Movie Heaven

Ingmar Bergman. Homepage image, Michaelangelo Antonioni

There are many other gods in silver screen heaven, but Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, who both passed away on July 30, have left a gap that won’t be easily filled.

Born respectively in 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden and 1912 in Ferrara, Italy,  Bergman and Antonioni  started working in the 1950s. Although their cinema was strikingly different - Bergman overtly disliked Antonioni's work -  their uniquely  poetic and dream-like films were both ground-breaking and influential.

At that time, Europe had just gone through the post-war reconstruction and was enjoying an economic boom.
But the war had left a deep scar on Europe’s soul: a mix of uneasiness, anguish and a sense of hopelessness and alienation.

If Bergman looked down at this situation from his relatively neutral Sweden, Italian director Antonioni was completely immersed in it:  this is probably why the first could concentrate on spiritual, timeless issues in his films, whereas the latter was strongly rooted in his time and society. 

Both directors had a penchant for very long takes (and therefore their cinema looked “slow” to many) but used them to express opposite and conflicting feelings: existential torment one moment, boredom the next.

Bergman filled the screen with dramatic, overemotional performances such as Brink of Life (1958) and Persona (1966), and gave a sympathetic quality to all his characters.
Notably, all his main performers were affectionate friends, especially actresses Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann, whose talent was showcased in psychodramas and romances.

In Bergman’s ethical world, human warmth and open sexuality win over hard-heartedness and rationally. Faith is an unsolvable mystery and childlike innocence is the real state of grace as late masterwork Fanny And Alexander (1982) shows.
The landscape or the set of his films often reflect the characters’ feelings: the blood-red walls of the mansion of Cries and Whispers (1973) in which three women confront their painful experiences.

On the contrary, Antonioni’s glance is always detached and his images are composed like abstract paintings in which human beings are mere shapes or strokes of a brush. Most of his characters are like robots or dummies and act superficially.
A friend of the two protagonists in The Adventure (1960) suddenly disappears, they look for her for a while and then easily move on.
 In Blow Up (1966) the main charcater thinks he can thoroughly read the world through his eyes, but finally succumbs to the common dullness.
These difficult subjects don't mean that Antonioni’s cinema is cold or unemotional: the director had simply chosen to illustrate the boredom, shallowness and impermanence of his time.

He often did this by  lingering over the expressionless faces of the actors, particularly his muse Monica Vitti.

A partial exception is Zabriskie Point (1970), his most political film, that culminates with an anarchic, if imaginary explosion of all symbols of wealth and superficiality – a liberating experience for the audience, even today.  

These two masters of the seventh art suddenly stopped working in the 1980s.
A few years before, Ingmar Bergman had been charged with tax evasion by the Swedish government, and despite being cleared from all accusations, he felt so humiliated that he swore never to work in Sweden again; Fanny And Alexander was his last film.

As for Antonioni, in 1985 he suffered an ictus that left him paralysed and unable to speak.
Ten years later, he asked German director Wim Wenders to co-direct Beyond The Clouds but the experiment unsuccessful.

Strangely enough, they both made a comeback in the early 2000s: Bergman directing TV film Saraband while Antonioni directed an episode of the collective film Eros.
But the last, and most shocking parallel between their two lives was drawn on July 30th 2007.
Within a few hours, both were gone.

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