re FANNY AND ALEXANDER: that makes two of us--so maybe i'll see you there ...

I've been thinking a lot lately about Olivier Assayas's inclusion of Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage on his 2002 S&S poll along with Mirror, Ordet and Bresson's L'Argent.
I just recently finished the TV version for the first time some weeks ago, and I kept feeling that the sustained close-ups, though more fluid and probing than any I know of, in effect require narcissim. Not only is it made clear that Bergman is projected in to both his male and female protaganists, but he asks, and even requires us to become narcissus by identifying with them and only being able to identify with them. I think that it is at that point that his Agnosticism fully turns to Atheism. That series becomes his most full formal expression of the very thing Mirror, L'Argent, and Ordet suggest most fully in their form.

regarding your op-ed for the NY Times, I must applaud it. There was just too much smoke being blown. A great blow, but a bit thick. Brave comments -- and fair. And I applaud the Times for running it.

Look in my humble opinion Bergman is vastly ovverated but compared to the so called giants of today: Scorcese, Tarantino, etc. I would kill for a new Bergman. Quite frankly no one can deny him Persona. that film is a masterpiece (The king himself Godard used the M word to describe it) and Orson Welles rightfully once commented that you only need one masterpiece film.
But what is really bothering me right now is the death of Antonioni and the realization that when Godard passes away the last link to to a time when Art Cinema was in vogue will pass away with him. While a kiarostami might be an equal to a Godard or Antonioni on cinematic or artistic terms he has been unable to stir the same amount of emotion in the movie going public. Perhaps as JR as commented this is a result of the multinational corporations who run the movie industry and the press covering it but that was also true in the 1960s. I have taken many friends who are not cinephiles to watch a Kiarostami film but his films have failed to radically change my friends notions of what the Cinema is and what it could be. On the otherhand, when some of these same friends are shown a Godard or Antonioni film the are blown away. Many times they may not even like the film but come out with a whole new idea of what the Cinema can represent. In fact, my cousin was so shocked by last year at marienbad that he wouldnt stop talking about for a month straight. He does not seem to have the same response with many of the new giants of the cinema. Perhaps, at the end of the day there is something trendy, vogue, or even cool about a frenchman, an italian, and pretty european women discussing art, philosophy, cinema. But a poor iranian or a poor tawainese women discussing his or her life just doesnt have that same "hipster" factor. The sad reality may be that the failure of the iranian or tawainese cinema to capture the attention of the youth and the public at large may be not the result of corporations controlling the media but of the imperialism of american culture marginalizing the so called third world cultures in exchange for the material chic culture of blue jeans, italian suits, and pretty white faces.

Wait a second. You wrote a piece in, of all places, The New York Times about Ingmar Bergman's career, but you haven't seen his crowning achievement? I think David Lodge has room for you in one of his novels.

"...you haven't seen his crowning achievement?"

Jonathan's piece was focused on the emperor's clothes, not his crown.

As for "Art Cinema": good riddance! Perhaps we can now start focusing on cinematic art.

although i was only three during the glory days of art house cinema (1961???) i think i can understand the nostalgia bergmanophiles express. this was such an antidote to hollywood shlock (even though the french -- and bogdonovich and sarris -- were discovering the hitchoko-hawksians), it really expressed rebellion and discovery and sex. good times. but, there was also something about joining with other like-minded humans in a common space and looking at something exotic and smart in the dark -- hell, i imagine you could even smoke in those places! can we have the same thrill from a solo medium? youtube or dvd or whatever? the spectacle of seeing an art film in an art house -- that takes film out of the realm of theatre and makes it akin to novels. it's still art, but it's private? seeing jules and jim at the movies is different than watching it on dvd. it just is. showing your kid gunga din at the movies is different that tcm (which i love, but it ain't no theatre 80 saint marks.) sad but true.

Puya Yazdi, The hipster factor doesn't work the same way with older enshrined masterpieces and today's new masterpieces. The "avant-garde" is ahead of its time, it takes time for the general public to get used to it or to truly understand it. Thus a wide recognition is harder to reach when the audience is involved in the very socio-political context these visionary filmmakers denounce. It's easier to look back on old controversies and relativize/ignore the flaws and only see a beautiful film speaking of an era that is no longer ours.

"Jonathan's piece was focused on the emperor's clothes, not his crown."

Well, he should have made it VERY clear then, and not articulate his argumentation as if he was evaluating Bergman's intrinsic style and oeuvre. Because such correlation is specious.

There's one minor change in the program: in place of Ben Kenigsberg we'll have Jim Trainor, filmmaker and prof at the School of the Art Institute, present Wild Strawberries.

Here is a interesting article regarding Bergman's Nazi Past: Posted by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe.

I was reminded by a reader over the weekend that of the hundreds of Ingmar Bergman obituaries published last week -- including my own -- none mentioned the great filmmaker's youthful infatuation with Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Which is odd, because the director had often admitted as much and in 1999 provided further details in an interview reported by the BBC.

Bergman's father was ultra-right wing, and both the future filmmaker and his brother were Nazi sympathizers. Bergman saw Hitler speak in Germany in 1936 and recalled the dictator as "incredibly charismatic." But he maintains he never went as far as his brother and friends, who painted swastikas on Jewish-owned buildings. On the other hand, neither did he stop them. It seems young Ingmar just went with the crowd until the very end of WWII -- not so hard, since officially neutral Sweden had a vocal pro-Nazi influence -- when the revelations of the death camps opened his eyes. "In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence," he said in 1999.

He never formally apologized -- nor was he asked to -- and there was no PR firestorm as there was over Gunter Grass last year. Was Bergman "given a free pass"?

The answer's complex. Without question, his WWII political beliefs should have been mentioned in any comprehensive obituary, my own included. (In my lame defense, I was working on a sudden and tight deadline, and blipped over the one oblique mention that turned up.)

But should he have apologized? I think he did -- with his movies. Only one of Bergman's films deals explicitly with the Nazi era, and it's not one of the good ones. But the filmography in total is wracked with moral pain, forever insisting on the abiding foolishness of man. He called one of his movies "Shame" -- tellingly, it's about life during wartime and what it does to people -- and the title extends to the whole race. The 1960s work especially is a cinema bereft of hope, "ripped of innocence," and the source seems to spring from behind the camera. The worst behavior and the most unforgivable sins in Bergman films are wholly personal, as if the director were using the lens as a mirror. He never apologized because I doubt he ever forgave himself -- his childish belief in those beautiful young Aryan men proved how deluded he and the rest of humanity could be.

Bergman consequently never set himself up as a moral arbiter, as Grass did in his writings. (Nor had he actively served in the Waffen-SS during WWII, as Grass had done.) How was he going to tell you what was right when he'd been so wrong? Better to start from scratch, his films say: Assume the worst of the human race, assume that God has left the building, and sift the ashes for the few coals of grace still burning. Bergman's career consisted of wondering how they could possibly be fanned into flame.

Defending Ingmar Bergman
by Roger Ebert

I have long known and admired the Chicago Reader’s film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, but his New York Times op-ed attack on Ingmar Bergman (“Scenes from an Overrated Career,” 8/4/07) is a bizarre departure from his usual sanity. It says more about Rosenbaum’s love of stylistic extremes than it does about Bergman and audiences. Who else but Rosenbaum could actually base an attack on the complaint that Bergman had what his favorites Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson lacked, “the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits?" In what parallel universe is the power to entertain defined in that way?

I love Bresson and respect Dreyer but what does Rosenbaum mean by their challenges to conventional film-going? He continues: “…as Dreyer did when constructing his peculiar form of movie space and Bresson did when constructing his peculiar form of movie acting.” And what were those peculiar forms? Dreyer built an elaborate set for “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and never revealed it, using closeups of faces with expressionistic angles and shadows. Bresson would shoot the same take over and over, as many as 50 times, to drain his actors of all emotion; he referred to them, indeed, as “models.” I am impressed by the idea and conception of these peculiar forms, but I doubt if they are more or less “entertaining” than Bergman’s also stylized but less constricted use of sets and actors.

Rosenbaum writes, “Riddled with wounds inflicted by Mr. Bergman’s strict Lutheran upbringing and diverse spiritual doubts, these films are at times too self-absorbed to say much about the larger world, limiting the relevance that his champions often claim for them.” This statement is perfectly accurate about Dreyer if you substitute his name for Bergman’s, and perfectly accurate about Bresson, if you substitute the names and change “Lutheran” to “Catholic.” Indeed, Bresson has been called the most Catholic of filmmakers.

Rosenbaum says Bergman is less taught in schools today than Godard and Hitchcock. He carefully avoids saying Bergman is less taught than Dreyer or Bresson. I grant him Hitchcock. He uses Google counts in his argument, so out of curiosity I googled “film class on Ingmar Bergman” (1,400,000) and “film class on Jean-Luc Godard (310,000). He says Bergman is “less discussed,” so I googled web discussion groups and found that Bergman scored 59,000 and Godard 14,400. Of course these entries cover a multitude of kinds of content, but there you have them.

Curiously, Rosenbaum thinks it is a sign of Bergman’s decline that he is hard to find on DVD these days, because he had to purchase his copy of “The Magician” in Paris (“Like many of his films, 'The Magician' hasn’t been widely available here for ages.”). Not true. I had to order Welles’ “Chimes at Midnight” from Brazil, and his “Magnificent Ambersons” is unavailable in this country, but I find 66 DVDs of Bergman’s 50-some titles, including "The Magician," for sale on Amazon, although some of them are for zones other than ours (an all-zone DVD player now costs less than $70, something I learned from Rosenbaum before ordering mine). You can find DVDs of all Dreyer’s films from “Joan” onward (five), and 10 of the 13 Bressons.

The most recent of the four Bergmans that Rosenbaum even mentions is “Persona” (1966), except for “Saraband” (2005), his final film. The sin of that film was “his seeming contempt for the medium [digital video] apart from its usefulness as a simple recording device.” In other words, at 86, Bergman did not choose to experiment with digital but simply used it. Surely it is also of interest that the film reunited the same two actors, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who had already played a divorced couple in “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973), and now meet again many years later. As for Bergman’s openness to a newer medium, what about his embrace of the lower costs and greater flexibility of Super 16 more than 35 years ago? What about him proving with Sven Nykvist in “The Passion of Anna” that a conversation could be shot on 16mm by the light of a single candle?

I think Rosenbaum gives away the game when he says, Bergman’s “movies aren’t so much filmic expressions as expressions on film.” He means form itself is more important (and entertaining, I guess) than narrative, emotional content and performance. Not everyone would agree.

Rosenbaum complains of “the antiseptic, upscale look of Mr. Bergman’s interiors.” Would that include the interiors in “The Virgin Spring,” “The Seventh Seal,” “The Passion of Anna,” “The Silence,” “Wild Strawberries,” “Hour of the Wolf,” “Scenes from a Marriage” and indeed “The Magician” and “Persona?” (I would mention “Fanny and Alexander” and its horror-house Lutheran parsonage but Rosenbaum says he hasn’t seen the film voted #3 in the Sight & Sound poll of world directors and critics to determine the best films from 1975-2000.)

Finally, Rosenbaum laments how Bergman’s “mainly blond, blue-eyed cast members became a brand to be adopted and emulated.” Hello? Bergman worked in Sweden! Does he forgive Ousmane Sembene’s African exteriors and mainly black-haired, brown-eyed cast members? Or the way Ozu used all those Japanese?

My reply to a few points in Roger's article (also posted on his web site):

1. The best discussion of Dreyer's use of space is to be found in David Bordwell's book on Dreyer, which I highly recommend. David is Roger's favorite academic critic, and understandably so, given the rigor of his visual analysis, so I hope Roger can check out Bordwell's treatment of Dreyer's use of space, which is quite different from what his article suggests it is. To broach this matter much more briefly, I hope I can be forgiven for quoting from another recent post of mine in "a_film_by":

"Syntactically, Dreyer's editing and his way of combining a track in one direction with a pan in another direction are more than just personal inflections, and the same goes for Bresson's use of inexpressiveness in both performances and shots in order to make the juxtapositions between shots and what might be called the involuntary expressiveness of bodies register in a different way from how we've experienced them before. In both cases, I think what's new isn't just a new 'personal' meaning but a new way of producing meaning--and that for me signifies a change in language."

2. I'm afraid Dreyer didn't have a strict Lutheran upbringing--that's been an old wives' tale ever since Maurice Drouzy's Dreyer biography came out. Dreyer hated his adopted parents, but not for any religious reasons. And I don't know anything about Bresson's religious upbringing; if Roger does, he should speak up. (As for Bresson's religious beliefs, a matter of much speculation, that's also been debated at some length in "a film by" over the past few days.)

3. Bergman's "seeming contempt" for digital video "apart from its usefulness as a simple recording device" in "Saraband" isn't a sin in my book but a plus. That's what I argued when I reviewed the film in the Reader -- at least that's what I tried to argue. What I find objectionable at times in "Saraband," as I say in my article, are some of the emotions being recorded and Bergman's lack of interest in critiquing or distancing himself from them in any way.

