Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Source:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/0 ... nioni.html
First Ingmar Bergman, now Michelangelo Antonioni
As another great film-maker dies, it remains to be seen whether this giddy spell signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse.
Ingmar Bergman left in the early hours of yesterday morning. Within a few hours, Michelangelo Antonioni had followed him through the exit door. It remains to be seen whether this signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse - some Biblical purge of revered European auteurs - but the omens are hardly encouraging. How are Godard, Resnais and Rohmer bearing up? Can we urge them to stay indoors, wrap up warm, and maybe put on some old DVDs. Anything to keep them out of circulation until the storm blows out.
In the meantime I'm hunting parallels between Bergman and Antonioni. Thankfully there are some obvious ones. Both were near contemporaries who came to epitomise the foreign-language film scene during its creative and commercial heyday in the 1950s and 60s. Both were regarded as rigorous, high-minded directors who typically chose to focus on modern man's sense of alienation in a God-less universe. Both, to their detractors, could be aloof, portentous artists who made great demands of their viewer ... and all in return for the revelation that we are all lost and lonely and doomed to die. Gee, thanks a bunch.
And yet these directors were very different too. If Bergman was the great high priest of the European art-house, then Antonioni was its puckish intellectual. His films were at once more playful and more spare than Bergman's. L'Avventura and L'Eclisse are cerebral, teasing puzzle pictures. Blowup is a roguish, vogueish mystery play. Zabriskie Point offered a freewheeling, anthropological tour of an American counter-culture that - one suspects - never really existed outside of Antonioni's head to begin with.
I also feel that Antonioni has aged less well than Bergman. Perhaps it is the fate of all "modernists" to eventually turn antique, or even retro, and through no fault of his own Antonioni seems finally to have been too fashionable, too much an index of his age, so that his cool inquiries can now look a little mannered and arch.
Moreover, when he made a belated return to film-making in 1995, the result proved faintly embarrassing. Stuffed full of earnest voice-overs and toe-curling sex scenes, Beyond the Clouds was the cinematic equivalent of an old man reading poetry to an attractive woman while using his stick to lift up her skirt. No doubt this was a film that came from the heart (or someplace near it), but it notably lacked the poise and confidence of his earlier work.
For all that, Antonioni remains one of the most distinctive and innovative film-makers of the 20th-century. When his 1960 breakthrough picture L'Avventura first screened at the Cannes film festival, it was reportedly jeered and booed by an audience of established critics and film-makers which had been shown a modern world they clearly did not want to see. This world was steely and cerebral. It was flush with money but lacking in love. Its characters were lost and disconnected, mere cogs in a machine. Back then, nobody articulated the modern world better than Michelangelo Antonioni. Nobody had such an affinity with its chill little pockets. No one seemed to take such a fiendish pleasure in mapping it out.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/0 ... nioni.html
First Ingmar Bergman, now Michelangelo Antonioni
As another great film-maker dies, it remains to be seen whether this giddy spell signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse.
Ingmar Bergman left in the early hours of yesterday morning. Within a few hours, Michelangelo Antonioni had followed him through the exit door. It remains to be seen whether this signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse - some Biblical purge of revered European auteurs - but the omens are hardly encouraging. How are Godard, Resnais and Rohmer bearing up? Can we urge them to stay indoors, wrap up warm, and maybe put on some old DVDs. Anything to keep them out of circulation until the storm blows out.
In the meantime I'm hunting parallels between Bergman and Antonioni. Thankfully there are some obvious ones. Both were near contemporaries who came to epitomise the foreign-language film scene during its creative and commercial heyday in the 1950s and 60s. Both were regarded as rigorous, high-minded directors who typically chose to focus on modern man's sense of alienation in a God-less universe. Both, to their detractors, could be aloof, portentous artists who made great demands of their viewer ... and all in return for the revelation that we are all lost and lonely and doomed to die. Gee, thanks a bunch.
And yet these directors were very different too. If Bergman was the great high priest of the European art-house, then Antonioni was its puckish intellectual. His films were at once more playful and more spare than Bergman's. L'Avventura and L'Eclisse are cerebral, teasing puzzle pictures. Blowup is a roguish, vogueish mystery play. Zabriskie Point offered a freewheeling, anthropological tour of an American counter-culture that - one suspects - never really existed outside of Antonioni's head to begin with.
I also feel that Antonioni has aged less well than Bergman. Perhaps it is the fate of all "modernists" to eventually turn antique, or even retro, and through no fault of his own Antonioni seems finally to have been too fashionable, too much an index of his age, so that his cool inquiries can now look a little mannered and arch.
Moreover, when he made a belated return to film-making in 1995, the result proved faintly embarrassing. Stuffed full of earnest voice-overs and toe-curling sex scenes, Beyond the Clouds was the cinematic equivalent of an old man reading poetry to an attractive woman while using his stick to lift up her skirt. No doubt this was a film that came from the heart (or someplace near it), but it notably lacked the poise and confidence of his earlier work.
For all that, Antonioni remains one of the most distinctive and innovative film-makers of the 20th-century. When his 1960 breakthrough picture L'Avventura first screened at the Cannes film festival, it was reportedly jeered and booed by an audience of established critics and film-makers which had been shown a modern world they clearly did not want to see. This world was steely and cerebral. It was flush with money but lacking in love. Its characters were lost and disconnected, mere cogs in a machine. Back then, nobody articulated the modern world better than Michelangelo Antonioni. Nobody had such an affinity with its chill little pockets. No one seemed to take such a fiendish pleasure in mapping it out.