In defence of my heroes Bergman and Antonioni

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Touched by genius: Ingmar Bergman

Michelangelo Antonioni on set

In focus: David Hemmings photographs Veruschka in Blowup

Lyrical beauty in a scene from Bergman's Cries and Whispers

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This week, following his death, Ingmar Bergman's films were mocked on TV as 'boring'. Here, the Evening Standard's film critic, who knew both the Swedish director and his Italian contemporary personally, explains why they were masters of their art.

The time when crowds rushed off to the Academy or the Paris Pullman art houses to mull over the latest masterpieces from Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni seem like an age ago. Now they are both dead, and within 24 hours of each other, too. The shock waves, at least for cinephiles, are considerable.

These two men, one Swedish and one Italian, commanded the European film scene, with a whole bevy of others such as Fellini and Visconti, like colossi. They were regarded as directly opposed to Hollywood and its determined commercialism, even though they actually admired Hollywood as much as Hollywood, albeit reluctantly, admired them.

Now the mood appears to have changed, or so some of even the upmarket media would have it. So-called art-house films of the kind Bergman and Antonioni made are castigated as dull and incomprehensible on Newsnight, with Toby Young, that fount of populist wisdom, brought in to emphasise the fact that those who like the two dead film-makers are probably boring pseuds. And Jeremy Paxman, quizzing a surprisingly nervous Richard Eyre in bellicose terms as if he was an obfuscating Cabinet minister and Bergman a serial killer, seemed to take up the cudgels on Young's behalf.

Even The Times, not now as august as it was, persuaded itself to put up a list, from its chief film critic, of Bergman films that should not on any account be seen. Admittedly, there was also a list of Bergman classics which he liked, but the idea was a demeaning one.

This refusal to admit the worth of serious films and to extol instead movies as pure entertainment leaves Bergman and Antonioni out in the cold. To hell with Bergman's charming, humorous and relevant Smiles of a Summer Night or Antonioni's astonishingly beautiful La Notte. Bruce Willis battering the life out of Die Hard 4 is the thing the great British public want to see.

Bergman's films, from Smiles of a Summer Night to the richly observed Wild Strawberries, the story of an elderly academic forced to review his dried-up life, are based as much on words as images, though the visuals are pretty good, too.

From works such as The Seventh Seal from 1957, now on release in London once more, to Saraband, his very last film about family relationships, they are impeccably acted by casts of Bergman regulars such as Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, who gave more than 100 per cent for their director, and they have a power of expression that seems like a kind of super-reality and psychologically absolutely true.

Antonioni could be called the Henry James of filmmaking. He avoids conventional narrative and it often seems that nothing whatsoever is happening except within the minds, or possibly the confused souls, of his often alienated characters. He used landscapes and cityscapes to underline what he was trying to say, at his best teaching us to see as we've never seen before.

It is difficult to turn a blind eye to their beauty even if the slow pace and long takes, revolutionary in the Fifties and Sixties, are totally different from the fashion now for quick-fire editing. His trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse made in the early Sixties, along with his two English-speaking films, Blowup, with David Hemmings, and The Passenger, with Jack Nicholson, have never been equalled as poetic summations of the disasters of love, sex and identity.

They were both extremely fond of women and, in their films at least, appeared to understand them better than most. Bergman had five wives and a bevy of mistresses who often became his friends after their relationship ended. Liv Ullmann, who was one of them, insists he was never the gloomy Swede his detractors complained about and that the sets of even his grimmest expositions of human suffering were full of laughter. He liked actors, especially female, and treated them well.

I only met him once, and prepared for the possibly intimidating experience with as unsmilingly intellectual a question as I could muster. "Oh, you critics!", he said with a smile, "you read all sorts of things into my films I've no idea about.

Don't you ever just sit back and enjoy them? I admit I don't because I see all the faults. But if you don't, I've really failed." He then proceeded to tell some extremely doubtful jokes about the difficulties of good sex in uncomfortable places.

Antonioni liked women a lot, too, and presented them subtly in his films, making Monica Vitti a world star and an icon of her time. Badly paralysed for many years by a severe stroke, he spent his life, mentally fully alert and forever planning his next film, in a wheelchair. But he still appreciated a pretty face. When he came once to the London Film Festival, he was given a nurse to look after him while his wife went out shopping. She almost immediately decamped complaining that the gentleman in the wheelchair had groped her. He was nearly 80 at the time.

The only time I met him was when I had to give him an award from the critics at the annual European Film prize-giving. I couldn't shake his hand because he was holding the citation, so I took my courage in my hands and kissed him on the forehead. He gave me a look as if to say that he might have appreciated the kiss better from a female critic.

The last time I saw him was with Satyajit Ray, the great Indian director, in Calcutta. Crowds followed him everywhere as if he were a god. He didn't look like a minority taste there as ordinary Bengalis pushed past the official welcoming committee trying desperately to get a sight of him and probably give him another kiss on the forehead.

In Europe, when I first came upon Bergman and Antonioni, we called their work films, not movies, and we honoured them as among the great artists of the century. This is a difficult concept for us Brits, with our literary and theatrical traditions to contemplate. We tend to find it difficult to admit that film-makers such as Bergman, Buñuel and John Ford should be accounted along with the best writers, artists and composers of the century.

But when Bergman and Antonioni were in full flow, a large minority actually believed this, and in France they would call you an idiot to this day if you denied that Jean Renoir, the film-maker, was any less of a genius than his painter father.

There was once a survey of French and English students about who was the best director in the world. The French students reeled off a dozen names to be considered without a moment's hesitation. The only names the British students could muster were Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.

This is still largely true. But then the majority vote would not go for a volume of James Joyce on their bookshelves along with the AA Book of the Road, nor would they plaster reproductions of Francis Bacon's Pope all over their walls.

I'm not being elitist, I promise. You only have to go to Cannes to see boring art movies and you only have to buy a ticket at your local multiplex to watch some crushingly vacuous commercial ones.

Bergman and Antonioni could be tough to watch. Bergman's essential pessimism and doubt can be encapsulated best in a passage from his film The Serpent's Egg, which didn't really work very well. "Go to Hell!" says one character to another. "Have you ever considered," comes the reply, "that we are there already?"

As for Antonioni, it is a well known fact that actors in his films were just told to say the lines and not worry about how to speak them. Words, he said, didn't matter. It was visual emphasis that was important, no matter how slowly wrought. It took a lot of patience sometimes. Jeanne Moreau, who starred with Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte, once said to me: "God, it was boring. But you can't argue with Antonioni. He never replies."

But, for all their slow-burning, under-the-text skills, they both made inalienable masterpieces that affected how we viewed film for the rest of our lives. Their work has been subsumed by a long list of other film-makers, some of whom live and work in Hollywood.

So long live cinematic art. And long live movie entertainment, too. It is perfectly possible to love Antonioni's L'Avventura and the Carry On movies as well. Or Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Creature from the Black Lagoon. The cinema should anyway never be divided into art on the one hand and commerce on the other. Let all the flowers in the garden flourish is the only answer to Newsnight's grumpy questioning.

 

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