4. Moreover, I have absolutely nothing against Bergman having used blond and blue-eyed cast members, nearly all of whom are extremely talented as well as Swedish. My objection is only to the way this use and practice became "a brand to be adopted and emulated"-- by Woody Allen, among others.

I am astounded that “the power to entertain” is regarded in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article as such a detrimental quality. There is little doubt in my mind that Dreyer and Bresson did have much more importance in creating a new cinematic language, yet to provide this comparison as evidence of an “overrated career” seems to belong to the same perspective of those who believe a figure such as Sturges isn’t a cinematic master simply because of his films’ lack of stylistic inventiveness in comparison to Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford and Welles. If anything Bergman’s “power to entertain” mixed with his thematic concerns (spiritual displacement, narcissism, death…) is reason enough for his status as a master. For some reason I don’t quite remember Cukor ever doing this, nor other directors doing it quite as brilliantly as Bergman. And if these thematic concerns that constitute Bergman’s oeuvre don’t “say much about the larger world” then I don’t know what does.

As for this ever increasing opinion of the overrated nature of Bergman, I firmly believe it belongs to many cinephiles’ desire to continually be outside the mainstream. It is very unlikely that someone who isn’t a cinephile would be familiar with a work by Dreyer or Bresson, but there may be a chance that they’re familiar with a work by Bergman which seems to be reason enough to declare his overrated stature. Furthermore many of those who maintain these points of view are the same individuals who praised his films on there initial releases.

Furthermore it was never evident in my reading that the article was solely’ concerned with the “emperor's clothes” since the title of the article does contain the words “overrated career.” The idea that an author would write an argument against the importance of a director’s oeuvre without ever having seen what is widely regard as not only the director’s crowning achievement, but also the summation of his career is quite simply absurd. And as a film student this assumption that Ingmar Bergman isn’t being taught in film schools “with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Jean-Luc Godard” is equally absurd. Nor is it relevant to the argument of Bergman’s overrated status seeing at how artists such as Dreyer and Bresson aren’t being taught in the same intensity as Hitchcock, Welles and Godard despite their equal importance. I’m glad that all of this was eloquently pointed out by Roger Ebert.

First of all, I'd like to point out that Tartan have released virtually all of Bergman's DVDs in the UK on Region 2, so if you can't get your Bergman fix elsewhere, that's the first port of call.

While I appreciate Dreyer as much as the next man and agree with your sentiments about his work, Jonathan, it does seem to me you're imposing a set of criteria on Bergman which he needn't necessarily have wanted to follow or emulate.

From your discussion of Bresson and Dreyer, it seems you hold "creators of form" as being the acme of achievement in film. But what of synthesisers, directors who experiment between the margins of, say, thatre and film, as Bergman did so successfully throughout his career? No-one experimented so much with the medium from film to film as Bergman did. He was restless, sure, but is that necessarily a fault? And if the resulting films have so much to say about the human character and male-female relationships, as I believe they do, is it valid to dismiss them because they are not so extreme in their manipulation of form as those of other directors?

This is the point I believe Roger Ebert is trying to make - a confluence of insight, intelligence, great performance, and progressive experiment is thrown out because of a purely formal criteria.

And while we're at it, are we really saying Bresson's remorselessly grim view of the universe is less doom-laden and more relevant to most viewers than Bergman's? It seems to me, in Bresson's movies, we are FORCED to accept his view of the world and his monotone actors as if they are a fait accomplit, and not a directorial decision that often detracts from the material rather than adds to it.

And if we're going to discuss narcissism, how one can criticise Bergman and eulogise Cassavetes is beyond me.

It's intriguing to me how much people are seizing on my remarks about form and ignoring my remarks about relevance to the contemporary world. I presume that's why I'm being accused of downgrading or ignoring content, emotional and otherwise.

I've said this before, but I usually like to think of form as a verb, not a noun. And what's being formed and why are, of course, crucial.

P.S. Just for the record, I like entertainment as well as many films by George Cukor. (I was especially knocked out by Bhowani Junction when I resaw it recently. A very advanced film for its period.) My comparison of Bergman with Cukor wasn't meant as a slam but as a tribute. All I was trying to say was that sometimes the power to entertain and the power to change the way you look at the world can wind up in conflict with one another. (This doesn't mean, of course, that they always do.)

As for relevance to the contemporary world, is anxiety about mortality or the (non)existence of God ever going to vanish (at least in North American and European culture)? As a critic who's tended to downplay the importance of religious themes in Dreyer and Bresson's work - rightly pointing out that the material aspects of their films deserve consideration too - I can see why you're not particularly sympathetic to Bergman's treatment of these themes, but someone from a more devout background might find them hitting home with a lot of power. .

Antonioni was a director who was far more concerned with relevance than Bergman, and I think some of his work - particualrly BLOW-UP and ZABRISKIE POINT- suffers for it. His early '60s films were probably a prophetic view of the impending triumph of the yuppie, but what do the Yardbirds smashing their guitars and a glimpse of female pubic hair have to do with the illusory nature of reality? ZABRISKIE POINT has more overt political discussion in its first reel than you'll find in the entire Bergman oeuvre (apart from his suppressed anti-communist film), but SHAME now seems like a deeper examination of the anxieties provoked by the Vietnam War.

Cervantes et Shakespeare they died the same day. Today it's time to movies: Bergman and Antonioni. All cinema lovers we are very sad these days.

Try to ckeck out "The making of Fanny and Alexander" made in 1986 as a complement to your sceening. It's a beautiful document. Are you planning to see the long version made for TV?

Bergman's filmography are so rich that always you can find new senses inside his work. My last great surprise was "Shame" (1968) a magnificent piece of movie making (right between "Persona" and "Cries and Whispers").

I do not know why "The Magician" was so difficult to find in US. I saw a excellent 35mm print in Chile some years ago. And if you come to Paris, in St André des Arts cinema they will shown the Bergman's Saga with 38 excellent 35mm prints, like they made since 20 years.

As a gift... in YouTube you can find the complete series of commercial clips made to swedish Briss Soap in 1951.

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=inqJeWDHav8

One of them starred by Bibi Andersson, and all of them with Gunnar Fischer like DoP. I saw them for the first time in a 16mm copy owned by the Frankfurt Filmmuseum.

They are funny and with a irresistible Bergman touch. He always denied them. Today it's to late.

While I agree that Bergman should be championed for his emotional depth and there very much is a time and a place for the depth he added to this medium and its emotional potential, that aspect alone leads us and viewers and craftsmen to naval-gazing and complicity.

Though I can't find a full copy in print of Bordwell's book on Dreyer
I view him as the greatest of all filmmakers. He was well aware of the power of emotion and used it sparingly.

Roger Ebert's citing of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc comes off as aloof. Even in that film (though virtually a different medium since it was prior to synchronized sound), Dreyer began exploring the space inside with his pans which alone makes that film stick out historically, and outside with his camera turning upside down.

I think at its essence, the Ebert rebuttal mistook Rosenbaum's descriptions as "arguments."

But what seems most troublesome was the following quote:
"'Riddled with wounds inflicted by Mr. Bergman’s strict Lutheran upbringing and diverse spiritual doubts, these films are at times too self-absorbed to say much about the larger world, limiting the relevance that his champions often claim for them.' This statement is perfectly accurate about Dreyer if you substitute his name for Bergman’s, and perfectly accurate about Bresson, if you substitute the names."

Has Ebert seen a Bresson film? Has he seen a Dreyer film? Every frame and every movement is designed to question, evaluate and distance (using varying methods and degrees) the spectator from the image, action and emotion.

Especially in Dreyer, the camera is so far from the subject (in movement and in distance) and so concerned with and aware of the surroundings that one's thoughts and one's personal musings inevitably stray outside of these characters. His subject is the other, whether divine or terrestrial. His subject is communion outside of one's self.

Bergman, as I mentioned in an earlier post, formally as well as thematically is the exact opposite. Though he is primarily concerned with characters entrenched in their own class structure both the characters and Bergman's films are completely unable to see outside of them. They cannot see the world, they are unable to get outside of their own dilemas, so they are unable to see the dilemas or struggles of others. The pinnacle of this formal expression is Scenes from a Marriage.

I'm reminded of an interview between David Sterritt and Kiarostami where Sterritt suggested that Taste Of Cherry was not a psychological film. From Kiarostami's response, I got the impression that in his mind, if films got so far into a character's psyche, the film could not view the forces and powers outside of the individual. That applies to economic as well as transcendent forces.

Though I deeply respect Bergman for his expressions and insights, they were self-centered and short-sighted. In many ways it is no wonder that in the end he found that silence to mean no divine existence.

JR
I too find it quite funny that you are being accused of ignoring content for form and of being a cinephile. While I love reading your criticism my only real major differences of opinion with you is the fact that in my opinion you place too much of an emphasis on content compared with the old Cahiers critics. For example, one can read your defense of a michael moore film as being a defense based on content. Compare this with Jean-luc Godard who has basically panned all of Moore's films to date. Furthermore, I would also venture to guess that your lack of enthusiasm for Vertigo is also a content issue.

Now I think what JR was trying to state about Bergman is something that in any other art would not be an issue. But only in the Cinema is content still so important to movie critics, fans, and the public at large. In painting or literature what makes someone a master is his or her ability to fuse form and content and thereby create new meaning in that art. Picasso, Joyce, Faulkner, etc. these artists are praised for there unique form that created new language in there perspective mediums.

That is the problem with the ovverated nature of Bergman. Compared with a Godard, Antonioni, or a Rossellini he is not a master on the same level. But in his time he was more celebrated because of the content and the narrative nature of his work. That is what i believe JR is trying to point out. He is not denying that Bergman is a great filmmaker. But for JR Bergman is ovverated because he is not a master on the level of a Dreyer, Bresson, Godard, Hawks, etc. because he failed to achieve what all the masters in all the arts did achieve: the creation of a new form whereby meaning and content derived directly from this new formic language.

Also, he makes another argument that he rightfully points out is being ignored by everyone. That much of Bergman's content is no longer as relavant as it was when he was making his films. This actually is a very subjective opinion but one that i would agree with. Bergman's thematic content seems a relic of his time and does not speak to me (a 29 year old persian american) they way it might have when his films first came out. But in Bergman's defense this is also the case with a lot of other great directors (Rossellini, Bresson, Mizoguchi). But coupled with Bergman's inability to radically change the language of Cinema the fact that his films content has dated signifies a significant decline in his relevance to current cinema and the world at large.

For me Persona is still one of the 50 best films ever made and one of the great works of art of the cinema. But i still know the difference between Bergman and Renoir just like i know the difference between Bob Dylan and Mozart no matter how much i like Like a Rolling Stone.

Puya wrote: "...what JR was trying to state about Bergman is something that in any other art would not be an issue. But only in the Cinema is content still so important to movie critics, fans, and the public at large."

That needs to be said again and again and again. Film criticism is uniquely retrograde in this regard, stuck in modes of aesthetic appreciation which predate the birth of the medium (and which predate the era of Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky, et al). Yet when a critic emphasizes these aesthetic qualities, as Jonathan does in his best work, that critic is pejoratively dismissed as a "formalist".
Of course to even recognize a content-form distinction in the first place plays into the hands of those who wish to prioritize things like narrative, theme, characters, acting, etc., over those modes of perception enabled by light-moving-in-time.

"Yet when a critic emphasizes these aesthetic qualities, as Jonathan does in his best work..."

Woops - meant to write:
Yet when a critic emphasizes FILMIC qualities, as Jonathan does in his best work, that critic is pejoratively dismissed as a "formalist".

Mr. Rosenbaum, your point about the potential conflict between the power to entertain and the power to change the way we see the world is well taken. I would say in response that if Bergman failed to change the way we see the world through medium-specific means, he changed the way we see the it through other ones. Yes, many of his films are pretentious and attitudinizing, but their expressions of sexual politics, destructive emotion, and the feeling of spiritual abandonment make them relevant to this day.

You say you find it interesting that "people are seizing on my remarks about form and ignoring my remarks about relevance to the contemporary world." Maybe it's because your remarks in the Times about his relevance are so underdeveloped. In fact, most of your article consists of assertions with little or no expansion or substantiation. All you actually write about his style is that his images have a "hard severity" and that he makes good use of close-ups. You briefly mention his "stylistic departures" but don't really discuss them. And you very briefly cite his "fluid storytelling" skills, an area that skirts the visual-style/verbal-content divide. (And yes, Jason G., there is a legitimate divide, especially in narrative film.) That's not a lot of discussion, but at least you establish a negative discourse by comparing his style to that of Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Antonioni and Welles.

Your comments on Bergman's verbal content, however, are brief, underqualified and unsubstantiated. You don't really cite any specific films in relation to thematics. You briefly cite Ibsen et al as precedents, then drop the matter. You say he was in retreat from the modern world but don't say how. You say he at best compressed the insights of other minds but don't name any, or say how he failed to build on them. You say that his films are too self-absorbed to have wider relevance, which is an interesting point, but I think spiritual confusion (Winter Light, Through a Glass Darkly) fear of death (The Seventh Seal), unrealized dreams (Scenes From a Marriage), the contingency of personal identity (Persona), the disappointments of old age (Wild Strawberries) and the destructive link between machismo and male sexuality (Sawdust and Tinsel) are pretty widely relevant. Yes, people in this discussion have occasionally danced around the issue of the relevance of his messages. But you set the precedent.

