Art Film Pissing Contest (Updated)

I didn't comment on Jonathan Rosenbaum's New York Times op-ed "Scenes From An Overrated Career" for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that I came to it a little late. Second, just reading the headline made my stomach sink. I got a mental picture of a meeting of the Times' op-ed staff, and some callow dickwad saying, "Hey, you know how everyone's saying how great Ingmar Bergman was? Why don't we run a piece saying that he sucked?" and heads bobbing wildly in agreement. Jeez. The guy's not even in his grave yet by then, probably. But you know these Times types—they all like to think they're Rick James, bitch, right after hitting Charlie Murphy in the forehead. "That was—'Coooold Blooded'!! Ha!" In other words, I was repelled by precisely the kind of forced, fake-ass "contrarianism" that animates the 85% worthless e-mag Slate.

A Times op-ed staffer pitches an anti-Bergman piece.

Then, my fevered imagination tells me (and please, anyone with inside dope on how the piece came to be should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, which I suppose I must be), on being unable to find anybody to say that Bergman actually sucked, the Times dickwad settles for the genteel scepticism of Jonathan Rosenbaum. [UPDATE: Jonathan Rosenbaum very graciously and gamely responds, with a real account fo the piece's evolution and more, in the comments section. I'm keeping the paranoid ravings in the post for their putative entertainment value. Thanks, Jonathan.] This brings me to reason three. (P.S. I know that my explanations for why I didn't write about the piece in the first place are delaying my explanation for why I'm writing about it now. Please bear with me.) I hold Rosenbaum in very high esteem, and the Times op-ed was—as George Clooney once said of Tarkovsky's Solaris, I'm always amused to recall—not his best work. A lot of Rosenbaum's critical "debunking" here goes consists of defining what Bergman was not—e.g., not an avant-gardist and/or formal innovator on the level of Godard or Resnais. He brings up what he sees as Bergman's "perpetual retreat from the modern world," a variant of the "solipsist" position on Bergman which kind of begs the question as to exactly which world, say, the characters in Scenes from a Marriage inhabit. But these are supportable positions; I just don't happen to share them. The stuff about the blond, blue-eyed cast members, however, practically screams "Holy shit! I'm under by 200 words!" The snipes at Bergman-chic are about as critically substantive and useful as, say, making fun of a Pedro Costa fan for his taste in t-shirts. The evocation of "relevance" is tiresome. And finally, there's the "hard fact"—unverified, as it happens—that "Mr. Bergman isn't being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson - two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman's heyday."

Even if that's true—so what? One might recall in the late '80s Godard, for example, pretty much dropped off the map of critical and commercial consciousness in North America—his great 1990 Nouvelle Vague never got a proper release here. Actual critical assessment and the noting of critical fashion are two different things, as Rosenbaum ought to be the first to know. Also, if nobody cares about Bergman anymore, why call him overrated?

But all this is not why, finally, this piece winds up being one of those things out of which no good can come.

For that we have to turn to Owen Gleiberman's enjoyable Entertainment Weekly account of his four stages of looking at Bergman films, which wraps up with a lively attack on Rosenbaum's piece and a sort of veiled warning to the reader: "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."

To be honest, I found the commendations of Dreyer and Bresson in Rosenbaum's piece kind of awkwardly touching—they're sort of the intellectual inverse of Times pop music critic Kalefa Sanneh's efforts to sell the papers' readers on the merits of Toby Keith and Ashlee Simpson, if you catch my drift. Gleiberman sees something a little more sinister; he later bemoans "a vanguard attitude in the way that foreign films are now routinely celebrated — not for their expression, but for their benumbed lack of expression."

Now we could choose to agree or disagree on whether a particular lack of expression is "benumbed" or not. What I take issue with, firstly, is Owen's characterization of Bresson's films. I can't talk him out of his "dessicated zombie acting" assertion, but "general lack of forward motion"? Dude! Bresson's films are all forward motion. Inexorable forward motion as a matter of fact. Not Tony Scott style, I grant you, but the guy never wastes a shot. His longest friggin' movie was a hundred and ten minutes, for frig's sake!

Now Owen would have been far less likely to have made this entirely insupportable point had not Rosenbaum first thrown down the Bergman=overrated gauntlet. The piece goes on to deplore the "canonization" of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami without out-and-out condemning the filmmakers themselves (reading him know I see it looks pretty harsh, but he leaves some wiggle room), and I think Owen's points imply a lot about how critics present these filmmakers to their readers, and maybe how we should present these filmmakers to our readers.

