1960, when I was 17. The only way I could watch the film this week after the Swedish director’s death was on a remaindered DVD I bought in Paris. Like many of his films, “The Magician” hasn’t been widely available here for ages.

Nearly all the obituaries I’ve read take for granted Mr. Bergman’s stature as one of the uncontestable major figures in cinema — for his serious themes (the loss of religious faith and the waning of relationships), for his expert direction of actors (many of whom, like Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, he introduced and made famous) and for the hard severity of his images. If you Google “Ingmar Bergman” and “great,” you get almost six million hits.

Sometimes, though, the best indication of an artist’s continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about. The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson — two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday.

What Mr. Bergman had that those two masters lacked was the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits, as Dreyer did when constructing his peculiar form of movie space and Bresson did when constructing his peculiar form of movie acting.

The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman’s films go down more easily than theirs — his fluid storytelling and deftness in handling actresses, comparable to the skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor — also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart. What we see is what we get, and what we hear, however well written or dramatic, are things we’re likely to have heard elsewhere.

So where did the outsized reputation of Mr. Bergman come from? At least part of his initial appeal in the ’50s seems tied to the sexiness of his actresses and the more relaxed attitudes about nudity in Sweden; discovering the handsome look of a Bergman film also clearly meant encountering the beauty of Maj-Britt Nilsson and Harriet Andersson. And for younger cinephiles like myself, watching Mr. Bergman’s films at the same time I was first encountering directors like Mr. Godard and Alain Resnais, it was tempting to regard him as a kindred spirit, the vanguard of a Swedish New Wave.

It was a seductive error, but an error nevertheless. The stylistic departures I saw in Mr. Bergman’s ’50s and ’60s features — the silent-movie pastiche in “Sawdust and Tinsel,” the punitive use of magic against a doctor-villain in “The Magician,” the aggressive avant-garde prologue of “Persona” — were actually more functions of his skill and experience as a theater director than a desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new. If the French New Wave addressed a new contemporary world, Mr. Bergman’s talent was mainly devoted to preserving and perpetuating an old one.

Curiously, theater is what claimed most of Mr. Bergman’s genius, but cinema is what claimed most of his reputation. He was drawn again and again to the 19th-century theater of Chekhov, Strindberg and Ibsen — these were his real roots — and based on the testimony of friends who saw some of his stage productions when they traveled to Brooklyn, there’s good reason to believe a comprehensive account of his prodigious theater work, his métier, is long overdue.

We remember the late Michelangelo Antonioni for his mysteriously vacant pockets of time, Andrei Tarkovsky for his elaborately choreographed long takes and Orson Welles for his canted angles and staccato editing. And we remember all three for their deep, multifaceted investments in the modern world — the same world Mr. Bergman seemed perpetually in retreat from.

Mr. Bergman simply used film (and later, video) to translate shadow-plays staged in his mind — relatively private psychodramas about his own relationships with his cast members, and metaphysical speculations that at best condensed the thoughts of a few philosophers rather than expanded them. Riddled with wounds inflicted by Mr. Bergman’s strict Lutheran upbringing and diverse spiritual doubts, these films are at times too self-absorbed to say much about the larger world, limiting the relevance that his champions often claim for them.

Above all, his movies aren’t so much filmic expressions as expressions on film. One of the most striking aspects of the use of digital video in “Saraband,” his last feature, is his seeming contempt for the medium apart from its usefulness as a simple recording device.

Yet what Mr. Bergman was interested in recording was pretty much the same tormented and tortured neurotic resentments, the same spite and even the same cruelty that can be traced back to his work of a half-century ago. Like John Ford, one of Mr. Bergman’s favorite directors — whose taste for silhouettes moving across horizons he shared — he would endlessly reshuffle his reliable troupe of players, his favorite sores and obsessions, like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope.

It’s strange to realize that his bitter and pinched emotions, once they were combined with excellent cinematography and superb acting, could become chic — and revered as emblems of higher purposes in cinema. But these emotions remain ugly ones, no matter how stylishly they might be served up.