To Mike A.: I'm glad you think at least one of my points is well-taken.

Otherwise, even though you sound as punitive as the pastor in Winter Light, I have to concede that you must be right. When that Times editor invited me to write an Op Ed piece on this subject, I should have demanded four times as much space--not half a page of newsprint but two entire pages--before ever agreeing to continue, and then taken full advantage of this unbridled editorial freedom by qualifying and substantiating all my comments on Bergman's verbal content. Instead, I stuck with the length I was assigned and chose to dance the night away around the issue. Guilty as charged.

So thanks for teaching me that Bergman had so many original and interesting (and therefore relevant, as opposed to banal and warmed-over) things to say about spiritual confusion, fear of death, unrealized dreams, the contingency of personal identity, the disappointments of old age, and the destructive link between machismo and male sexuality--all of which you elect not to spell out, qualify, or substantiate, despite the fact that you have unlimited length. But in your case, I applaud your brevity. Think how bored we all might be if you tried to explain what you really meant.

Roger Ebert--Mr. Middlebrow himself--defending Bergman? Now I know the filmmaker's rep is in big trouble.

I've seen Fanny & Alexander twice. Like all Bergman movies the photography is absolutely stunning, but I find it a hard story to engage with. I admire the film but don't really care about the characters. The Silence is my favourite Bergman.

-------

Just like to add that while Bergman and Antonioni recently made headline obituaries, one of our great cinematographers quietly passed away: László Kovács. I particularly a fan of his photography on Paper Moon.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004088/

Ouch!

Of course, there's more specificity about Bergman's themes in my measly little post than there is in your entire article in the Times. But I'm glad to hear I spared you some boredom- I'll sleep better tonight. It'll also help knowing my superficialities weren't published in one of the most widely read and influential papers in the Western world. I'm going to stop bugging you now. Cheers.

Mike A - Rosenbaum is right to take issue with your attacks because, like his own in the Times article, you failed to substantiate your comments. I think it's important to remember that you both can view Bergman in a different light, shocking I know.

Mike A. and dave: I'm just a casual reader here - but are you guys really that naive as to think that "The Weary Precedent Setter" is Jonathan Rosenbaum? Does that comment sound like something that he would write? Welcome to the world of blog comments - where anyone can pose as anyone.

Sorry, Adam. But that's who I am. Mike A. and Dave are right.

Also liked Kovacs' work with Richard Rush, especially the ratchet focus in Psych Out.

I hope I can be forgiven for copying a slightly expanded recent post of mine from Jim Emerson's Scanners blog:

Last night I finally saw the three-hour version of Fanny and Alexander--the version that Bergman himself regarded as the compromised theatrical version (which is also the one that ranked so highly among critics in the Sight and Sound poll), not the much longer director's cut made for Swedish TV. The latter is also available in the same Criterion box set, though I haven't encountered much evidence that many of my colleagues outside of Scandinavian countries, including those who rank Bergman so highly and profess to be scholars of his work, have bothered to see it. In his piece on the film for his "Great Movies" series, Roger does acknowledge the longer version's existence and Bergman's own preference for it, but he doesn't get around to clarifying whether or not he's seen it and, if he has, whether he agrees or disagrees with Bergman's own estimation of it.

Sorry, guys, but I saw the three-hour Fanny and Alexander back to back with the 1953 Sawdust and Tinsel, and I much prefer the earlier film. Both are impressive in some ways, but the earlier film is far more impressive to me as an almost perfectly achieved work in relation to Fanny and Alexander, a bit of a sprawl by comparison which affects me the same way it affects Alef. Maybe I'd feel differently about the five-hour version, but that's not the version people have been criticizing me for not seeing.

For a very smart and adept estimation of what's good and what's not so good in the three-hour Fanny and Alexander, check out Pauline Kael's detailed review. And please don't come back to me with Oscar nominations. After all, the vile racism of The Deer Hunter as well as what I assume is the boring wartime propaganda of Mrs. Miniver were both validated and ratified with best-picture Oscars.

To all the most vocally fervent Bergman and Fanny and Alexander supporters out there: when are you going to see the original 312-minute TV version and explain why the 188-minute version is presumably better? Even Kael seemed to imply that when she concluded her review by noting that Bergman ALSO made a TV version, failing to acknowledge that the shorter version was simply a digest that Bergman had to put together in order to get the film shown in theaters.

I'm planning on watching the TV version of FANNY AND ALEXANDER as soon as I can.

Though I am not a Bergman scholar, I have seen the 5 hour Fanny and Alexander within the last year or so, and I can say that is a significant improvement over the theatrical cut, which I actually find overrated. (The same is true with the 5 hour Scenes From a Marriage by the way: the miniseries cut is superb, whereas the theatrical cut is less so). The criterion essay the accompanies the Fanny and Alexander dvd set nicely captures what the fundamental difference between the two is, namely that in the long cut, you get a much richer immersion into fantasy. With much of that missing from theatrical cut, it becomes a much more anemic film. I, too, would like to hear how anyone could think it's a better version.

Can one admire both Bergman and Dreyer? Yes indeed. So many (myself included perhaps) have taken to thinking the so-called Rosenbaum/Ebert battle is over who is greater Bergman or Dreyer. Personally I vote Dreyer, but that is not to diminish Bergman. Bergman is perhaps a stepping stone to greater heights (such as Dreyer and Bresson).

True, Bergman has an undeniable(?) masterpiece in his midst with Persona and a few near-calls, but JR may very well be right in his assessment of Bergman's lack of reputation these days, but then what great master is truly revered in today's Harry Knowles-esque wolrd of bloggers, where anyone with a keyboard and mouse can chime in (just as I am doing here by the way)??? Bergman may no longer have the reputation but is that the fault of his style (or lack thereof) or the result of a modern world of Tarantino-bred freaks (no offense QT)?? Is Dreyer relevent to the world? Probably not anymore, but that does not diminish his greatness as a stylist, and that should also not diminish Bergman's stylistic approach.

I must surely give Bergman his props (to use one of those modern terms) for changing my views on Cinema when I was still young enough to change, and also for his leading me to the heights of Dreyer and Bresson and Tarkovsky and maybe even Bela Tarr.

I know I sound rather wishy washy on the whole shabang, but I cannot help liking the cinema of Bergman while simultaneously decrying his lack of relevence in today's world.

I may not agree totally with your op/ed piece JR but certainly I applaud your production of it.

As far as Bergman's form goes. His was a form which needed closure of some sort. A visually static (and yes gloomy dammit) outlook on the idea of cinema. No more or less theatrical than Dreyer, yet Dreyer needed no such conclusion to his cinema. Bergman's cinema needed to dole out answers and in doing so his style may have fallen to the wayside. Still there, just hiding a bit. Whereas Dreyer's form was everything to his cinema. The difference between a teenager's overwhelming desire to have sex and an adult's knowledge that sex will indeed come to him in time. Perhaps this is a crude allegory but I think it quite apt.

One way to distinguish Bergman from both Dreyer and Bresson is to distinguish the art of mise en scene from the art of what the French call decoupage (which means "breakdown into shots" but can also more generally be defined as mise en scene plus editing). One thing I regret about my Op Ed piece is its implication that the art of decoupage is superior to the art of mise en scene, which is a short- sighted view: after all, Playtime, which is as important to me as Ordet or Gertrud or Au Hasard Balthazar, is mise en scene, not decoupage. And seeing Sawdust and Tinsel again over the weekend, I found the mise en scene even more dazzling than I remembered.

Some bloggers have been confused by my claim that Dreyer and Tarkovsky had more to say about the modern world than Bergman, but I was thinking in part about Day of Wrath as a film about totalitarianism, Gertrud as a film about both feminism and intolerance, and Stalker as a film about a very contemporary form of self- deception. For me, these films dig a lot deeper into the issues they take up, intellectually and politically, than Persona or Shame do--or Sawdust and Tinsel or Fanny and Alexander, for that matter.

In fact, for me the only glaring weakness in Sawdust and Tinsel is the psychologically bogus way that its actor character is drawn to mock and jeer at the circus director even after he seduces his mistress, for no reason in particular except to suit Bergman's fairly systematic s & m dramaturgy, which obliges practically everyone to be as mean as possible. This only makes sense to me as a simplistically misanthropic statement about people in general, and as such it seems puerile alongside the complex and nuanced ethical investigations of Day of Wrath or Gertrud or Stalker.

One way to distinguish Bergman from both Dreyer and Bresson is to admit that they are all very glaringly different individuals whose intensely separate lives and artistic visions share only the commonality of that certain medium they all worked in and mastered: what the Lumierre brothers rightly called cinématographe (writing the movement).

Their successes and failures will remain private ones and elusive to those who seek to understand them. The movies they leave behind are mysterious artifacts of these struggles and will slowly reveal themselves only to those who look with love. And lest we forget, Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer and Antonioni all stand on the same side of the fence. They are beyond our words.

And I can't express why, but this is the saddest movie artifact I have ever come across:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8qxiwhuD3g

Being Scandinavian, living in Sweden, it is fascinating to follow the commments on Bergman as they unfold here. Immediately after Bergman’s passing away Swedish TV sent six of Bergman’s films, and also the three-part documentary Mr. Rosenbaum refers to above somewhere. The films broadcast were ’Summer with Monika’, ’The Seventh Seal’, ’Wild Strawberries’, ’Winter Light’, ’Persona’, and the five-hour version of ’Fanny and Alexander’. An excellent opportunity to assess and re-assess his work. Leaving disputes about form and content aside, I believe there are two important observations in the original op-ed piece: one concerns Bergman’s love with theatre and his skill with his chosen actors, the other concerns the themes chosen. There is an evolution of form and content from the early 50s into the early 70s. During the 50s Bergman’s films were considered accessible, even entertaining. Gradually the themes explored turned inward, estranging (Swedish) audiences, but gaining the respect from those who were willing to invest their time in films like ’Winter Light’ and ’Persona’. This inward journey is difficult – we are taken to places where the emotions are ugly, as Mr. Rosenbaum put it. ’Cries and Whispers’ can be thought of as the end station for this process.
In the films of the 60s the characters are plagued by existential angst, ”expressions of sexual politics, destructive emotion, and the feeling of spiritual abandonment” – a phrase stolen from Mike A above. I have a hard time believing in many of these angst-ridden characters, and see only the manipulations of the puppeteer. There is a borderline sadistic treatment of them in many of Bergman’s films which is hard to take. It is as if the wrath of the scriptwriter is taken out on defenseless marionettes. Hard to see what is relevant about that today.
’Fanny and Alexander’ was made at a time when Bergman seemingly had mellowed. I remember seeing it during its first run in Gothenburg. I was surprised by the warmth of characterization and sympathy shown towards many of the characters. As for the question of whether the three or five-hour version of ’Fanny and Alexander’ is the better one: the five-hour version is richer, better paced, more humane and believable in terms of character. I have seen the longer version several times Get the Criterion and see the long version!
Dreyer, Bresson or Bergman? Or Hawks and Kiarostami, which I prefer? Bergman certainly was a great and important film director. How great? I find that a less interesting question, and I shall gladly leave it to those who are intent on discussing canons. It will be interesting to follow the developments.

Its very livener to read a conversation about cinema in so serious terms. But putting the polemic aside (anyway, i don't think Bergman is overrated), i just want to express my gratitude to the leading personage of the discussion.. Unattached to mainstream obligations, often teaching us and polemizing about masters of the art (i began to watch kiarostami, tsai ming-liang, tarr and others just catching his reviews), Jonathan deserved more respect as a jornalist, writer and film historian and critic. I think that Ebert's words "bizarre departure from his usual sanity" were very hard to take..

I agree that JR is indeed the champion of the unknown cinema. Sure everyone knows about Kane and Casablanca and Rashomon and Persona and City Lights (all great films for sure), but is Jonathan Rosenbaum who has championed films such as Satantango and the cinema of Kiarostami and the likes. Great job indeed JR.

I appreciate the supportive posts.

Below is the copy of a letter sent by French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier to the Sun-Times in support of Roger Ebert's article, taken from his website. And below that is the copy of a response I sent to the Sun-Times yesterday; the last I heard, the editors there were still deciding whether or not to run it.


Tavernier's letter to Roger:
Read and loved your defense of Bergman. Everything you say, all the points you raise, are valid, make sense and refute the vicious attacks of this sometimes brilliant but very often intolerant and rigid writer. He [Jonathan Rosenbaum] has a lot of pre-conceived opinions and for him a lot of films and directors are presumed guilty before being heard or seen. You have a right to dislike Bergman or Herman Melville or Malraux. You have the right to prefer Raymond Chandler or Balzac or Eudora Welty to Heidegger or Ezra Pound. But nobody forces you to write that, to take a public position against the artist you do not like. Most of the time the essays and books written against are forgettable or narrow-minded. You can like Dreyer and Bresson without firing at Bergman or Fellini. It was the great mistake of some of the best French critics such as Francois Truffaut; to defend Hitchcock, which was an important cause, he felt the obligation to wipe out the entire British cinema. To push Rosselini, Ophuls or Jacques Becker (have seen recently his “Touchez Pas au Grisbi” and the very modern description of the aging gangster, very innovative), you had to eliminate De Sica, Duvivier or Autant-Lara. To praise Mann you had to kill Delmer Daves. It seems that Mr Rosenbaum, who has been impressed by the new wave, has learnt more the intolerance than the perception.

