Bergman: The Last of the Great Ones


Liv and IngmarIn the past twenty years or so the last of the great twentieth century writers passed away: Samuel Beckett, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jorge Luis Borges. They haven’t been replaced, and they won’t be replaced.

Now the last of the great masters of cinema is gone. There are still some fine movie makers around, but I don’t think that Coppola or Scorsese or even the one possible remaining master, Claude Chabrol, would dream of putting themselves in Ingmar Bergman’s league.

There was no one else in Ingmar Bergman’s league.

Every great artist creates his own league, his own genre. There is only one Dostoyevsky. Another writer might have Dostoyevskyan tendencies or ambitions, but there’s only one Dostoyevsky, just as there is only one Tolstoy, one Flaubert, one Proust. Cinema had a Fellini, an Antonioni, a Kurosawa; and Bergman.

When I think of Bergman’s movies (besides thinking of the the obvious: the grimness, the sadness, the lack of sentimentality) I think of one thing: truth. In the best of movies there are always moments that strike me as forced, as not real, as not true. I don’t remember ever seeing one of these false moments in a Bergman movie. You might feel drained after the movie, you might never want to watch another Bergman for ten years, if ever, but you don’t feel you’ve been talked down to. You haven’t been lied to.

I’ve written before somewhere about how I love the documentary Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, directed by Vilgot Sjöman. My favorite part shows Bergman joking and laughing with the great actor Gunnar Björnstrand on the set while the next shot is being set up. The shot is ready, Bergman and Björnstrand get serious, they shoot the take with utter concentration, Bergman intent on the actor, the actor perfectly in the moment. Cut. If there was some little thing wrong, either with camera placement or lighting or actorly “business”, Bergman makes the adjustment, and does another take. When the shot is as true as he can make it, it’s cut and print. Then back to the joking and the camaraderie of the set. I just felt privileged to watch this world of creation.

Bergman always stayed true, he never let himself or his audience off easily. His final film, from a few years ago, Saraband, was as uncompromising as anything he ever did.

There’s never been a better movie about childhood and about magic than Fanny and Alexander. There’s never been a better movie about men and women and what they do to each other than Scenes From a Marriage.

There was never a film maker like Bergman before Bergman, and there will never be one again, and that’s all right.

Somewhere there’s a young man or woman who is going to take some digital equipment and gather some dedicated actors and technicians and he or she is going to make a film as brilliant in its own way as Persona, or The Seven Samurai, or I Vitelloni.

And that young movie maker will invent a genre whose name will be the name of that young artist.

And that’s as it should be.

(Slight return:)

As mentioned in the comments below, when I wrote the above I wasn’t aware that Michelangelo Antonioni was still alive at the time of Bergman’s death, and then he went and passed away later the very same day. So you could say that Bergman was the next-to-the-last of the great ones. But as Weepingsam and other commenters have pointed out, more than a few film makers survive who could easily be counted as great.

In another article I mentioned that odd time in American film-making, when Coppola and Scorsese were in their heyday, when people who somehow later fell to the wayside like Jerry Schatzberg and Bob Rafelson and Peter Bogdanovich were able to make movies like Scarecrow and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show, when a young actor-director like Jack Nicholson could make a novelistic piece like Drive, He Said. And what a period for actors: Pacino, Hoffman, DeNiro, Hackman, and Nicholson.

Antonioni’s passing made me think of another time, in Italian movies: how strange and how great that I Vitelloni, La Strada, 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura, La Notte, Rocco and His Brothers, Divorce Italian Style, Two Women — just naming some personal favorites, and please add your own — all came out within ten years of each other. It’s as boggling and as wonderful as the fact that Proust and Joyce and Kafka once all walked the earth at the same time.

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July 31st, 2007
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Viewing 11 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    "Has Oshima made anything since Taboo?"

