Bergman vs. Antonioni

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?...