My response:
Dear Bertrand,
Let’s see if I have this straight. Your letter implies that it’s perfectly OK for Roger to dismiss Abbas Kiarostami as an important filmmaker solely on the basis of Taste of Cherry and 10, thereby consigning The Traveler, Homework, Close-up, the Koker trilogy, and The Wind Will Carry Us to oblivion. It's also OK for Roger to bypass the original version of Fanny and Alexander, which Ingmar Bergman himself preferred, while chastising me for not having yet seen the three-hour version (which I finally caught up with last weekend). But it’s scandalously unacceptable for me to have responded favorably to an invitation from a Times editor to argue that some recent claims being made for Bergman after his death, in the Times and elsewhere --some implying that he dwarfed every other filmmaker in the history of cinema—-were a bit overblown, even if I allude in the piece to Bergman's "genius" and compare him to a director as admirable as George Cukor.

Your outburst reminds me of a critique I used to hear in Alabama during my teens: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” But if I wanted to write a major polemic (as I tried to do, for instance, in my book Movie Wars), I wouldn’t have attempted to squeeze it into an Op Ed piece. All I wanted to do was let some air into a subject that people appeared to be taking for granted--although the mere fact that my comments appeared in the Times seems to have unleashed a wave of hysteria.


Peace,

Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago 60613

Wow, Bertrand Tavernier's comments are horrid.
I'm not really sure what the big deal about the piece was. I mean pointing out the Ingmar Bergman may be overrated is hardly in the same league as totally dismissing Kiarostami, and if I remember correctly Angelopoulos as well.

I am huge Bergman fan and honestly after reading Rosenbaum's piece if you were to tell me it would cause a stir, I would have been surprised.

Looking back at it, I think that what may have gotten some people so worked up--even though most of them didn't mention it--were my remarks about the ugliness of the emotions expressed in some of Bergman's films, which they presumably wound up taking as personal attacks on their own seriousness in regarding Bergman's spiritual concerns with reverence.

I was discussing this issue with a friend last night, and we hypothesized that Bergman's (and also sometimes Woody Allen's) films often appear to say that if God doesn't exist, there's no moral or ethical compass left to work with--which to my mind is a real copout in relation to humanism, as well as an irresponsible "Open, sesame" to a kind of misanthropy and misogyny that I find distasteful, hence ugly. I also tend to connect this despairing "anything goes" notion to the extreme cruelty that becomes virtually fetishized in some of Bergman's films. (To put it in the crudest possible terms, it's presumably OK to heap abuse and scorn on your girlfriend if God doesn't exist anyway.)

Place this jaundiced view of mankind alongside the ethical concerns of most other important spiritually minded filmmakers (not just Dreyer, Bresson, and Tarkovsky, but also Bunuel), and Bergman starts to look like a bit of a primitive. This, in any case, is what I was trying to get at in my Op Ed piece. And if Bergman fans want to persist in seeing some higher form of humanity in Bergman's contempt for mankind, I'd like to hear their arguments.

P.S. I'd agree that the view of people in the three-hour "Fanny and Alexander" is somewhat softer and warmer than what I've just outlined above, which may partially account for its relative popularity. But that alone doesn't make it a masterpiece.

“I was discussing this issue with a friend last night, and we hypothesized that Bergman's (and also sometimes Woody Allen's) films often appear to say that if God doesn't exist, there's no moral or ethical compass left to work with--which to my mind is a real copout in relation to humanism, as well as an irresponsible "Open, sesame" to a kind of misanthropy and misogyny that I find distasteful, hence ugly.”


This is a slightly reductive reading of Bergman at least in relation to his whole career. While you do correctly read his despair about the non-existence of god, I do think later Bergman films tend to find some solace in love and family however fleeting and transitory they may be. I am thinking her of the ending of Scenes of a Marriage or even Cries and Whispers, or the role that imagination and fantasy play in at least the longer cut of Fanny and Alexander. These moments may not be triumphs of humanism but they are at least less nihilistic than earlier films such as Persona or the odd The Hour of the Wolf (which strangely enough is the one film I chose to revisit after his death)

Besides, if misanthropy were a standard by which we should consistently object to, we would have to abandon Luis Bunuel and Stanley Kubrick. I am not sure if either had any more faith in humanity than Bergman did…. but perhaps they were more funny about it than Bergman? Is it really that a Bunuel, a Kubrick, or other cinematic misanthropes are that much more ethical, or are they simply able to convince us of their vision of the world through a more effective, and varied, manipulation of style? The gender relations in The Shining, for example, are every bit as crude as in most Bergman films, but perhaps don’t feel so because of the detached style.

The problem, I think, in relation to Bergman’s being over praised—or rather why your piece seemed to raise such ire—is that the Roger Eberts of the world act as if film history ends in the 60’s or something. Yes, Bergman made a lot of masterpieces (at least I’d argue), but in terms of formal innovation, or more broadly using cinema to understand the world, I am not sure why he should be held to a higher esteem than a Kiarostami, Angelopoulos,Hsiao-hsien, or dozens of other directors in the last forty-years that have made as many, if not more so, wonderful films.

To "The Weary Precedent Setter"

It seems that people need to know more about what tolerance means. Maybe if you had kept your point of view to yourself then perhaps people, who have such a strong esteem towards Bergman's films, wouldn't feel so disturbed by it. But no, you published it in the "TIMES". Obviously you knew that in doing so, you would be causing some stir. But then again we're talking NEW YORK.
Quoting from Stanley Kubrick's superb "The Killing":

" Individuality is a monster, and
it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable."

I do like some of Bergman's films and although I agree that there is a certain lack of "humanism" (a term I'm not very fond of using because it's misleading)in them I prefer to think that, to a certain extent, Bergman was exposing themes rather than glorifying them. But we leave that to interpretation.

I was gladly surprised that "Inquietude" from Manoel de Oliveira made it into your ten favourite films of the nineties. He surely lacks recognition from his enormous output, especially here in his home country. I still prefer his "Vou Para Casa" but "Inquietude" was surely remarkable.

P.S. Being impressed by the French New Wave surely is a sign of good taste. And Jacques Tati is, perhaps, the french filmmaker I cherish the most.

Judging a film or a body of works is not that different from judging a person. There are people who are clever or even brilliant in something they do but you just hate their guts or they are morally objectionable. In this case, "humanism" does matter. Therefore, I do want to a encounter a film/person that is brilliant AND sincere and humane. I like to relate art to life, why should I view artists differently. If I were to have a dinner party, a Stanley Kubrick (perhaps the most overrated of them all) or an Ingmar Bergman is not invited. A Jacques Tati is delightfully welcome - same goes for Renoir, Ozu, Keaton, et al.

I agree with ZS, that misogyny is not a discriminatory criterion to judge the importance of any work of art. One might find it ugly, others wouldn't. We could discuss the ethics involved, the point of producing a pessimistic vision... We could analyze Bergman's personal psychology, question his own ethics... But this only qualifies his films thematically. I don't think it helps to determine their artistic importance. Van Gogh didn't paint Gernica, he only painted gloomy flowers, ok we might say he's not a politically engaged artist, but does that make him any less important than Picasso in regard of art history?
My point is I don't understand how we could balance moral content (or stylistic discrepency) with canonical importance. If philosophical probity is the ultimate standard in cinema, that would leave out a lot of auteurs from the Pantheon... not just Bergman.

To me, Bergman's (apparent) "contempt for mankind" (I call it cynicism), in his films, is to be contrasted with a subtext which begs the audience to confront this reality and react to the film with a higher moral ground than the protagonists. Quite like with Homer, Shakespeare, Sade, Dostoevsky or Camus. Sadism, cynicism, fatalism or melancholy could be the dramatic setting of a great tragedy that puts into perspective the lower extremes of the human condition, not to condone or aesthetize them, but to criticize the society that allows them. In this regard I never considered a negative (diegetic/narrative) worldview as negative in itself (for the filmmaker's intention), much less as a canonical exclusion in the realm of arts.

P.S. If we'd discuss the career of Woody Allen, it would be obvious to mention Bergman, on the side. However Allen's cinema can hardly help in any way to understand better Bergman's cinema if we are assessing Bergman's career. Allen's stature is not even at the level of this small circles of masters that caused this argument about the ultimate canon. They don't even make the same kind of movies.

How exactly is Tavernier defending Ebert's stance on Kiarostami, whom his letter never mentions? I don't think he's defending every word Ebert has ever written.

My letter speaks of what Tavernier's letter "implies," not what it mentions. Maybe you think this is a stretch, but it seemed appropriate after Tavernier wrote, with no backup or examples, that I have "a lot of pre-conceived opinions," and that for me, "a lot of films and directors are presumed guilty before being heard or seen."
So I thought I'd begin with an example where this was truly the case. Considering that I've seen at least 26 Bergman films whereas Roger's seen only two Kiarostamis, and explicitly declared that
"the emperor has no clothes" on the basis of the first of these, it seemed to me like this was a point worth making. I suppose one could argue that theoretically Tavernier was also only criticizing what my piece was implying (rather than saying), but if that's what he was doing he should have said so, as I did.

Just to mention the amount of interest and knowledge Ebert deposites on Kiarostami, i quote his review of Taste of Cherry: "What I do feel, however, is that Kiarostami's style here is an affectation; the subject matter does not make it necessary, and is not benefited by it". In other words, clearly his idea of cinema's aesthetics may be different from ours; thus the polemic about Bergman, Dreyer and Bresson styles would never be solved anyway.. Also, i can't afford to note that Ebert, in his bored words on Kiarostami's Ten, informed us that The Wind Will Carry Us was the winner of the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Film Festival! Even underseved, i might just grasp: poor Zhang Yimou, poor..

Intentionally or not Jonathan kicked up the dust of Bergman's ouevre which is a very revitalizing thing and made many of movie fans want to catch up with Bergman's quite huge cinematic output.
Though it's good to see remarks by Ebert & Tavernier, I think, in this case, some of 'em are quite perfunctory (not dissing Roger & Bertrand whatsoever), particularly Ebert's saraband remarks. I'm (and many people) more interested what's your response to recent D.Bordwell's article and his treatment of your NYTimes op-ed piece?
I'd like to object to the penultimate paragraph of your article. Though it's quite enjoyable to read your suckerpunching of NY bürgerskapp's darling W.Allen, but is it Bergman's fault or drawback as a filmmaker? Take a ticket to Sundance and you'll see a lotta Cassavetes' wannabees mimicking the idiosyncratic behaviour of Cass. protagonists, quite often to the point of being moronic.
What worries me is there's no other worthwhile film director in Sweden left, the problem of overcoming Bergman's seal so to speak. But hey what could have been invented or explored after the magnificent Persona. Well he chose to recycle and polishing his theatre-on-film thing, if you ask me/\.:)
Keep it up, J.

To Mr Bertrand Tavernier,

Just a few thoughts on your "public" letter:

"He [Jonathan Rosenbaum] has a lot of pre-conceived opinions and for him a lot of films and directors are presumed guilty before being heard or seen." ..... I haven't come across any article by JR on a film which he hasn't seen or heard before. Could you give us a specific example?

"But nobody forces you to write that, to take a public position against the artist you do not like." ..... So all the critics (including Roger Ebert whom I admire very much for his dedication and professionlism) should shut up and keep their opinion (especially a negative one on an artist) to themselves?

"It seems that Mr Rosenbaum, who has been impressed by the new wave, has learnt more the intolerance than the perception." ..... Now I get it - someone was in fact trying to use his defense of Roger Ebert to attack the French New Wave (and those people embracing its spirit). But the question is, why can't the people be more candid?

To Alex Bas: I never intended to blame Bergman for Woody Allen. My target was actually the NY Times' own elevation of Allen (mainly via Vincent Canby), in part because of his "serious" applications of Bergman. Canby even once advised Antonioni to take a look at Allen's films in order to learn how to make art films that weren't pretentious. I kid you not. He was reviewing "Identification of a Woman" when it showed at the NY Film Festival, and his review had the effect of making a lot of people who'd already purchased tickets take them back to the box office for a refund--a good example of the kind of herd instincts the Times often caters to. From this point of view, I wonder if accepting their invitation was signing a pact with the devil in some fashion.

I'm rather surprised that anyone could be in a position to know the work of all living Swedish film directors and therefore be able to judge their work as a whole. Is this really possible?

