1 Michelangelo Antonioni
Death of the auteurs
Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman died 12 hours apart on July 30, 2007
By Beth Capper
Published: August 15th, 2007 | 3:01pm
Ingmar Bergman reportedly never cared for Michelangelo Antonioni's films. It's strange, considering how many similarities they had as directors. Both directors made films concerned with modernist alienation and depicted characters plagued by identity crises and mental illness, personal relationships lying in ruins due to betrayal and distrust. They also tended toward stark visual images of their homelands as abandoned wastelands and enigmatic plot lines leaving audiences with more questions than answers.
Perhaps the most brutal difference between Bergman and Antonioni is aesthetic, defined for both of them by their geographical origins. Bergman's Sweden is as dead and inanimate as Ikea furniture, while Antonioni's Italy, somewhat like Federico Fellini's, is so mired in social alienation that morality and excesses have no meaning. Bergman's films were direct, almost to the point of being depressing and mundane, while Antonioni's films were prone to heavily stylized plot digressions.
Both had abandoned the directorial seats by the time of their deaths. Before their artistic retirements, Antonioni had written or directed almost 30 films over the course of his career, and Bergman had directed a startling 62, as well as countless TV shows and theatrical productions. Here, we examine why these men are widely considered to be two of art-house cinema's finest and most influential auteurs.
MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI
In 1940, Michelangelo Antonioni started out as a film journalist for Cinema magazine — the official film magazine of the Italian fascist party, edited by dictator Benito Mussolini's son, Vittorio. In 1942, he co-wrote his first film, A Pilot Returns (Un Pilota Ritorna), which was directed by Roberto Rosselini. Antonioni’s early films were influenced by Italian neorealism — a popular cinematic movement in Italy at the time, which depicted shifting social changes and the gritty reality of life for Italy's working classes. However, Antonioni soon moved away from neorealism into a more obscure and subversive cinema.
Two of his best films take place outside of Italy — the wonderful and scandalous Blowup (1966), set in swinging-’60s London, and a haunting desert movie The Passenger (Professione: reporter), which was unsuccessful upon its initial release in 1975, but achieved critical acclaim when it was re-released in 2005.
Blowup jump-started the career of actor David Hemmings, cast as a womanizing fashion photographer who accidentally photographs a murder in a tranquil city park. It’s an era-defining film, which, in spite of its macabre plot line, makes ample space for iconic and colorful imagery of London in the grips of hippy-hedonism.
The Passenger is the more intellectual of the two, featuring long scenes of sparse philosophical dialogue and thoughtful, pensive camera work. It casts a sprightly Jack Nicholson in one of his earliest roles, as an American reporter investigating guerilla insurgency in the Sahara until he discovers a dead man lying in the hotel room adjacent to his own. Realizing that he and the man bear a striking resemblance to one another, he swaps identities, effectually killing his own. The breathtaking final scene in The Passenger displays Antonioni's expertise at long takes — a technique he often utilized — filming a carefully choreographed police raid without interruption.
Antonioni died at age 94 at his home in Rome. Due to a stroke that left him paralyzed years earlier, he had not made a film since Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole) in 1995, where he was aided by the directorial expertise of German auteur Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Paris Texas, Buena Vista Social Club).
INGMAR BERGMAN
Ingmar Bergman was born to a Lutheran minister in 1918, which may explain why many of his films examined personal struggles with religious belief, most notably through a trilogy of films he released during a three-year period in the early ’60s — Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. Although Bergman was most famous for his work in film, he was also well regarded in the theatre as a stage director — it is believed he was the youngest theater manager in Europe at the age of 26.
Over the course of his career, he worked with actress and fellow director Liv Ullmann multiple times. She took the starring role in nine of his films, including Scenes From a Marriage — Bergman's excruciating portrait of marital breakdown, which he initially conceived as a six-part TV series, but then edited down into a three-hour film. Bergman's films were often low budget affairs — Scenes From a Marriage only cost $200,000 to make, which is relatively small for a feature-length movie. For his films depicting relationship breakdown — of which there were many — Bergman only had to appeal to personal experience; he was married five times, four of which ended in divorce.
Bergman's films are, on the whole, relentlessly depressing and tragic. Watching a Bergman is like peeking through a keyhole at a scene you weren't meant to see — there are few directors who can so expertly portray the fragility of the human condition with such a fine balance between delicate beauty and stark realism. Perhaps the two key instances where Bergman veers away from this style of realist film-making are in experimental postmodern art-film Persona, released in 1966 — considered to be one of Bergman's crowning achievements – and The Seventh Seal (1957), featuring the infamous scene where a medieval knight plays chess with Death. Persona is an examination of the unreliability of the camera eye, which Bergman had utilized for near documentary-style film-making in his previous works.
Bergman retired from filmmaking in 2003, after releasing Saraband, his sequel to Scenes From a Marriage. He died in his sleep at his home on an island called Faro, off the coast in Sweden — a quiet and peaceful death for a man who lived an anguished existence.
Issue #33
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