Less interesting, though, is the either/or-choice both critics' pieces imply. I myself want Bergman and Bresson, please. I'm going to continue to, unless you convincingly demonstrate to me that it is constitutionally impossible to have a coherent appreciation of both. Which I doubt can be done.

Comments

[Peter Debruge]

And then there's reliable old Camille Paglia, who titled her thesis "Sexual Personae" as an explicit homage to Bergman (though somehow the connection hadn't occurred to me before).

On Salon (http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/08/08/clarkson/), she weighs in on the double-whammy of Bergman and Antonioni's deaths (actually, she calls it a "cold douche" -- read into that what you will). The Art Film is dead, she laments, because "very few young people today, teethed on dazzling special effects and a hyperactive visual style, seem to have patience for the long, slow take that deep-think European directors once specialized in." Then she goes on to remember how "the entire theater emptied within a half-hour" when L'Avventura screened in college.

Have audiences lost their taste for Art Films, as she suggests, or was such filmgoing always a rather elitist endeavor? And what about those aspiring young filmmakers of which she speaks? Apart from Woody Allen (who wrote this great tribute for the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/movies/12alle.html), did other directors ever really aspire to engage the Big Questions in the way that Bergman did?

Filmmaking has lost an original, pure and simple. And the fiesty young critics who were so enamored with Fellini and Antonioni and Bergman in their day have become the fogeys (like Paglia) who don't "get" the younger generation's tastes. But isn't that how things have always been? Would cinema really be better if someone were making Ingmar Bergman movies today?

[Jonathan Rosenbaum]

Hi Glenn,

Since you're curious about how it all happened, here's the basic rundown: On July 31st, I received an email from a Times Op Ed page editor whom I hadn't previously been in touch with: "We were wondering if you might writing a short essay for us on Ingmar Bergman-- something that might offer slightly more perspective than the solemn
obituaries, a clear-eyed audit of his achievements, his actual influence on and place in world cinema." I called him back, and it did become clear he wanted something that was less reverential than what had already been appearing in the Times and elsewhere, and this wasn't in conflict with my own inclinations. I'd never been invited to write anything for the Times before this, so it seemed worth going ahead with it.

Three days and four drafts later, we came up with something we were both happy with. The editing was amicable but also difficult--I'm not accustomed to doing so many rewrites. And it's obvious that some of my original emphases got altered. The fact that Bergman wasn't being taught too much today wasn't meant as a knock, just as a statement of fact. (After all, some of my favorite filmmakers, such as Feuillade, aren't taught too much either.)

Clearly the very fact that this was a Times Op Ed piece wound up affecting the way many people read it; it automatically made the whole thing more of a fashion statement than what I had in mind--but this is context more than content. I can't imagine so many people would have gotten so worked up about it if something similar had appeared in the Reader. I guess it must have felt to some people like one institution was attacking another institution--and if that's what it was or how it seemed, then I guess I was at least partially a tool in this process. As you imply, neither the headline nor the "pull- quote" (actually not a quote at all) was mine, and I can't say I was very happy with either. I'd wanted a more extended (and favorable) treatment of Bergman's mise en scene, in film as well as in theater, versus what I regard more as the decoupage of Dreyer and Bresson, and I certainly didn't regard the comparison with Cukor as any kind of putdown--unless it's a putdown to say that I respect the mise en scene of Bergman more than the intellectual or spiritual content. For whatever it's worth, I'm teaching a film course in world cinema of the 50s at the Gene Siskel Film Center this fall, and I selected "The Magician" as one of the films to show many months ago; and I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

As for my critique of the way Woody Allen took over some of the blond, blue-eyed, and upscale baggage of Bergman, and how this became hallowed in the Times itself (mainly via Vincent Canby), of course this is obviously secondary to any evaluation of Bergman's work in its own right. I was just objecting to some of the uses this work had been put to--as I phrased it (rightly or wrongly), the way it had been turned into a kind of brand name. Which is what Owen is still doing by the way, although he's brandishing blood and guts instead of Ikea furniture.

Speaking of which, I agree with all your responses to Owen's screed. And having reseen last weekend the sublime "Sawdust and Tinsel" (which I selected and introduced at a Chicago Bergman event organized on short notice) as well as seen the three-hour "Fanny and Alexander" for the first time (very belatedly, of course), I'm completely with you about there being plenty of room for both Bergman and Bresson--as there wasn't to the same degree in the 60s, when Bresson and Dreyer were both widely regarded as jokes by the Owen Gleibermans of THAT period.

