“The people in my films are exactly like myself – creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they’re talking. .. Mostly they’re body with a little hollow for the soul.”

The deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelango Antonioni on the same day brings to a close forever the work of a pioneering generation of filmmakers who constructed the very idea that film could be a work of art.

Bergman was the last great auteur director of his kind to stand on location next to a 35mm camera. Saraband was shown just last year on the festival circuit. Antonioni had a stroke in 1985, which almost ended his cinema career.

Before Bergman and Antonioni, film went from a carnival attraction to an industrial process. The generation of Lang, Hitchcock, Griffith, Ford and Chaplin came to cinema as adults, and invented the professional roles, vocabularies and methods to tell stories to millions with the distinctive eye of artists.

Elsewhere in the world, away from Hollywood and its own European connections, cinema was brought to artistic maturity by directors like Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu, Rosselini and Renoir.

Born slightly later, and living much longer, Bergman and Antonioni have become the enduring icons of the art movie, and clichés in popular culture. Bergman is seen as wallowing in a trough of doom; Antonioni as a dude who makes no sense at all.

Both versions are a travesty. Bergman made comedies, explored the use of colour and worked brilliantly with children. Antonioni was responsible for Blow Up, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, which bring an older, European eye to the evolution of late twentieth century public culture.

Bergman was steeped in Western culture, and worked with a small cadre of craftspeople and a close ensemble of actors who shared the same vocabulary and historical values. It is no accident that Sven Nykvist, Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow could create such luminous intensity together.

He inherited a vibrant theatre tradition, which contributed through Strindberg to the exploration of naturalism and the realism which is at the heart of the screen arts over the last century.

As an artist, he put the actor and character at the centre of the frame and the process. He was unafraid of stillness, content to watch, absorbed in the great mysteries and depth of a human being struggling with life itself.

In himself, he had all the frailties of an ordinary human being, who fought with the tax department and built toilets on set so he could shit himself with fear.

In the sacred space of shared artistic process, Bergman was unflinching and profound, full of joy and pity, laconic and dark, playful and despairing. His ability and vision took him far beyond the cinema. He was extraordinarily active in the other performed arts – in television, theatre and opera. He was prolific, energetic and fecund.

Antonioni, too, worked on a larger canvas than the cinema. He started as a film reviewer, and turned to painting and short stories after his stroke.

In contrast to Bergman’s artistic traditionalism, he was the first truly valorised modernist of the cinema, who took the medium forwards into wider artistic possibilities.

He was able to embrace a world in which certainty and continuity are no more than a carapace. He was fascinated by discontinuity, disappointment, the world between objects, the unintelligible gesture and the unanswered question.

In The Passenger, Jack Nicholson sits at the back of an open sports car as Maria Schneider asks him what they are running away from. He tells her to look. The camera lingers on the road endlessly spinning away from them, out to the vanishing point between lines of trees. In the same shot, there is nothing and everything.

In Bergman’s most iconic work, The Seventh Seal, the central characters dance joyously with Death on the crest of a hill.

In the last sequence of Zabriskie Point we see the ranch house on the cliff explode savagely again and again, before we see the interior burst apart and fly off to the music of Pink Floyd, serene in its own destruction down to the clothes and the books. A moment later, a trash song tells us that “If you live just for the day, the day may soon be done, but there’s a space where dreams always stay so young..”

There is a moment in The Seventh Seal when a character staggers from a line of flagellants and shouts into the camera the most basic message of all – the line which has overwhelmed both Bergman and Antonioni on the same day.

“We’re all going to die.”

Defiance and mortality. Ennui and hope. Despair and acceptance.

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The Guardian obituaries of Antonioni and Bergman are excellent.

There is a collection of videos about Bergman making his last film, Saraband, here.

YouTube has the last fantastic tracking shot in The Passenger, with its utterly simple camera trick, and the explosion sequence in Zabriskie Point. You can also find tributes to both filmmakers.

The Swedes are in mourning. This site covers him extensively, and includes clips.

I wrote this today for Screen Hub. It is pretty rough but I needed to be fast, and the connection between the two invites a lot of thought. These two people stretch my mind and spirit. They enlarge my understanding of humanity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 2:30 am and is filed under visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.