Ingmar Bergman (1918 - 2007)

‘Our friend Berman is dead!’, my cinephile colleague announced from the other end and my reaction was, ‘Oh…he must've been 90, no?. '89’, my friend corrected me.

Natural death of any great artiste doesn’t arouse sadness in me because of two reasons. Firstly, because the person’s time had come and secondly, the artiste will always be alive through his works. So, without getting sad, I said to myself, ‘This calls for a post’. But then I remembered that I’ve already written something on the moviemaker, which you can find over here. So, what else do I put up as a tribute to the great man who turned (and will continue to turn) so many moments of my life into pleasurable ones and in such intelligent ways.

Then, I bumped into this excerpt from an interview, where Mr Bergman gives his opinion on other film directors. He replies with his usual brutal honesty and I had material for my post.

On Orson Welles:

Bergman: For me he's just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of - is all the critics' darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it's a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie's got is absolutely unbelievable.

On Michelangelo Antonioni:
Bergman: He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don't feel anything for L'Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.

On Federico Fellini:

Bergman: We were supposed to collaborate once, and along with Kurosawa make one love story each for a movie produced by Dino de Laurentiis. I flew down to Rome with my script and spent a lot of time with Fellini while we waited for Kurosawa, who finally couldn't leave Japan because of his health, so the project went belly-up. Fellini was about to finish Satyricon. I spent a lot of time in the studio and saw him work. I loved him both as a director and as a person, and I still watch his movies, like La Strada and that childhood rememberance - what's that called again?
The interviewer admits that he has also seen the movie several times, but just now the title slips his mind. Bergman laughs delightedly.

Bergman: Great that you're also a bit senile! That pleases me.

Later the same day, several hours after the interview, the phone rings:It's Bergman. 'AMARCORD!', he shouts.

On Francois Truffaut:

Bergman: I liked Truffaut a lot, I've felt a lot of admiration for his way to address the audience, and his storytelling. La nuit américaine is adorable, and another film I like to see is L'enfant sauvage, with its fine humanism.

On Jean-Luc Godard:

Bergman: I've never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He's made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mindnumbingly boring.

On Andrei Tarkovsky:

Late one evening in 1971, Bergman and his friend and director Kjell Grede by pure coincidence stumbled upon a copy of Andrej Rubljov in a screening room at Svensk Filmindustri. They saw it without any subtitles. He ranks it to be one of his most startling and unforgettable movie experiences ever.

On modern American cinema:

Bergman: Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another couple of fine examples of the strength of American cinema are American Beauty and Magnolia.

‘Seventh Seal’, one of his masterpieces depicts Man’s battle with Death over a game of chess…a battle which Death always wins. But not in the case of an artiste like Mr Bergman...his work lives on.