Although I haven't yet made it to the end of David Bordwell's piece apart from skimming it (I tend to get bored when he writes long, no matter how accurate he often is), I agree with most of what he said in the first two-thirds or so. I even emailed him to agree with him that nothing I was arguing was especially new. I also agreed with his statements about generations. But I also pointed out that I wasn't the one who selected the moment when I should write this piece for the Times' Op Ed page; I was invited by a particular editor to write this piece at a particular time, so the only choice I had in the matter is that I could have refused this invitation. I presume that Bertrand and Roger thinks I should have, which implies--sorry, Mark--that they would have turned down such an invitation themselves.
I wonder what David Bordwell himself would have done. His criticism of the Times' Op Ed piece seems fairly accurate to me, but does that mean he necessarily would have turned down such an offer if it had been made to him? I don't know the answer, of course; I'm just bringing up the issue.

"Canby even once advised Antonioni to take a look at Allen's films in order to learn how to make art films that weren't pretentious. I kid you not."

Wow, I almost did a spit-take while reading that. That is surely the silliest thing I've heard in a long time.

"I agree with ZS, that misogyny is not a discriminatory criterion to judge the importance of any work of art. One might find it ugly, others wouldn't."

To be clear, I said misanthropy (not misogyny) is not the best or clearest criterion by which to judge a filmmaker. I do think misogyny, on the other hand, is: If, as is clear in many recent Woody Allen films, the portraits of women verge on the hateful, then yes I think this is something one should object to. My point about misanthropy is that several filmmakers seem to have contempt for the world (many of whom Rosenbaum admires) and I don’t necessarily see how they are that much more ethical about it than Bergman.

Lol! That pretty much sums it all up. The public had certainly the same reason like hero from 'Faces', when asked about the possibilty of watching a Bergman movie.
I guess the question about the qualified judgement of all working & living swedish filmakers should be adressed to people who live in Sweden and fancy their native motion pictures. Among swedish contemporaries I can only recall Lukas Moodysson and Roy Andersson, that's not much and if I miss anybody else, I'd like to fill that gap. But it's quite obvious, they and Bergman are in different leagues.
Bordwell's critique is well argumented with painstaking academic rigor and very hard to refute. For example, his starting point, that you apply some criteria to Bergman which you do not to your favourite directors.
So out of curiosity I searched the net and it's well easy to find comments on filmakers' fav. movie lists, and in particular Bergman's quotations on Bresson, Antonioni, Godard and likes...
And since you're expert on Welles, I'm very eager to ask you whether Orson watched or had a slightest interest in any of so called european art movies during his expat days, especially anything by Robert Bresson, Dreyer, Bergman and likes...

P.S. Just a few days ago watched an interview with K.Anger at disinfo conference, where he called Welles a businessman, and Preston Sturges a great hollywood director.

Bergman on Welles

from http://www.ingmarbergman.se

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.

Aghed: How about The Magnificent Ambersons?

Bergman: Nah. Also terribly boring. And I've never liked Welles as an actor, because he's not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that's when he's croaks. In my eyes he's an infinitely overrated filmmaker.

- Jan Aghed, "När Bergman går på bio", Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Welles expressed admiration for Dreyer, Fellini, and Godard, but antipathy towards Antonioni, Bergman, and Bresson.

Personally, with the exception of A Clockwork Orange, I don't think Kubrick's or Bunuel's misanthropy (if that's what it was) present any of the same moral or ethical problems that I have with Bergman's. I think both of them saw the (external) world in a much more complex and nuanced way. Bergman was more interested in an inner world, I think.

Regarding the length of his blogs, David Bordwell has this to say:



"I’ve suggested elsewhere that too much film writing, on paper and on the Net, favors opinion over information and ideas. Opinions, which can be stated in a clever turn of phrase, suit the constraints of publication. Amassing facts and exploring ideas in a responsible way—making distinctions, checking counterexamples, anticipating objections, nuancing broad statements—takes more time. Academics are sometimes mocked for their show-all-your-work tendencies, and I grant that this can be tedious. But we’re just trying to get it right, and that can’t be done quickly."

"Now you know why our blog entries are so damn long."

"This one is no exception."

All perfectly true. And I do value a lot of David's work for these reasons. But as a nonacademic, I have to admit that there are times when I'm more interested in reading writers who are factually unreliable but do more to stimulate my imagination and sometimes do even more to change the way I watch films. The classic instance of this: Noel Burch.

Bergman's negative assessment of Welles is interesting, though not especially surprising. I also once heard him say in a documentary that Dreyer was much inferior as a filmmaker to Jan Troell--and that, if memory serves, Dreyer only made two good films. (One of these was The Passion of Joan of Arc--also no surprise--and the other, if memory serves, was Day of Wrath. Is it merely a coincidence that these are the two Dreyer films featuring torture?

“Personally, with the exception of A Clockwork Orange, I don't think Kubrick's or Bunuel's misanthropy (if that's what it was) present any of the same moral or ethical problems that I have with Bergman's. I think both of them saw the (external) world in a much more complex and nuanced way. Bergman was more interested in an inner world, I think.”


I do think Bergman’s films show concern with the external world (or political realities and social analysis which is presumably what is meant by the term here) but these concerns are not very sophisticated in relation to the spiritual and psychic questions of his film. In fact, his worst film for me, The Serpent’s Egg, tries to address political terror. I am not sure, though, whether this is really a problem of ethics unless one narrows the meaning of the term to reflect only the exclusive realm of the political or the social. What it seems to say to me is that Bergman’s greatest strengths are what largely date him as a filmmaker. As excellent as a film Winter Light is, its vision of the apocalypse is certainly less effective and timely today than say, Dr. Strangelove.

Recalling the reactions to Stanley Kubrick’s death, I wonder why he didn’t invite the positive hyperbole that Bergman’s has? I mean there was a Salon piece (at least I think it was them) that postulated that Bergman may have been the greatest artist of the 20th century! Now my memory could be faulty, but most Kubrick pieces seemed interested in gossip rather than the serious questions of his work, and his formal innovations which were certainly greater than Bergman’s. Surfing through the on-line archive of old Siskel and Ebert reviews, I was surprised to see Ebert panning Full Metal Jacket and saying it was inferior to Platoon. I wonder if he’d be willing to revisit that position today

Sorry, I meant "misanthropy" instead of "misogyny". (I don't believe Bergman is misogynist, he depicts great women characters)

Why would Bergman's use of "torture" on his fictional characters be different, in principle, to Dreyer's (or Bresson's)?
Jonathan, in your Essential Cinema essay, you seem to be more generous towards Lars Von Trier's cynicism in Breaking the Waves, than you are for the entire oeuvre of Bergman. You reckon there are creative, interesting ways to deal with misantropy. If the debate is about the content and moral purpose of such sadism, then we shouldn't stigmatize "misanthropy" in itself, and focus on Bergman's hollowness (if that's the case) rather than "sadism" (which is a cliché).
I don't know what you think of these following auteurs, but on the specific case of "misantropic treatment" what degrees separate the "cynicism" of, say, Bresson (Balthazar, Une Femme Douce, L'argent, Le Diable Probablement), Kaurismaki, Herzog, Cassavetes, Elaine May (Mickey and Nicky), Peter Watkins, Alan Clarke, Polanski, Kubrick, Kurosawa (Dodesukaden, The Lower Depths) , Kim Ki-duk... If you admire any of these, what justifies their harassment of fictional characters that doesn't work with Bergman (and I think he's at least greater than a few on the list).

Danny Onions, thanks for sharing Bergman's thoughts on Welles. Wow. Not a Bergman fan but at least I can agree with him on Citizen Kane. Talk about overrated!

I am a fan of Bordwell because the man does his homework but I admire Ray Carney just as much who is totally different from Bordwell. Although he's been quite harsh on Bordwell over the years. I wonder what he has to say on Bergman and Jonathan's op-ed piece...

The thing that really surprised me about Ebert's reaction to Jonathan's NYT piece was his last paragraph where he stated: "Finally, Rosenbaum laments how Bergman’s “mainly blond, blue-eyed cast members became a brand to be adopted and emulated.” Hello? Bergman worked in Sweden! Does he forgive Ousmane Sembene’s African exteriors and mainly black-haired, brown-eyed cast members? Or the way Ozu used all those Japanese?" Ebert seemed to have entirely missed the point which I thought was a highly insightful observation about the use of race in determining "greatness". One of the things that is most admirable about Jonathan's work is his engagement with the international film critical community. The book MOVIE MUTATIONS (co-edited with the great Adrian Martin) being one of the most recent examples of this. I think it is clear that the US critical establishment is more comfortable recognizing the greatness of white skinned performers then they are at recognizing and discussing the quality of performances given if the actors are Asian or African. For example, very few US based critics write about Ozu's work with Setsuko Hara, Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Kinuyo Tanaka, Shin Saburi in the same way that write about Bergman's collaborations with Max Von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Erland Jospehson. And how many US based film critics recognized the remarkable performance given by Venus Seye In Sembene's great FAAT KINE (2000)? To point this out is not to suggest that Bergman's work with actors was not remarkable for it certainly was! It is just to suggest that US critics that tend to support the system (and thus capitalism, US imperialism and white supremacy) are much more able to recognize this greatness when the actor's skin happens to be white and the country S/He comes from happens to be wealthy. One has to wonder if the changes in demographic composition in countries like Sweden have anything to do with the popular idea that "they don't have any great filmmakers anymore"? Looking through IMDB I noticed many recent Swedish films that remain unreleased in the US as having multi-cultural casts and dealing explicitly with issues of immigration, globalization, Islamic Fundamentalism and racism. Could there be a connection between the demographic changes in Europe and the hostility towards releasing European films? Could there be a connection between the oft uttered statements in dominant US publications that European cinema is in decline and the changing racial realities of Europe? I raise this especially because many of the critics and reviewers that keep telling us what a sad state European cinema is in seem to watch very little cinema from outside the US. So what are they really judging?

Jonathan, your issues with Bergman's misogynistic motifs seem to contradict with your fondness towards Peckinpah, who himself was probably the huge dame hater.
What Welles detested R. Bresson do not strike me as well, since I always suspected Welles despised any director who worked with amateur actors. And cuz Bresson really dug repetition.

I do like a few Peckinpah films, just as I like a few Bergman films--actually several more in Bergman's case. But my "fondness towards Peckinpah" is news to me.

Re: Misanthropy.

"The idea here, that when the world's legitimacy comes to rest upon consent--when the public world is something that each individual has at some moment to agree to join--that then adolescence is invented as the time of preparing for that agreement, and is ended by it...The world needs that sense, requires that you say, willingly, that the world is good enough to want to live in."

Stanley Cavell, "A Cover letter to Moliere's Misanthrope"

"The film (Sweet Movie) attempts to extract hope...from the very fact that we are capable of genuine disgust at the world; that our revoltedness is the chance for a cleansing revulsion; that we may purge ourselves by living rather than killing."

"...To see that the actor forgives the director is to see that Makavejev is forgiving himself--for the fact that the world is not better than it is and the fact that those who would make it better have only themselves, products of such a world, to work with. It is the best basis in the world from which to look for a new beginning, a first motion."

Stanley Cavell, "On Makavejev on Bergman"

Dear Mr. Rosenbaum,

Thanks for your many insightful reviews and brilliant recommendations over the years. This intriguing debate on the merits of Bergman sent me back to Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, a book which in parts reads like an extended commentary on Bergman films Tarkovsky had seen. There are a couple of observations Tarkovsky makes which it seems to me contain the seeds of a response to your question about the “ugliness” and “cruelty” of the emotions in Bergman’s films, and about his attitude towards those emotions.

“Let us look at Bergman’s Shame. The film doesn’t contain a single ‘actor’s piece’ for the performer to ‘give away’ the director’s purpose, to play his conception of the persona, his attitude towards it, to assess it in relation to the overall idea; and the latter is entirely hidden within the dynamic of the character’s lives, at one with it. The people in the film are crushed by circumstances; they act only in accordance with their situation, to which they themselves are subordinate; they make no attempt to proffer us any idea, any perspective on what is happening, or to draw any conclusion. All of that is left to the film as a whole, to the director’s vision. And how superbly it is accomplished! You cannot say in simple terms who amongst them is good or bad. I could never say that van Sydow is a bad man. They are all partly good and partly bad, each in his own way. No judgments are passed, because there is no hint of tendentiousness in any of the actors, and the circumstances of the film are used by the director to explore the human possibilities which they test, and not for a moment to illustrate a thesis.” (Sculpting in Time, 146)

Tarkovsky concludes that Bergman’s attitude towards what he calls the “cruel, anti-human” elements in his characters is an essentially non-judgmental one. As you pointed out in your original piece, this may be what makes watching some of his slow motion self-torture spectacles so excruciating. But I think that Tarkovsky is right about Bergman. Bergman’s greatest films are attempts to explore through his art the kinds of situations (in the case of Shame, war) which lead almost ineluctably to spiritual humiliation. Tarkovsky also points out that Bergman punctuates his portraits of inner desolation with moments of genuine human warmth and closeness (he cites a scene from Cries and Whispers). On Tarkovsky’s view, it is these rare scenes of human contact which reveal something of the “meaning” of the films. It seems to me that, for better of worse, this was Bergman’s territory up to and including Saraband.

