Beyond the Multiplex

Aug. 2, 2007 | Didn't John Adams and Thomas Jefferson die on the same day too? The parallel is pretty distant, but I suppose in their own field they were just as important. When I was writing my obituary essay about Ingmar Bergman on Monday, I at first included a parenthesis to say that Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard were now the last surviving big-name directors of 1960s art-house cinema. Late in the day I had to take that sentence out, marveling at the strangeness of fate; word came over the Associated Press wires that Antonioni had died in Rome, at age 94.

I don't want to get dragged into some facile compare-and-contrast, or the sort of wonky taxonomy that reveals film snobbery at its most unpleasant. You can't imagine contemporary cinema without both Bergman and Antonioni any more than you can imagine the history of the American republic without both Adams and Jefferson. (Unlike the second and third presidents, the two filmmakers liked and respected one another.) As different as Bergman's intense, emotional dramas were from Antonioni's highly stylized landscapes of cosmopolitan anomie, both were responding to the same phenomenon: the perceived spiritual emptiness of Western civilization in the decades that followed the horrors of World War II.

As the letters in response to my Bergman article revealed, so-called art film retains the ability to provoke angry cultural warfare -- much of it irrelevant and ad hominem -- out of all proportion to its actual audience. Long after the resounding global victory of pop culture, some of its adherents still seem to feel threatened, or lectured, or condescended to, by the handful of oddballs who still want to sit through "Cries and Whispers" or Antonioni's "La Notte," or, I don't know, Pedro Costa's "Colossal Youth" (a film I'll discuss below). Is this something like the belief that heterosexual marriage will be fatally undermined if Doug and Russell can get hitched too?

It's partly true that the defenders of high-modernist culture, even as it lies in ruins around them, remain responsible for their own reputation. Bergman's death occasioned an outpouring of prose from aficionados all over the world, much of it heartfelt and inspired but some of it also extremely pompous. Consider Brian Baxter's essay in the Guardian, an apparent eulogy that belongs to the finest small-minded, carrion-crow tradition of English intellectualism. Baxter places Bergman among such "second rung, but never second rate" directors as Antonioni, Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Billy Wilder and Luchino Visconti, who "hover fitfully behind the handful of geniuses -- Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu, Renoir, Rossellini -- where poetry and originality transcend matter and realism."

I don't know what the last part of that sentence is supposed to mean, but the only conclusion I can draw is that Baxter thinks that Bergman, Antonioni, Wilder and the rest of his "second rung" are entirely too popular and well-known. (Where and why are they fitfully hovering? Are they like the plain-belly Sneetches, excluded from the weenie roast by star-bellies like Bresson and Renoir?) So I'd like to approach the simultaneous deaths of these two great filmmakers with some degree of humility, but without running away from my own opinions.

Many people I respect feel passionately about Antonioni's pictures, and one could definitely argue that his influence is more evident and more widespread in contemporary culture than Bergman's. I've always felt similar reservations about Antonioni's work as I do about Alfred Hitchcock's; in both cases, an extraordinary technical facility seems to put form ahead of content, style ahead of substance. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that for both directors form was content, and that this idea flowed from their most basic understanding of the world. In both cases, my problem is not so much with Antonioni or Hitchcock's movies (which I find powerful and impressive, though hardly ever moving) but with what I see as their baleful influence on later generations.

Antonioni's black-and-white trilogy of the early '60s -- the international sensation of "L'Avventura," followed by "La Notte" and "Eclipse" -- with their beautiful women, sharp-dressed men, sleek modern settings and startling compositions, shaped advertising and fashion photography for decades to come. Whatever Marxian-Freudian points the filmmaker was trying to make became subsumed in the decadent, sexy glamour of the whole enterprise. That isn't precisely ironic, and isn't precisely Antonioni's fault. Maybe it's just symptomatic of the problem those movies sought to address.

International celebrity followed, but didn't necessarily do Antonioni any favors. After his first color film, the masterly but irredeemably bleak "Red Desert," he was lured to swinging London to make "Blow-Up" and then to chaotic, late-'60s America, where he was followed by the FBI and investigated by a federal grand jury while making "Zabriskie Point." The first of those was an international hit and remains one of the decade's most influential pictures (although its critical reputation has faded somewhat), while the second was a legendary debacle that nearly sank Antonioni's career. I haven't seen either for many years, but I bet they're ripe for reconsideration. (Has Antonioni's original ending to "Zabriskie Point," featuring an airplane skywriting "Fuck you, America," ever been found?)

Only one noteworthy film came after that, the sun-baked, widescreen spectacle of "The Passenger," with a lizardlike Jack Nicholson bent on escape or transcendence or self-destruction as he drags Maria Schneider from one European location to another. It's another story of anomie and self-hatred, but driven by a restless energy and a consummate, decadent gorgeousness. I'm inclined to believe that it's Antonioni's one real masterpiece, a tantalizing suggestion of what he could have done with the right kind of access to Hollywood-level resources and movie stars.

By the '80s, Antonioni was physically weakened, apparently bereft of ideas and perceived as unmarketable. He suffered a devastating stroke in 1985 and spent his last two decades partially paralyzed and unable to speak clearly, a cruel fate for a man once well known as a bon vivant. His only feature after 1982 was "Beyond the Clouds," a peculiar softcore fantasy made in 1995 that, by most accounts, was directed by Wim Wenders based on Antonioni's suggestions.

However posterity will judge him, Antonioni's reputation rests on just seven major films, while Bergman made more than 30. My own preference for Bergman's work may just be personal predisposition, or more specifically the fact that I was introduced to Bergman's films (along with Kurosawa's) as a child, and they became the unconscious gold standard by which I have judged all others. As I've said, Bergman and Antonioni liked each other, as men and as filmmakers, and both were instrumental in creating today's cinematic culture. But I think the longer you consider their work side by side, the more fundamentally different they appear.

Here's your homework assignment, if you choose to accept it. Hit up Netflix or GreenCine or your video store and watch the following pairs of movies, with as clear a mind as possible. In the First Success category, let's combine Bergman's "Seventh Seal" with Antonioni's "L'Avventura." As Artistic Breakthroughs, let's compare "Persona" to "Red Desert." In the Mature Masterpiece category, let's watch "The Passenger" and "Fanny and Alexander" (about the most bizarre double bill I can imagine). Discuss! You can submit to the letters section, of course, or send me an e-mail and I'll publish responses in the column.

Next page: An indie-film blurbapalooza!