Scorsese on Bergman

This is a wonderful discussion of the greatest director of all time (Bergman) by the greatest film fan and one of the top 50 directors of all time (Scorsese). Really great.

Bergman

Glenn Kenny has an excellent discussion of Ingmar Bergman's The Magician and the snide comments upon Bergman's death that he was now passé.

This past July marked the third anniversary of Bergman's death, and the continuing—as opposed to waning—fact of his stature as a cinematic master makes Jonathan Rosenbaum's new-conventional-wisdom op-ed in the Times in the wake of the filmmaker's death seem even more churlish than had likely been intended. With a "case closed" confidence, Rosenbaum stated,"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." I've never quite gotten over that last bit, which seems to blame Bergman for the scorn straw man Rosenbaum erects. But the more germane self-satisfied faux-"tant pis" occurs earlier in the piece, with Rosenbaum's oh-gee-isn't-that-tough-luck shrug, "Like many of [Bergman's] films, 'The Magician' hasn’t been widely available here for ages." But—ooops!—here's The Magician on DVD, on Criterion no less, in a gorgeous restoration that gives amazing solidity and depth to Gunnar Fischer's black-and-white images—I was practically hypnotized by the steely frames of the eyeglasses worn by  Naima Wifstrand's  crone and Gunnar Björnstrand's inquisitor. And there's a major Bergman retrospective at, which moved Mike D'Angelo in the L.A. Weekly to insist that coming to grips with Bergman is a necessary "rite of passage" for the "budding cinephile." That doesn't sound like much fun, mind you, but it does sound important. "Like almost any other significant, prolific artist," D'Angelo, slightly adopting Rosenbaum's shrug, proclaimed, early in September, "Bergman produced both towering masterpieces and self-indulgent drivel." There's a different kind of confidence at work in that assessment; as much as I might dislike or object to a particular work of Bergman's or a particular aspect of a Bergman work, I've never been sure that I could apprehend it well enough to dismiss it, literally, as drivel; for me in this respect it's a case of not having enough context. Is the monologue on Mozart from Hour of the Wolf, which Bille August later transposed to A Song For Martin, inspired musicological analysis or just something that sounds nice? I can't rightly say. But someday I may learn. Until that point, I believe that we'll continue to keep arguing about, and learning from, the great Ingmar. And, yes, actually enjoying a good deal of his work. As you should definitely do with this really great disc of The Magician. 

Absolutely.

My Favorite Living Director

With Eric Rohmer's sad passing, I've been trying to answer a question--who is my favorite living director? For years it was Ingmar Bergman. Then Eric Rohmer. But now I'm not sure.

I think I have an answer though. Or at least one I can try on for awhile.

I thought about Wong Kar-Wai. But Wong's movies are so wildly inconsistent. For as awesome as In the Mood for Love and 2046 are, My Blueberry Nights was a disaster. I didn't care too much for Ashes of Time. Others are very solid. I just find Wong such a crapshoot that I can't make that commitment.

The Coen Brothers are great, but their output during the 2000s wasn't great, though with a significant recent uptick. I really like the Coen Brothers, but I don't get super excited to find out when their next film is coming out. So I guess I'm not feeling the passion.

Martin Scorsese is always a possibility. But I feel that I've been watching skilled but somewhat impersonal movies from him for years. Obviously, he's one of the all-time greats. But much of that reputation comes from very old work. Bergman on the other hand was making great movies (though proxies to some extent) until the day he died.

Pedro Almodovar is someone I greatly respect. But I only love a couple of his films. So I can't claim he's my favorite.

Farther down on the list we have John Sayles (but when was the last time he made a movie you had to watch? 15 years?) Mike Leigh (love him but also deeply inconsistent), Ken Loach (so many highs, but a lot of lows), Wim Wenders (but he totally fell apart when he came to the U.S.), and others.

But I think I can go with Arnaud Desplechin. I haven't seen his early movies, but that doesn't matter too much. Kings and Queen and A Christmas Tale are both awe-inspiring masterpieces. Kings and Queen was on my decade's top 50 and had I seen A Christmas Tale before I wrote it, it would have been in the top 15. What a fantastic film. I don't think any director created 2 such magnificent pieces of art in the last decade. I am amazed.

So for the time being, I'm going with Arnaud Desplechin as my favorite director. We'll see how this suit fits.

Ingmar Bergman, RIP

I am tremendously sad to read of Ingmar Bergman's death.

For my money, Bergman was the greatest director in the history of cinema. I know he's unfashionable today. He didn't have the cool, postmodern irony that modern cinephiles seem to love. He didn't pioneer hipster violence like his contemporaries in the French New Wave. He didn't play with anything goes sexuality and gender identity like Fellini. His movies could be depressing. He made some pretty gloomy art. There is some good analysis of the disturbing nature of Bergman's decline in stature here.

Who cares. Bergman made films exploring the deepest questions humans have to face. Not only did he mine the emotional hell of his own life for amazing films about relationships like Scenes from a Marriage or the films he wrote but did not direct about his parents, he delved deep into the meaning of life. Bergman grew up as the son of a prominent Lutheran minister in Sweden. Like many Lutherans, Erik Bergman was cold to his son emotionally and this profoundly affected young Ingmar. Bergman soon gave up his father's religion and came to what I think is a deeply honest discovery: the only meaning of life is life.

I think this is key to understanding Bergman's films and is an important key to unlock why so many Americans aren't into him today. Bergman gave up on God. A lot of Americans especially are not so willing to do that. At his best, his work was not a depressing look at existence, but rather a glorious mirror his own understanding of humanity. The next to last scene in The Seventh Seal, which is my favorite film ever made, demonstrates this. The knight is desperate to understand the meaning of life before he dies. But his squire, played excellently by Gunnar Bjornstrand, tells him that his search his hopeless. However, he says, "But feel, to the very end, the triumph of being alive!" The professor in Wild Strawberries realizes this as well. He has been emotionally dead to the world but as he ages, he knows he has wronged others and has not truly lived.

Isn't Bergman really telling us to live. He struggled with the very issues he rejected of course. He couldn't live how he preached either. Take this speech from the knight in The Seventh Seal:

"Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one's senses? Why does he hide in a cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles? How can we believe in the faithful when we lack faith? What will happen to us who want to believe, but can not? What about those who neither want to nor can believe? Why can't I kill God in me? Why does He live on in me in a humiliating way - despite my wanting to evict Him from my heart? Why is He, despite all, a mocking reality I can't be rid of?"

Ingmar Bergman couldn't kill the God inside him. But he dealt with it the best way he knew how, by turning his inner torture into beautiful art.

When my friend died last week, I turned to The Seventh Seal as a way to help myself mourn him and deal with the inevitably and sadness of death, while still being ecstatic at the fact of being alive. Scenes from a Marriage helped me get through a divorce. Tonight, I will watch Cries and Whispers, both because of the way it combines Bergman's themes of death and difficult personal relationships, but also because it is a perfect film to remember Bergman's greatness. The look, the actors, the story, the dialogue.

I will miss never again having the opportunity to watch a new Ingmar Bergman film.