Week of August 8, 2007, Issue #616
FILM
DVDetective
JOSEF BRAUN / dvdetective@vueweekly.com
When I woke last Monday morning to learn of the death of Ingmar Bergman—that prolific old Swede who I’ve always considered my favourite director, at least when backed into a corner and forced to choose—two ideas immediately sprung to mind.First, I couldn’t help but wonder about Bergman’s last thoughts, this most spiritually troubled of filmmakers, who earlier in his career confessed to suffering from a paralyzing fear of death. He was 89, and the overtly faith-themed films were far behind him, but still: did he find peace out on that little northern island of Fårö where so many of his most haunting films played out? Would he have been disappointed if no cloaked, sickle-wielding figure arrived to challenge him to that chess game that no one ever wins? Or would he have sighed upon discovering that even Death was unable to resist another tired parody of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), the cinema’s most iconic incarnation of The Grim Reaper?
The second thing that came to me was this: Bergman’s gone, but amongst the old masters, at least we still have Antonioni. Then Tuesday morning arrived and, well, so much for consolation. Michelangelo Antonioni, another personal favourite, was 93, yet, unlike Bergman, not even officially retired. I spent the rest of Tuesday trying not to think about, say, Alain Resnais or Chris Marker—both in their 80s, both still working—for fear of spurring a chain reaction.
Death has intervened to fuse the destinies of these two giants, just as life had back in the ’50s and ’60s, those glory years for the international arthouse when terms like “seriousness” and “rigour” weren’t deemed antithetical to the ingredients of a successful film. It’s a period I cherish, and as it happens, one that’s becoming increasingly well represented on DVD.
Criterion has been especially committed to keeping the films of both Bergman and Antonioni alive for a new generation—the most fevered Bergmaniacs can even see a slew of his earliest work in the Early Bergman box released just months ago on Criterion’s new bare-bones Eclipse imprint. But for those seeking to fully immerse themselves in Bergman at his best, there’s another multi-disc set I’ve chosen to highlight in this modest little eulogy-by-way-of-DVD column.
With films like Winter Light (’62), Persona (’66) and The Passion of Anna (’69), Bergman honed the elements of his aesthetic that will stand as his most distinctive contributions to movies: the transformation of chamber drama into intimate, vital cinema, and the use of the human face as an all-encompassing landscape of mystery, wonder and the unfolding of ideas, story and emotion. Scenes From a Marriage (’73), often mistaken for a less ambitious project, was in many ways the quintessence of Bergman’s explorations.
Basically a two-hander, Scenes chronicles the gradual disintegration of the marriage of Marianne and Johan (the magnificent pairing of Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson), and the strange paths their lives assume in wedlock’s wake. Criterion’s three-disc set presents Scenes as I think it should be seen, in its original six-part television mini-series format. Vivid, moving, exquisitely photographed (in colour, by the late-great Sven Nykvist), and utterly engrossing, the mounting effect of watching the series is far more potent than the truncated theatrical version.
Last year’s highly successful re-release of The Passenger (’75) both inaugurated a new legion of Antonioniites and reawakened the interests of older filmgoers who’d forgotten the breadth of Antonioni’s cinema. But of all the Antonioni films currently available on DVD, I’d argue that the finest package accompanies the title that remains most emblematic of Antonioni: L’Avventura (’60).
“I’m interested in irrationality,” Antonioni once wrote. These are the words of the guy who must have been the only Italian filmmaker whose best work is refreshingly untainted by that national cinema’s chronic sentimentality. L’Avventura, which concerns a woman who vanishes on a boating trip and the fruitless search enacted by her lover and friend, was as startling for me as Bergman’s work of that very same period: just as Bergman’s God opted for silence, Antonioni’s mystery opted to remain perfectly unsolved. In different but equally memorable ways, such films reveal to us that the life of movies continues to unfold and take surprising shape even within the realm of total uncertainty.
Criterion’s two-disc set contains a superb commentary by Gene Youngblood, writings by Antonioni most enjoyably read by Jack Nicholson, and a documentary of Antonioni by Gianfranco Mingozzi. It’s an ideal package to sink into over a rainy, lonely weekend, and one I’m hoping Criterion will follow up on soon—Antonioni’s disturbingly gorgeous, endlessly perplexing masterpiece Red Desert (’64) is more than ripe for the deluxe treatment. V