Even stranger to me was the way he always resonated with New York audiences. The antiseptic, upscale look of Mr. Bergman’s interiors and his mainly blond, blue-eyed cast members became a brand to be adopted and emulated. (His artfully presented traumas became so respectable they could help to sell espresso in the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Cinema.) Mr. Bergman, famously, not only helped fuel the art-house aspirations of Woody Allen but Mr. Allen’s class aspirations as well — the dual yearnings ultimately becoming so intertwined that they seemed identical.

Despite all the compulsive superlatives offered up this week, Mr. Bergman’s star has faded, maybe because we’ve all grown up a little, as filmgoers and as socially aware adults. It doesn’t diminish his masterful use of extended close-ups or his distinctively theatrical, seemingly homemade cinema to suggest that movies can offer something more complex and challenging. And while Mr. Bergman’s films may have lost much of their pertinence, they will always remain landmarks in the history of taste.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, a film critic for The Chicago Reader, is the author, most recently, of “Discovering Orson Welles.”

[ToddBaesen]

Strange that J. Rosenbaum should put up such a weak argument about Bergman having gone down in influence, or that people should not consider him as being such a great director, especially if he's going to base it on what films of his are available on DVD, or even how much he's discussed in film circles these days. Whether you like Bergman and Antonioni, or not, I don't think you can seriously say they weren't great directors. And the truth is Bergman is extremely well represented on DVD, with most of his major films and a lot of his minor early ones, now out on Criterion or MGM discs.

In fact, in relation to the amount of film's they both made, Bergman is probably much better represented on DVD than Orson Welles is, who still has two major films (FALSTAFF and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS) not available. And compared to Bergman, Rosenbaum's favorite, Jean-Luc Godard is very poorly represented on disc, and these days probably shown and talked about much less than Bergman is in college classrooms.

[tonyw]

Rosenbuam's article has been the subject of intense debate on the yahoo group "A Film By..." which he has participated in. The point he makes is that his article was deliberately provocative and aimed at getting readers of those reverent obituaries to consider whether Bergman was really a cinematic director to the extent that Welles was. JR did exaggerate but the whole point of the article was to dethrone the unqualified reverence to a deceased talent and to articulate what exactly cinema can be capable of. In this regard, both Dreyer and Welles emerge as challenging talents.

[ToddBaesen]

Wow, Jonathan Rosenbaum is really getting flayed over at "A Film by..." If his point is that Bergman was not as cinematic a director as Welles, Bresson, Dreyer etc. he may be right, but it still makes for a very silly argument. To me, Bergman has directed such important "cinematic" gems as WINTER LIGHT, PERSONA, SHAME and FACE TO FACE which speak for themselves, so Bergman will need little defense. Of course he made some poor films as well, but dosen't every great director? It reminds me of the story Jean Cocteau tells in Bazin's book on Welles (that Rosenbaum edited!)

Cocteau and Welles were together at the Venice film festival in 1948 when MACBETH was supposed to be shown. Cocteau and Welles kept hearing statements like, "it's a good film, but it isn't cinematic." Cocteau wrote: "You can imagine how amusing we found this. When interviewed toegether on the radio, Welles and I replied that we should love to know what a cinematic film was and that we asked only to be taught the recipe in order to put it into practice."

[Glenn Anders]

A-Ha! The Antonioni Connection!

Near the beginning of this thread, I repeated what others have observed, that "the film within a film" in TOSOTW appears to resemble the work of the late Michelangelo Antonioni. Not being a fan of the director, I did not single out RED DESERT, but when I think about it, that's the film I must be referring to.

By chance, I received today a communication from the San Francisco Film Society, which contained a link to an interview with Antonioni before a live audience, made by the Society's General Director at the time, Albert Johnson, during the 1968 SF International Film Festival. Antonioni was in America to shoot ZABRISKIE'S POINT. He had flown up to San Francisco to receive an award, and to show a sequence from ECLIPSE.