Just wanted to concur with the folks who were surprised to see how much outrage Mr. Rosenbaum's essay generated. Is it just the timing of the piece, or the fact that it was in the NY Times? As JR, Bordwell, and others have pointed out, there isn't anything new or controversial about JR's assessment of Bergman's work. I can't recall ever reading a serious appraisal of Bergman's films that didn't include some, if not all, of these criticisms.

Honestly, I felt that this made Ebert's response particularly disengenuous; i.e., JR's "departure from his usual sanity" - aw, c'mon, Roger, after 30+ years as a critic are you truly shocked to learn that some find Bergman to be dour, stagey, self-absorbed and pretentious? (not a a fair reduction of JR's opinions, I know).

JR is taking a lot of heat for his essay, but personally I thought his essay, while perhaps ill-timed, was fair, respectful, and well-reasoned. To the contrary, I thought Ebert's response was mean and personal. It wasn't a defense of Ingmar Bergman; it was a defense of Roger Ebert. Just like Ebert's attack on Foundas wasn't a defense of Crash; it was a self-defense for naming Crash the best movie of the year. By all accounts, Mr. Ebert is a warm and generous critic and person. But he seems to bristle when anyone states or implies that his tastes are pedestrian or his critical faculties dull.

“And if Bergman fans want to persist in seeing some higher form of humanity in Bergman's contempt for mankind, I'd like to hear their arguments.”

As Bergman fan I’ll be the first one to say that this can be the basis of a valid argument towards Bergman’s oeuvre in the same way it has been a valid argument towards Kubrick’s by many of his dissenters. What I don’t understand is how the works of Bunuel, Dreyer, Bresson, and Tarkovsky constitute oeuvres with more ethical concerns in contrast to the “primitive” Bergman.

As far as Bunuel goes, I agree with a previous comment that didn’t seem to notice a difference between “Bergman’s contempt for mankind” and Bunuel’s. Perhaps what Bunuel had going for him was that he tended to be very funny about it.

“As in Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, the heroine suffers greatly, but whether she suffers at the hands of humanity or von Trier himself isn't entirely clear.”

In regards to Dreyer, what Jonathan Rosenbaum writes in his review of Dogville could in many ways be applicable to the suffering of Renee Maria Falconetti (is it merely a coincidence that von Trier thinks so highly of Dreyer?).

Bresson’s analysis of S & M relations throughout Au Hasard Balthazar culminates in many ways in the director’s own self implication to this misanthropy through what appears to be filmed animal abuse by the various actors throughout the film.

As for Tarkovsky, let’s not forget that this is the same director who filmed a cow on fire and a horse being brutally killed very slowly. The connection between the “despairing "anything goes notion to the extreme cruelty that becomes virtually fetishized” is a quality that can be used to describe not only the work of Bergman, but the work of Bunuel, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Au Hasard Balthazar, and Andrei Rublev.

Brief reply to one of Harry Tuttle's points:

"Jonathan, in your Essential Cinema essay, you seem to be more generous towards Lars Von Trier's cynicism in Breaking the Waves, than you are for the entire oeuvre of Bergman."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall making any reference to von Trier's "genius" or comparing him to George Cukor or talking about his gift for directing actresses.

In one of your previous bash notes, you mistakenly imply that I have a "weekly column" and can write about anything I want to in the Reader at any time--and also that I spontaneously contacted the New York Times just after Bergman's death, deciding in my poor judgment this was the proper moment to mount an attack on him. I guess I should be flattered that you think I have that kind of clout with the Times. But if you check Glenn Kenny's web site, you'll find an account (by me) of how the piece came to be written, and why. Of course you're still free to believe I should have rejected the Times' (supposedly) crass invitation, just as (presumably) you and Roger Ebert and Bertrand Tavernier and Owen Gleiberman all would have done if any or all of you had received the same invitation. I applaud your principled stand on this matter, even though none of you has actually bothered to take it--only implied that I should have.

I agree with Jonathan's points regarding so many of the proclamations of 'Fanny and Alexander''s greatness existing within an ironic field of dismissal — including a dismissal of (or at least disinterest in watching) the complete 5-hour version of the film.

The facts being: (1) The complete version is available at any U.S. retail outlet with a Criterion section (e.g., Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.). (2) Bergman publicly expressed the feeling that the film was the summation of his life's work in film, a conscious cinema valediction. (3) Bergman dismissed the shorter version, just as he dismissed the shorter version of 'Scenes from a Marriage,' both as compromised edits made for theatrical exhibition.

So why any self-professed Bergman admirer would not take it upon himself to pop the DVDs of this, his self-professed magnum opus in its full and easily available form, into the player (as though there were some more difficult obstacle here, that's eluding me) really seems pretty puzzling. And feeds the suspicions that for many of these critics, like Roger Ebert, the movies they see and how they see them boil down to what any given 'assignment' dictates.

I have seen the 5-hour version, and I have seen ONLY the 5-hour version. With Bergman's cinema such an important part of my existence, I never dreamt of spoiling the experience of seeing the "final" film until I had seen a majority helping of the films that had come before, and until I was able to see the film in its intended form, which the Criterion release made possible. Obviously, I don't have the "abridgement" to compare it to (and don't really care, considering the 3-hour version is precisely an ABRIDGEMENT), but the 5-hour version "unfurls" itself with a pace and a trajectory (and a mystery) quite unlike anything else in cinema, although the easy comparison with regard to literature would be Proust. It's moving not only for its scope, the sharpness of its characterizations (particularly the two uncles, the grandmother, Josephson's usurer/antique-dealer), and its raptuous visual beauty, but also for the way in which the pacing of the story (indeed, of the 'decoupage') seems to figure, cinematographically, the gestation of the consciousness of the artist himself, embodied within Alexander.

Most remarkably, Bergman has constructed the picture like a "prism" of all (or at least the most significant entries, of which there are many) of his previous films. Resonances abound, from the repetition of dramaturgy, to visual cues, to pieces of dialogue, and so on, that establish the film not only as "the conscious summary of Bergman's work," but as an expression of the very "interiority" of artistic creation and the human soul which, to paraphrase Nabokov/Shade, shall and must "live on, fly on, in the reflected sky." And incidentally closes the circle that joins the interchange between old age and childhood — which, for Bergman, has always been the seat of grace. How strange to misunderstand Bergman as positing the absence of God would equate to a moral void! 'Fanny and Alexander' is the grace of consciousness.

As a P.S.: Sometimes the existence of God was on his mind, at other times of his life the existence or non-existence of God was simply not an issue of interest. For example, near the end, and with 'Saraband' specifically, wherein one gets the sense that for Bergman the notion of an afterlife had less to do with a Divine Power than in the power of the human soul. Going back even to 'Smiles of a Summer Night' or, yes, even 'The Seventh Seal,' we can see that IB has always been one of the supreme secular humanists of the cinema, in that high satyrean vein shared by Renoir, Vigo, and Shakespeare.

You know your in the right when Owen Gleiberman is against you.

"You know your in the right when Owen Gleiberman is against you."

Ha! How true. Really, I still don't understand how people are reading Rosenbaum's piece as that critical against Bergman.

Certainly there is nothing in the Bergman piece as absurd as the following comment by OG:

"Specious as it is, this argument represents what has become a vanguard attitude in the way that foreign films are now routinely celebrated — not for their expression, but for their benumbed lack of expression. You see it in the canonization of directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, the spiritual heirs to Bresson: filmmakers who fetishize their refusal to dramatize, who create art that is meandering and oblique, at times to the point of madness."

Wow, I mean this is a plan stupid comment on the aesthetics of Bresson, Kiarostami, and others. I suppose I shouldn't have been touched by And Life Goes on or Ten by Kiarostami.

I was trying to think of why I can't stand OG, and I think it was solidified by his short capsule on Kirby Dick's DERRIDA where he called it "slipshod" for not mentioning Sartre or Foucault, which is a sort of confession to having never read Derrida since references to those two writers in Derrida's complete oeuvre could be counted on one hand and still have the middle finger left up to aim in OG's direction. But if he just wants to feel smart by hearing the name of perhaps the only French philosopher he has ever read in a documentary he knows nothing about, that explains a lot about him as an intellectual. Assuming his preference for Sartre, that may be related to his allegiance to Bergman, as both seem to me more like adolescent phases than serious players in their respective fields. But both have that positive ability of beging stepping stones.

Still don't understand blaming Bergman for Woody Allen's preference for blondes.

Bergman had power to entertain but he's not popular.

His very good director's abilities are a liability.

The reasons for his success are his sexy actresses.

Bergman's repetitive and New Yorkers like him.

Jonathan, you are describing Woody Allen. Bergman is not responsible for Allen's well done and pointless films.

I agree that Bergman is overrated and that what he attempted to do on film often would have been more effective in a theater. I also agree that his work is parochial.

However, Bergman hit on something that Woody Allen figured out and that is how to make a scene memorable however pointless it is. I can vividly remember scenes from Bergman's and Allen's films casually viewed years ago. They are like mindless songs that won't leave the brain.

Who ever said that Bergman was to blame for Woody Allen? Not me.

Maybe Vincent Canby was partly responsible for overrating and thereby validating Allen's film-by-film derivations from Bergman and Fellini, one after the other, as if this form of abject imitation was precisely the way Allen should develop as an artist--but certainly neither Bergman nor Fellini could be held even remotely responsible for such an aberration.

Thanks for the reply Jonathan.
Firstly I'm not bashing you, it's self-defense, you initiated the assault and asked for a response. It's only about this article actually. I'm reading your Essential Cinema at the moment and admire it a lot.
I know my tone is provocative but blogs don't need the polished discourse of an exposed newspaper. I tried to drop the angry voice when posting on your blog though.

re: Lars Von Trier. You don't call Bergman a genius either (except for his stage work). So it's to tell how you rank them respectively. All I see is that you give a bump to von Trier, for making an interesting film despite all the shortcomings you accuse Bergman of. While the general intent of your op-ed piece is to bring Bergman down (I agree you don't call him a hack either). And both are compared to Dreyer, who seems to be the only canonical yardstick. You establish relative comparisons without a referential point, except Dreyer (who is supposed to be another floating point if old canons are disputed).
I doubt you meant Cuckor would fit in your top canon with Dreyer and Bresson, did you? Maybe the comparison was flattering but the goal of your piece was to define who's in and who's out. And if I understood right, both Cuckor and Bergman are good directors, but not worthy of the elitist canon you seem to isolate from the rest of cinema. Again I could assume wrong, but that's the impression many readers had.
The re-evaluation of Bergman's achievements is a legit endeavor, as long as you don't make it a lever to prove many other things on a more universal level (such as canon definition and auteurs ranking). Bergman is considered a master by many generations of serious critics (not just by the public opinion which has no academic weight), despite his aknowleged shortcomings. So this is not a stature anyone can brush off with the back of the hand, just because there are other auteurs who are more political or less misanthropic.

Thank you for correcting me if I misrepresented your job opportunities. Does it mean you couldn't negociate the publication of a Bergman article at the Chicago Reader?
Personally I was surprised to learn it was your first invitation by the NYT. They could use your insights more often (no sarcasm). For whatever it's worth, I think you're better than any resident NYT critic!
Though I still think this anti-Bergman piece was in bad taste, for all parties involved.
I don't blame you for accepting, and I certainly would not endorse Ebert's and Tavernier's self-serving rant (who, like you, divert the original topic to splash bad vibes on side off-topic grudges).
I saw at Premiere that with 4 drafts, things can get a little complicated alright. Though you are responsible for the objectionable content and that's what we are debating. the material and timely conditions of its making don't matter that much to the reader.
The best case scenario would have been to let you write the bash piece you had in mind against New Yorkers and Allen, and just leave Bergman out of it altogether. A straightforward fashion piece that wouldn't hide behind a pseudo canonical revision. I don't mind your attack on Allen, nor your distaste for Bergman, it's the collision I'm not comfortable with. Bordwell said it best so far, maybe you wanted to say too much in too few words. And it came off in a quite disturbing, confusing way.

Beginning of second paragraph should read : "So it's hard to tell how you rank them respectively"

Why can't some people just deal with negative criticism? So Mr. Rosenbaum criticized Bergman, so what? Is Bergman beyond criticism? Did he say that he wanted to write a bash piece against New Yorkers and Allen? Where? When? People should stop putting words in his mouth.

Quit the ad hominem. Tell us why Bergman is important. Provide a rebuttal. Stop criticizing the criticisms. We are going around in circles in this debate. Stop being so sensitive. Stop taking things so personally. Go to the films. Show us the evidence. Convince us that Bergman isn't overrated. Debate.

I should say this, Harry Tuttle sure is condescending ie. "the public opinion has no academic weight". Haha. How patronizing. So that makes this "public opinion" (whatever that is, and, hell, how do you obtain it in the first place?) worthless? It's a vague notion employed by "intellectuals" to make them feel better and smarter than the "common herd", the "dumb ordinary layman". Of course, Harry Tuttle is as guilty of the groupthink he so criticizes. See as he refers to "many generations of serious critics" to validate his opinion. Can't one think on his own?

Stop bashing Woody Allen. He's a great director. He's just been trying to hide it for the last twenty years (to do him justice, he sometimes fails).