[Aaron Aradillas]

In defense of Mr. Clooney, it is possible to think Solaris is not one of Tarkovsky's better works and still think it is a good movie. A film school buddy of mine prefers Adrei Rublev over Solaris.

I'm reminded of the Jeff Daniels character in The Squid and the Whale when he calls A Tale of Two Cities "minor Dickens." Some people would agree with this sentiment. It doesn't take away from the Dickens classic. One could easily call After Hours or the "Life Lessons" segment of New York Stories lesser Scorsese and still think they're great movies.

[Ryland Walker Knight]

I'm very happy you saw F&A, however belatedly, Mr Rosenbaum. Did you type up anything on a_film_by? I'm not a member, nor have I attempted to join, but would be curious as to your thoughts in whatever, uh, "context." It seems you are rather partial to quite a few long-form narrative films and maybe you could say something about how this might stack up alongside some of those, if we want to get all silly and say what's better or worse than whatever else is out there. (Honestly, don't you guys, the battle-tested critics, still get antsy about arrogating to yourself sometimes? I mean, I guess you have to sort of get over that hesitation, however slight, after a certain point, but I think a little internal resistance is a good thing, right?)

(I agree with the film school buddy of AA above me: Andrei Rublev is "better" than Solaris, but so are Mirror and Stalker and Nostalghia and The Sacrifice. However, Tarkovksy's Solaris is "better" than a lot of other movies so why niggle? I guess cuz it's fun...)

[Ryland Walker Knight]

Oops, shoulda surfed first! Just went through the comments at the reader's blog and I got it. I should say, though, that I've been working on a piece about the TV version of F&A for The House Next Door and will hopefully have more to say in its "defense" later on.

[Griff]

I didn't much agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum's Op-Ed piece on Bergman, but I could grasp his point, and I have great respect for his body of work. [And his memoir, "Moving Places: A Life at the Movies," is quite wonderful.] I would add that I thought Rosenbaum's essay was at least an intelligent and basically informed argument... since it was probably historically inevitable that the Times would commission and run a piece skeptical of Bergman's genius.

Just days after Fellini's passing in 1993, the Times published Bruce Weber's blunt, ignorant dismissal of the artist ("Excuse Me -- I Must Have Missed Part of the Movie") as a Sunday Op-Ed piece. I have never forgiven the paper for running this piece. Even thinking about it fills me with rage. I understand that Martin Scorsese wrote an angry letter to the paper about it; perhaps this is one reason why he published his personal tribute to Antonioni in the Arts & Leisure section the other week.

There are plenty of filmmakers who were inspired by Bresson (Haneke, Dumont, Akerman, The Dardennes [who, in turn have inspired great American filmmakers like Kerrigan, Van Sant]), and as long as I can see their movies, I don't care whether or not they're in fashion, and clearly we are about to reach a point soon where these films are considered ancient and irrelevant. Speaking of irrelevant (cough, Gleiberman, cough), Paglia is herself an artifact from another era, and when I saw her speak at NYU in the early 90's more than half the audience walked out on her lecture, in which she discussed Madonna and how sexual harassment was good for women, so everything she says should be taken with a shaker full of salt.

[stpetebeach]

George Clooney evaluating Tarkovsky is like Larry the Cable Guy evaluating Buster Keaton.

[josiah]

I disagree with Paglia, and for that matter all cultural critics, who dismiss the younger generation for having no patience for European art films because we've been raised on the methed-up cinema of Tony Scott. Please...does she really think baby boomers are the only ones buying all those Criterion DVDs? Every time I go to our local art house cinema in Chicago, there's always a mix of young and old patrons at films like "Three Times" and "The Russian Ark". When I went to a Roger Ebert book signing, I had a lengthy discussion with a woman 5-years younger than me (I just turned 31) about the films of Jacques Tati.

And, am I really supposed to believe that every filmgoer in the 1960s and 70s was lining up to see Godard and Fellini films? I know Ebert likes to wax nostalgic about the days when there were long lines outside the theatre to see Antonioni's "Blow Up", but those were the days before dvd, video, and multiplexes.

[G. Kenny]

Yeah, I wasn't even going to get started on Paglia, because her piece was so idiotic and ignorant that there was almost literally no beginning to take it apart...suffice it to say, her point boiled down to "Because I haven't ventured near a repertory theater in the past 30 years, the art film must be dead." I'd like to say it's staggering that she gets paid to produces such no-nothing bilge, but alas, it's not.