Antonioni, granting his difficulty with English, appears limited in his outlook, in terms of influences, and very guarded in his replies to questions from the audience. But near the end of the interview, he is asked about his "use" of Richard Harris in RED DESERT. Antonioni rears back, and as politely as possible, criticizes Harris.

He tells us that Harris left the film before shooting for the last third of it was complete. He says that the climactic "love scene in the desert," as it appears in the finished movie, had to be conceived in one night because "Harris was already gone." He estimates that the sequence was composed of "45 -- 47 shots." He invites the audience to examine the sequence again because Harris appears in only seven of them.

No doubt, Orson Welles would have heard of this incident, and it is likely, it seems to me, that he might well have wedded Antonioni's sterile photo style to his own original inspirations from the lives of Hemingway and Director George Stevens in fashioning the "walk out" of Johnny Dale.

There is no need to listen to the entire interview, which is mostly an exercise in evasion, but to hear Antonioni relate the above story in his own words, move the cursor to the end of the half hour conversation. Here is the link:

http://history.sffs.org/media_assets/au ... onioni.mp3

Glenn

[Tony]

Personally, I love Bergman, Welles, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Mizoguchi, etc. etc.

Antonioni's materful quartet, "Laventura", "La notte", "L'eclisse" and "Il Deserto Rosso" I saw at a cinemateque last year for the first time as a quartet, and they blew my mind. For these films alone, Antonioni will be remembered for all time. Actually, for any one of these films, he would be remembered . I know Welles hated him and was spoofing him in TOSOTW, but I still love both filmakers without reservation. In the musical world the fact that Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived blocks away from eachother in Hollywood for years and refused to visit eachother was their loss; I still love them both.

This game of having to reject one artist in order to love another reminds me of rooting for your favourite football team, and always seemed to me to be infantile, not to mention anti-art, even when its artists choosing sides against eachother.

PS: Thanks for that link, Glen: I sat enthralled by every answer of Antonioni's, as was the audience as expressed by the thunderous applause at the end. Much appreciated.

[Glenn Anders]

I appreciate your acknowledgement, Tony.

For me, there was a lot more human frankness and anecdotal material (like the Richard Harris story) that I would have appreciated. Having attended the San Francisco International Film Festival, off and on, for nearly forty years, perhaps I have been spoiled by dozens of on-stage interviews with great directors, which I find the heart of the Festival. So many of them told stories I have never seen in print, stories I've never forgotten. I just found Antonioni dry and academic, whatever his language difficulties.

The speculation I am making about Antonioni and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is simply that Antonioni's anecdote about Harris fits into the plot of TOSOTW, and into Welles' theme, oft demonstrated, about how older, powerful men (tycoons, nazis, American fascists, Shakespearean rulers, European "merchants of death," policemen, the State, master artists, movie directors, etc) attempt to dominate women, society, the weak, the young. Welles' great humanism of spirit is tempered in his main characters, with the exception, perhaps, of Falstaff, by the knowledge that men (like himself?) sacrifice their souls to maintain their power over their own lives and those of others.

Of course, I agree with you, Tony, that it is possible to love both the works of Welles and Antonioni, but that does not mean that we have to love their works equally, nor love each of their works. [I have never seen BLOW UP in a good print or in its entirety. My guess is that Antonioni made a masterpiece there] I admire the work of Bergman, but I like his early pictures a lot more than his later ones. The fact that these gentlemen evidently did not admire one another is sad, but it doesn't change the strengths and weaknesses each was able to display to the World in their films.

No doubt, Welles, Bergman, and Antonioni (to a lesser extent, in my opinion) -- and the others you mention -- were giants of Cinema who bestrode the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's, in roughly that order.

I would hope that Antonioni's remark about Richard Harris might help us to understand better Welles' inspirations in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, which may or may not turn out to be a very great picture.

Glenn