Dear Dottie,
if you asked me I'd tell you how condescending I am with the taste of the majority (as indicated by the box office ranking). But this quote is not condescending, it's descriptive distinction between two groups Rosenbaum refers to, to oppose the academic canon to the audience preference (which is the argument of his op-ed piece!). Check out how a canon is formed and you'll see it's not a democratic poll of the audience at large. ;)

Thanks a bunch, Dottie; you said it all for me.

I think the persisting problem in much of this discussion, if discussion is what it is, is mythology: the mythology of Bergman, the mythology of Allen, the mythology of the Times, even the mythology of little old me. Example, to reply to Harry Tuttle's, "Does it mean you couldn't negotiate the publication of a Bergman article at the Chicago Reader?": Why would I even want to do that, assuming that I could? Am I supposed to ask my editor now in order to find out? Jeez. As I've explained many, many times by now, I was responding to an invitation from the Times. I wouldn't have written the piece otherwise. If that invalidates the piece for you, fine--be my guest and invalidate it. I'd even welcome the gesture. Put it out of your mind. And please let me get on with my life.

I'm sure it's been said before, but I think it's worth saying again: the biggest contributing factor to the outraged response to the article is just the timing of it. People have increased sympathy for the very recently departed.

Sorry. All my apologies for preventing your life to go on. I thought we only stirred a pot...

Maybe its time to all of us get a softer mood on the comments. I know that op-ed piece was very controversial in subject and publication time (the old man die and receive an examination titled "Scenes from an Overrated Career"), but, for my money, JR sincerely and polished had answered lots of questions and provocations coming for all sides (readers, movie directors, other critics). Lets take it easy with him. If we didn't have polemic and courageous writers like JR, the movie critics of the US would dissipate completely. Remember P. Kael, D. Mcdonald and others??

Whoa! Bergman died?!

Holy crap! You guys are still discussing this? Everyone go get a drink, now. On me. Charge it to my credit card. The number is 1111-1111-1111-1111. Don't forget the seventh one or it won't work. And let's see, it expires... uh, says here "sometime in the future".

Jonathan, I must say (having just stumbled across this blog - I'm a little slow with these things) that I admire your willingness to respond to comments so enduringly. Anyway, I was wondering if we could see the list of 25 favorite foreign films you submitted as part of the nominating committee for the online poll of favorite foreign films being organized by Edward Copeland. Your knowledge of non-english language films is formidable to say the least and I and several others would love to see what you submitted. I'm sure it will make the list I submitted look even more mundane than it already does.

Sorry I don't have anything to say about the Bergman kerfuffle. You riled me up pretty well with your Times piece but since then you have explained yourself so well (and at length)that I feel somewhat amused that I ever let it bother me in the first place. File my initial reaction under "knee-jerk."

And finally, to READER - Now that's a comment!

I stumbled onto this chat as I was browsing the site. I haven't managed to read the entire conversation but I must point out a couple of things I find completely uncalled for, all regarding the criticisms of Roger Ebert.
For one, the fact that Ebert has not seen the uncut version of Fanny and Alexander does not invalidate his argument. He cited the film to prove to Rosenbaum that not all of Bergman's films possess the "upscale, antiseptic" look. You do not need to see the entire film to realize this. One need only watch five minutes of the film to realize this. I'm not saying he shouldn't watch the uncut version but the fact that he hasn't does not get in the way of the point he was making about the cinematography.
Now in response to this comment Rosenbaum made:
"Let’s see if I have this straight. Your letter implies that it’s perfectly OK for Roger to dismiss Abbas Kiarostami as an important filmmaker solely on the basis of Taste of Cherry and 10, thereby consigning The Traveler, Homework, Close-up, the Koker trilogy, and The Wind Will Carry Us to oblivion. It's also OK for Roger to bypass the original version of Fanny and Alexander, which Ingmar Bergman himself preferred, while chastising me for not having yet seen the three-hour version (which I finally caught up with last weekend)."
Yes, it is. He was chastising you because you made a claim about Bergman's visual style which is completely contradicted by Fanny and Alexander. It is unfair to call Bergman's look antiseptic without regarding the stunning visual beauty of one of his most acclaimed films. The original version, while terrific, is irrelevant to this particular discussion about Bergman's allegedly antiseptic style.
Now about Kiarostami. First of all, Ebert has also seen The Wind Will Carry Us, as he said in his review of 10. I guess he just didn't consider worthwhile to review. Is this such a crime? I think that critics shouldn't waste time discussing films they don't believe to be worthy of discussion. You of all people should agree with this. Wasn't it you who refused to watch The Departed on the basis of those involved with it, in spite of its good reviews? Aren't you consigning that film to oblivion? At least Ebert didn't refuse to watch or review 10, even though he had already found both Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us uninteresting. I think he should have, just as I think you had every right to pass on The Departed. Critics should pursue what they find interesting. If they don't, they're wasting their own time as well as their readers'.
I also have to point out that you've misquoted Roger Ebert in a way that distorts what he said about Kiarostami. You said:
"Considering that I've seen at least 26 Bergman films whereas Roger's seen only two Kiarostamis, and explicitly declared that
'the emperor has no clothes' on the basis of the first of these, it seemed to me like this was a point worth making."
He said:
"Both believed they had seen a masterpiece. I thought I had seen an emperor without any clothes."
It’s highly debatable as to whether he is making a judgment on Kiarostami's entire career or simply making a comment on the particular film he had just seen (Taste of Cherry). Even if he was referring to Kiarostami, that doesn't make it an overarching comment about every film he has ever produced. For instance, one could defensibly say, "I've loved Kiarostami's previous films but this time I think the emperor has no clothes". Furthermore, the fact that Ebert went on to see two more of his films shows that he had not given up on the director at this point.
There is one last comment I find particularly disconcerting made by Zs:
"The problem, I think, in relation to Bergman’s being over praised—or rather why your piece seemed to raise such ire—is that the Roger Eberts of the world act as if film history ends in the 60’s or something. Yes, Bergman made a lot of masterpieces (at least I’d argue), but in terms of formal innovation, or more broadly using cinema to understand the world, I am not sure why he should be held to a higher esteem than a Kiarostami, Angelopoulos,Hsiao-hsien, or dozens of other directors in the last forty-years that have made as many, if not more so, wonderful films."
First of all, the claim about Ebert's view of film history is ridiculous. He champions new films every year and his Great Movies collection features dozens upon dozens of "contemporary classics". Not to mention, Ebert hailed Hsiao's Three Times and has at least taken the time to see some of Kiarostami's films.
And, let's assume you're right. Let's assume these filmmakers are more worthy of attention than Bergman. Does that mean Bergman is so NOT worthy of attention that he deserves to be called an overrated misanthrope shortly after his death? And what's with all this discussion about whether or not Fanny and Alexander is a masterpiece? Who cares whether or not it is a masterpiece? I'm inclined to quote Rosenbaum:
"If we could learn to respect non-masterpieces for a change--some of which are potential masterpieces that we're still trying to understand--we might both be able to chill out."
Let's not insult Bergman simply because his work isn't as "masterful" as Kiarostami's or Hsiao's.

“First of all, the claim about Ebert's view of film history is ridiculous. He champions new films every year and his Great Movies collection features dozens upon dozens of "contemporary classics". Not to mention, Ebert hailed Hsiao's Three Times and has at least taken the time to see some of Kiarostami's films.
And, let's assume you're right. Let's assume these filmmakers are more worthy of attention than Bergman. Does that mean Bergman is so NOT worthy of attention that he deserves to be called an overrated misanthrope shortly after his death?”

Oh no, it’s not ridiculous. What Ebert has reviewed in relation to the aesthetic, political, and national spectrums available in world cinema in the last forty-years is rather narrow. While obviously he shouldn’t review anything he doesn’t want to, nor is required to like anything, the way in which he dismisses Angelopoulos or Kiarostami films suggests a limited frame of reference. When Ebert champions a film like Satantango in one of his review books, then you could make a case that he is moving beyond limited categories by which movies are marketed.

Also, you misunderstand me entirely. I didn’t say Kiarostami is better than Bergman, but see no reason why the latter should be considered better than the former. The obvious point missed is that ranking directors, or placing them above criticism as seems to be the case here with all the Bergman defenders, is a thoroughly pointless exercise. Regardless of his strengths, Bergman is overrated because there are simply too many great films and directors who add as much to the history of cinema. I personally think he is an overrated misanthrope but I love many of his films: Why exactly is that a contradiction?

"Oh no, it’s not ridiculous. What Ebert has reviewed in relation to the aesthetic, political, and national spectrums available in world cinema in the last forty-years is rather narrow. While obviously he shouldn’t review anything he doesn’t want to, nor is required to like anything, the way in which he dismisses Angelopoulos or Kiarostami films suggests a limited frame of reference. When Ebert champions a film like Satantango in one of his review books, then you could make a case that he is moving beyond limited categories by which movies are marketed."
I'm sorry but... have you ever read Roger Ebert? Are you aware that he has praised such Iranian filmmakers as Jafar Panahi, Tahmineh Milani, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Babak Payami? The fact that he doesn't like some of the work of one Iranian filmmaker (for perfectly valid reasons, whether or not you agree with them), does not make him narrow minded. In the past few years he's hailed filmmakers from various parts of the world: Iran, Russia, Hong Kong, China, Mexico, Senegal, Spain, Romania, and Japan. These are simply the ones I can think of off hand. And he hasn't "dismissed" Abba Kiarostami. He has dismissed the work which he has seen by Kiarostami. There is a difference. When he opened his review of 10 with "I have yet to grasp the greatness of Abba Kiarostami", I believe it to be a genuine suggestion that he is certainly trying to. Anyhow, you can't say that he disliked the film on the basis of a closeminded world view because he has gone out of his way to champion other films from Iran.

"Also, you misunderstand me entirely. I didn’t say Kiarostami is better than Bergman, but see no reason why the latter should be considered better than the former. The obvious point missed is that ranking directors, or placing them above criticism as seems to be the case here with all the Bergman defenders, is a thoroughly pointless exercise. Regardless of his strengths, Bergman is overrated because there are simply too many great films and directors who add as much to the history of cinema. I personally think he is an overrated misanthrope but I love many of his films: Why exactly is that a contradiction?"
No, I'm with you on this one. Comparing these two very different filmmakers is a pointless exercise.
That said, I think you're coming dangerously close to contradicting yourself. You say that Bergman is overrated because there are "too many great... directors who add as much to the history of cinema..." As much? Just as much? So...equal contributions. Well, if these other filmmakers contribute just as much to cinema as Bergman does then Bergman contributes just as much to cinema as they do. Therefore, by your logic, those filmmakers are overrated as well.
So, I guess these filmmakers you are referring to, with their equal contributions to cinema, are all equally overrated.
But maybe you meant to say that Bergman is overrated because there are simply too many great films and directors who add MORE to the history of cinema. That would be a more logical argument. But then you're contradicting what you said about the pointlessness of ranking directors.
I hope I don't sound like a smart alec but what I am trying to point out is this: Bergman, Kiarostami, Angelopoulos, and Hsiao are all completely different directors. The existence of one director does not decrease the value of the films of another director. They exist in their own habitats. Let's not start devaluing Bergman simply because there are other great filmmakers out there. (This is why I felt it necessary to cite Rosenbaum’s “In Defense of Non-Masterpieces”.)

To Colin:

Roger didn't say he saw "The Wind Will Carry Us" in his review of "10". All he said is something he could easily have gleaned from just about any review--and, if memory serves, he told me at the time, or perhaps more recently, that he hasn't seen the film.

I didn't make any such claim about Bergman's style always being antiseptic--and if I had, I wouldn't have had to see "Fanny and Alexander" in order to be corrected. I could just as easily have seen "Sawdust and Tinsel," "Smiles of a Summer Night," "The Magic Flute," or plenty of others. But if your understanding of what I wrote or what Roger wrote is really that primitive, there's nothing to be gained from any further discussion.

To Jonathan:
Regardless of whether you said all of his films have an antiseptic style or just a few, the purpose of Ebert's reference to Fanny and Alexander was to point out one of many examples of Bergman films without this style. Therefore, Ebert’s failure to have seen the uncut version is just as irrelevant.
For what it is worth, when I said that Roger was trying to prove that not all Bergman’s films possess this style, I’m simply referring to his argument:
“Rosenbaum complains of “the antiseptic, upscale look of Mr. Bergman’s interiors.” Would that include the interiors in “The Virgin Spring,” “The Seventh Seal,” “The Passion of Anna,” “The Silence,” “Wild Strawberries,” “Hour of the Wolf,” “Scenes from a Marriage” and indeed “The Magician” and “Persona?” (I would mention “Fanny and Alexander” and its horror-house Lutheran parsonage but Rosenbaum says he hasn’t seen the film voted #3 in the Sight & Sound poll of world directors and critics to determine the best films from 1975-2000.)”
He would not have felt the need to cite examples of films without this antiseptic look if he didn’t feel that you were making generalizations about Bergman’s work. Furthermore, I think your argument would seem less ludicrous if you WERE making these sweeping generalizations. After all, it’s a bit peculiar to accuse a director of being overrated, partially on the basis of his visual style, and fail to mention the fact that about ten of his most acclaimed (or “overrated”) films does NOT possess the style you are describing.
The Wind Will Carry Us bit is a mistake on my part but if these two details are you're willing to respond to then I suppose you're right about how little is to be gained from this conversation.

