Adieu, Antonioni, Adieu, Bergman

C.S.Venkiteswaran, in this insightful short piece pays rich tributes to two of the legendary film makers, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman who passed away last month

IngmarBergman with Liv Ulmann

Two great European masters of cinema left the scene last week – Michaelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) and Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). Both were auteurs in the true sense of the term.

Antonioni

Both were eminent auteurs in the true sense creating a world of characters and concerns of their own. Their intense and introspective body of work redefined the medium and extended the horizons of the medium. Interestingly though both the masters belong to the same period and to Europe, they are continents apart in their approach to life and its basic concerns. Coincidentally both made trilogies almost at the same time and in the earlier period of their career. While Antonioni made "L'Avventura" 1959, "La Notte" 1960 and "L'Eclisse" 1962 – that dwelt upon his central vision about alienation in an industrial society, Bergman's film trilogy - Through a Glass Darkly 1961 , Winter Light 1962 , The Silence 1963- dealt with the silence of God and the borderline between sanity and madness.  Both dealt with death though at different levels. For Bergman, death was an almost real presence, constantly haunting his characters, questioning the purpose of life and pushing them to the extremes. In Antonioni films, the urban sprawl itself is a deathly presence, looming large over the characters, as if mirroring their inner angst and vacuity. Both also had life-long fascination with actresses who became part of the world they created – Liv Ulmann and Ingrid Thulin for Bergman and Monica Vitti for Antonioni.

According to critics "Bergman introduced the idea of the total filmmaker, the writer- director who uses the modern medium to express himself in the same way that artists had done for generations in the novel, the symphony, the fresco and other established forms." In a way, Bergman was a historian of the European mind – he journeyed through its dark innards mapping its fears, frustrations and anxieties. His films were about the silence of God, and the unbearable solitude of human beings in their struggles to make themselves heard. Unearthly, and averse to the noise and bustle of society, Bergman characters, these tormented souls, took refuge in faraway desolate places to reflect upon their wounds. In the burning necessity to convince themselves of their own existence and emotional reality, they tormented themselves and each other, very often prying into the lives of others and hurting them where it pained the most. All the relationships that Bergman portrayed were painful and sado-masochist in nature. They were merciless both to themselves and to others. For them, society, outside world and history were faraway and remote though it rumbled outside ominously (The Silence) or burned itself away as they watched (as in Persona, where Liv Ulman watches the Vietnames Buddhist monk on television). Their self flagellations were directed at themselves and through that, at God. They are all doomed to loneliness and driven to endless journeys into more desolate and dark spaces. No wonder he was very popular among Indian filmmakers and cineastes, for he was the 'perfect other' to them.

Martin Scorsese considers Antonioni as "one of the greatest film directors as well as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century… a maestro for my generation (and) also for younger directors".   A great stylist many considered his importance in cinema as what Pablo Picasso was to painting or James Joyce to literature. He was also a filmmaker whose central concerns were urban solitude, alienation and the inability to communicate. Like the life around him that he tried to portray, his narratives were also never linear or followed any pre-laid rules or conventions.   A true stylist, he is considered to be a very 'difficult' filmmaker, for his central theme itself was the inability to communicate and connect.

Unlike Bergman, Antonioni characters lived in real space and time, though the cityscapes of these urban wastelands of Europe looks weird and loom large over them, making them insignificant and alien. For him, modern life is oppressive for Antonioni and man-made landscapes, a recurring leit motif of his films, embody the spiritual and emotional emptiness of the characters. Take for instance films like L'avventura, Red Desert, Zabriskie Point or Blow up, in all these the city, with its oppressive and vacant presence externalizes the inscapes of the characters inhabiting it.
It is this restless and intense grappling with urban reality that marks his films, and in this endeavour, he takes the neo-realist project into its interiorities, by extending its original critique and angst about physical and economic oppression into the realms of spirituality and self expression. 
Antonioni and Bergman: with their entry, cinema was no longer the same. With their exit, cinema won't be the same.