    I think he had a serious stroke in the early 00s, and has been in very bad health... it's notable how many of the filmmakers of that generation, in their late 70s and 80s, are still active - Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Marker - all putting out films in the last year or two... de Oliveira keeps them coming; Kon Ichikawa, well into his 90s, is still making films...
    • ^
    • v
    "Smiles Of A Summer Night" is the Bergman for me. Also: "Shame," "Monika," "Persona" and probably "The Silence" But there is also alot of things that seem stilted or dated ("The Seventh Seal," the death/nightmare imagery in "Wild Strawberries," and "The Hour Of The Wolf")or needlessly pious.
    I agree with weepingsam: Hou, Lynch are still young enough to break new forms/modes, Marker's always in search of a subject, and maybe DeOlivera can live to 150. (Has Oshima made anything since Taboo?)
    • ^
    • v
    Here's a little grenade thrown into this breast fondling fest.

    Saw Autumn Sonata when it first came out and despised it so much I refused to see another Bergman film except by accident. Kinda like getting sick the first time you drink some putrid alcohol when you're a kid and swear off that flavor the rest of your life.

    Probably the first "art" film I saw and did not like its effect. The only word I remember to describe it was "manipulative".

    From the little I know about the guy he seemed to be honest to himself, that's achievement.
    • ^
    • v
    Saw Autumn Sonata when it first came out and despised it so much I refused to see another Bergman film except by accident. Kinda like getting sick the first time you drink some putrid alcohol when you're a kid and swear off that flavor the rest of your life.

    Probably the first "art" film I saw and I did not like its effect. The only word I remember to describe it was "manipulative".
    • ^
    • v
    I was much more sorry to hear about the passing of Antonioni. He was so much more fun than Bergman, IMHO.
    What could be sexier than Blow Up? What could be dreamier than The Passenger?
    But I agree with Weepingsam --these old guys were great, but there are lots more to take their place.
    • ^
    • v
    I have to take exception to the idea that Bergman was the "last of the great ones" though. He was certainly great (as was Antonioni), and artists of that caliber are unique - but they were not the only filmmakers of that quality, by a long shot. Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, Oshima, Herzog - they're every one as thrilling and powerful, and influential and historically important as Antonioni or Bergman. And those are just my favorites - a similar case could be probably be made for Resnais, Marker, Chabrol, Wiseman, de Oliveira, at least... a magnificent crop of filmmakers emerged between 1945-60.... And the generation after that - Lynch and Hou and Kiarostami and Scorsese, etc, - has a nice body of work as well...
    • ^
    • v
    I saw that Antonioni died as well. When I was younger, Bergman was it for me. As I get older, the Italians, Fellini and Antonioni are who I end up watching more. Still, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, The Silence, Persona and The Hour of the Wolf are endlessly re-watchable to me.
    As for the future, David Lynch lives in the same part of my brain as all the aforementioned artists.
    • ^
    • v
    And now I just discovered that Michelangelo Antonioni has died; when I wrote the above piece I thought that he already had passed away, and then it turns out he died later on the same day as Bergman. Well, I'll leave it to others to write about Antonioni, although I will say that La Notte is an amazing movie.

    New great artists will step up. They always do.
    • ^
    • v
    Hear, hear. Great movies like great books require a little work. It takes two to dance.
    That's one way art works. The artist creates a rhythm, a story, a world, and will eagerly lead you through it. One wrong step or even a misplaced emphasis from the artist and the whole show either tumbles or stumbles. But the partner needs to pay attention, and really be up and ready to go with the flow.
    And while I rarely enjoyed Bergman's movies, and I don't think the truth, which I recognized, threw me off, he was more than brilliant. His dances are rich and complex and we're lucky to have them.
    • ^
    • v
    Maybe the 20th century is now well and truly over.

    The 21st is shaping up to be just as problematic and we go into it without any artists of this caliber to help us, in their various ways, with understanding, or knowledge, or solace.

    That is, I don't see anybody stepping up.
    • ^
    • v
    I'm glad you mentioned "truth" first. It hit me last night that under his great gifts for cinematography, screenwriting, directing actors, etc., all talents on display in his work, there was a core of integrity. And that was what made his work special. Being human he was not right all the time, but he was nearly always honest about what he felt. Extremely rare, and not show biz at all. When people say that there's really no difference between entertainment and art, Bergman stands as a rebuttal.
 

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