“That said, I think you're coming dangerously close to contradicting yourself. You say that Bergman is overrated because there are "too many great... directors who add as much to the history of cinema..." As much? Just as much? So...equal contributions. Well, if these other filmmakers contribute just as much to cinema as Bergman does then Bergman contributes just as much to cinema as they do. Therefore, by your logic, those filmmakers are overrated as well.”

Colin, You obviously seem only interested in logical games rather than discussion. Given that I said RANKING directors not COMPARING directors is a pointless exercise. Certainly, one can compare different directors in order to understand larger aesthetic, political, or social questions about film history. RANKING directors, such as what has happened after Bergman’s death, is a pointless exercise and inevitably leads to overrating a director’s work. Other than a mistake about dvd availability, why exactly should JR’s piece have upset Ebert or any so?

Also, I have no idea what your defense of Ebert is. He is a good popular film critic, but if you think he covers a wide spectrum of world cinema in his writings, then you are simply mistaken.

"Colin, You obviously seem only interested in logical games rather than discussion. Given that I said RANKING directors not COMPARING directors is a pointless exercise. Certainly, one can compare different directors in order to understand larger aesthetic, political, or social questions about film history. RANKING directors, such as what has happened after Bergman’s death, is a pointless exercise and inevitably leads to overrating a director’s work. Other than a mistake about dvd availability, why exactly should JR’s piece have upset Ebert or any so?"
My logical game is simply there to point out that the statement I was responding to makes absolutely no sense. Bergman is overrated because other filmmakers contribute as much to cinema as he does? The fact that there are filmmakers as valuable as he is makes him less valuable? I wasn't fishing out a loophole in your argument. I was breaking it down because I found it utterly baffling. I'm sorry if this came across as being unnecessarily daft.
I think my biggest problem with this entire discussion is the futility of determining whether a filmmaker is overrated. Calling a filmmaker overrated is usually less than meaningless. There are millions of different opinions about Ingmar Bergman out there. It’s pretty much impossible to make any kind of generalization about how he is "rated". I'd say it is even difficult to make a blanket statement about how Bergman is "rated" by his fans. I'd actually argue that a filmmaker like Kiarostami is rated more highly than Bergman is. Bergman's body of work generates more polarized responses than Kiarostami's does, in my opinion. Reviews Ten and The Wind Will Carry Us were abundantly favorable. So how exactly is Bergman overrated?

"My logical game is simply there to point out that the statement I was responding to makes absolutely no sense. Bergman is overrated because other filmmakers contribute as much to cinema as he does? The fact that there are filmmakers as valuable as he is makes him less valuable? I wasn't fishing out a loophole in your argument. I was breaking it down because I found it utterly baffling. I'm sorry if this came across as being unnecessarily daft."

Given your refusal to engage in any contextualiztion here, and instance on playing reductive logical and rhetorical games, it’s no wonder you find things baffling. Since we are talking about the type of praise Bergman has largely received upon death, claiming him the master of all things serious in cinema among other things or in the case of a Salon article the greatest film artist of the century, then it is obvious that he is overrated the moment one steps back and COMPARES NOT RANKS his aesthetic, political, and social contributions to the history of cinema.

One reason why I've been slow to respond to Jonathan Lapper's request for me to post my 25 favorite foreign films, as selected for the nominating committee in Edward Copeland's poll of the best foreign language sound films made up through 2002, is that I now feel I may have carried out this work more quickly than I should have. I don't mind the selection, but the order I gave was in most cases quite arbitrary--the order in which some titles came to mind. Anyway, before turning to an ancillary matter, here is the list:

1. M (1931)
2. Ivan (1932)
3. L'Atalante (1934)
4. Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939)
5. Ivan the Terrible (1946)
6. The Bicycle Thief (1948)
7. Spring in a Small City (1948)
8. Los olvidados (1950)
9. The White Sheik (1951)
10. Lola Montes (1955)
11. Ordet (1955)
12. A Man Escaped (1956)
13. India (1958)
14. Breathless (1959)
15. The Cloud-Capped Star (1960)
16. Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
17. Eclipse (1962)
18. Black Girl (1966)
19. Playtime (1967)
20. L'amour fou (1969)
21. Doomed Love (1978)
22. Stalker (1979)
23. A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
24. The Puppet Master (1993)
25. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

Very few of these titles made it into the 122 titles selected by the 51 nominators as a whole. And I think it's worth adding that seven Bergman titles made it into this list of 122 and none by Kiarostami (or any other Iranian director, or Hou Hsiao-hsien, fior that matter; the only Taiwanese film on the list is Yi Yi). So if Colin can "actually argue that a filmmaker like Kiarostami is rated more highly than Bergman," the raters can't be these 51 nominators as a whole--a group that incidentally doesn't include Roger Ebert.

A sheepish correction: I now see that the order of my list wasn't in the least bit arbitrary; in fact, it was chronological. I also made a point of not listing two titles for any filmmaker, which may have been a mistake given some personal preferences (e.g., Gertrud, Hiroshima mon amour, Close-up, Contempt, Sansho the Bailiff, among others). I'm amazed, incidentally, that Breathless didn't make the cut of 122 nominations--and that two Almodovar films did.

All that's really been proven in my eyes is that Bergman is overrated by an Edward Copeland poll and a Slate magazine article. This is, to me, a confirmation of the silliness of discussing how a filmmaker is "rated" by the public. I guess you've made some kind of point with these two sources. But anyone can play this game. Bergman certainly isn't overrated by the many juries who have served on the Cannes and Venice film festivals over the years. Kiarostami has received the grand prizes for films at both of these festivals while Bergman never has received them from either festival. But all this game proves is that calling a director overrated is a good way of criticizing him without actually having to evaluate his work on its own terms. But I do think it’s safe to say that Kiarostami, now more recognize by the American press than he has ever been, has gotten a much more consistent praise than Bergman did when he first reached this level of recognition. Bergman might be getting more praise at the moment but that's simply because it’s safer to give accolades to a "dead master" than a "newer" filmmaker like Kiarostami. (Let's face it: even though he's been around for decades, Kiarostami really is "new" to most mainstream American film critics, many of whom haven't seen anything earlier than Taste of Cherry.) If I have to cite Rotten Tomatoes I will but I hope THAT isn't necessary. I also have an article somewhere by Phillip Lopate about the extremely polarized response Bergman films received in the sixties.

Jonathan,

Breathless did make the final cut. It's a lot of films to look through so it's easy to miss. I originally posted that I was amazed that M didn't make until Edward Copeland e-mailed me to point out that it did.

I would not worry that you went about things too quickly as I find your list inclusive and diverse.

Colin said, " Bergman might be getting more praise at the moment but that's simply because it’s safer to give accolades to a "dead master" than a "newer" filmmaker like Kiarostami." This is probably correct. I love Wild Strawberries and included it on my list. I realize many would not agree with that and I know you (Jonathan) have asked the Bergman supporters to "explain" his greatness. I, alas, cannot carry out that task nor do I believe anyone can with any director. I can tell you that I think the story of an old man coming to terms with his past affects me deeply in the way it was presented. I can point out camerawork, editing, use of sound, etc. But of course you and anyone else can point that out with any other movie as well. If you like the end result of Wild Strawberries you understand if you don't you won't understand. That's why your original piece (that I am embarrassed to say upset me so) makes perfect sense to me as does Bergman's own assessment of Welles. After all the technical discussion of a work is through it really comes down to how it affects you and if you feel, as I believe you do, that Bergman tells you nothing new about life, then I doubt there is anything I can argue that would change that. By the same token, you have written about the end of Artificial Intelligence and I felt you made a lot of sense. But... I still didn't like it. You once wrote that someone trying to convince you otherwise (about the end of Artificial Intelligence) may as well be speaking in foreign tongues. To that I say, "Exactly." Maybe that's why this Bergman discussion has gone on so long, because people are speaking in two different tongues - The "I like Bergman" tongue and the "I don't like Bergman tongue." A Tower of Babel of sorts for the film world. I'm not even that big a fan of Bergman, I just very much like Wild Strawberries, Persona, and Shame.

And one final thought: Many films grow on us in time in different ways. I originally thought The Godfather, Part II was a masterfully done sequel but years later I view it as redundant, telling me nothing new about Michael or Vito that I didn't already know from the first film, just a lot more information. Also when I first saw Playtime I was not that thrilled by it. But I couldn't stop thinking about it and watched it again when it came out on DVD and now I have seen it countless times, absolutely love it and put it on my top 25 as well.

Maybe Bergman will change for you, maybe not. As long as you're honest about it I can't see any problem with vigorous discussion of a exalted director's career.

Please read previous posts and replies.

Since more people know who Bergman is (versus the number of people who know who Dreyer, Bresson, and Kiarostami are) then it follows that more people will rate Bergman as a great filmmaker compared to, say, James Mangold. Thus, Bergman is overrated in comparison to Dreyer, Bresson, or Kiarostami. If one takes a deep breath and reads the article with a clear head, he or she will discover that the term "overrated" is used in the context of popularity. Not popularity among the cinephile community, but popularity among general moviegoers. By the way, I use popularity to mean recognition.

I quote:

"Even stranger to me was the way he always resonated with New York audiences."

And then there is the fact that it was the New York Times who came up with the title for the article and NOT Mr. Rosenbaum. Some people need to do their homework before jerking their knees about.

Now see how easy that was without all the logical and rhetorical circombobulation?

Well, since Jonathan has humored me in debating whether or not Bergman is properly "rated", I cannot help but think he does not have a problem with the word overrated, even if he didn't come up with the title of the article. And the size of Bergman's audience has no bearing on whether or not he is overrated. More people have seen Jumanji than Close-up. But Jumanji isn't overrated because the average Jumanji viewer will tell you the film is mediocre whereas the average Close-up viewer will likely tell you s/he loved it.
Similarly, the average critic who sees Ten will likely say it was good or even great, whereas a film like Fanny and Alexander produced a far more divided response when it first came out. It is only now that Bergman is, once again, in the "dead master" category that he is considered safe for canonization. Kiarostami is still relatively new to mainstream media and so it isn’t as safe to put him on lists. I think he will be on these very same lists decades from now when he’s gone.

"If one takes a deep breath and reads the article with a clear head, he or she will discover that the term 'overrated' is used in the context of popularity. Not popularity among the cinephile community, but popularity among general moviegoers. By the way, I use popularity to mean recognition."
Now things get even fuzzier. If this is the case, why is Jonathan citing some critic's poll as proof of Bergman being overrated?

I just made a mental note that I am comment#106 so any comments count higher than that I won't read and waste my time. Take Jonathan Lapper's advice: get a drink. But don't use his credit card though.

Jonathan,

Counting at least 107 comments on this blog's topic, can we call it a record?

Ok, Jonathan, my mistake for trying to find a black cat in the dark room, e.g. my Peckinpah comparison. But I guess Alvodovar is right up there, well at least in your reviews you kinda bash his kinky melodramatic approach ('Talk to her' imo Pedro's best). So it's still more about attitudes, than ehh reality...
Listening to Tristano, Koenitz & Marsh, very cool, thanks J..
Actually, as lists already popped up, I'd like to inquire about some what I call essay-film:
great examples: Los Angeles Plays Itself, Histoire du Cinema, M.Rappaport's trilogy: Rock Hubson, Jean Seberg & Silver Screen,
also Zizek's perverted guide and recently mentioned in J.R.'s Cinemascope column - On Stalking and being stalked.
I would be tremendously happy if somebody could call up the more movies of similar type and style.

I'm not sure where Rosenbaum is getting his statistics. From everything I've Googled and read, Bergman's films are more popular now, on DVD and in college classes, than those of Bresson, Dreyer, or Godard. (Hitchcock is another story, but then — he's Hitchcock.) I also don't know how anyone could think that a movie like Persona, with its naked acting and mind-warp structure, or Scenes From a Marriage, which so captures the music of relationships that I could it watch forever, is lacking in eternal secrets. What's truly notable about Rosenbaum's dismissal, however, is the battle line he's really drawing: between Bergman the middlebrow, an art filmmaker who actually deigned to tell his stories fluidly (how vulgar!), and Rosenbaum's heroes, such as the arid, oblique Bresson, with his dessicated zombie acting and general lack of forward motion.

Specious as it is, this argument represents what has become a vanguard attitude in the way that foreign films are now routinely celebrated — not for their expression, but for their benumbed lack of expression. You see it in the canonization of directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, the spiritual heirs to Bresson: filmmakers who fetishize their refusal to dramatize, who create art that is meandering and oblique, at times to the point of madness. For a while there in the '50s, '60s, and early '70s, Ingmar Bergman's films held sway as a ''classy'' cultural phenomenon, but through all the symbols, the feverish close-ups, the otherworldly chess games, the torment and the tenderness, what you always felt was his deep desire to connect. That's what made his art, and art film itself, matter.