The cinema recently lost two titans of film making: Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. The tributes have been numerous and for the most part, gushing. It is to be expected given the immense body of work from these two directors. But not everyone has been gushing. In the New York Times on August 4th, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a rebuke of Bergman's career, Scenes from an Overrated Career, in which he argues that Bergman's work does not hold up well over time.Rosenbaum is as always a superb writer and distiller of ideas and as I recently noted on these pages one of my favorite critics. His argumentation here however, seems specious at best. It starts from the very beginning:
THE first Ingmar Bergman movie I ever saw was “The Magician,” at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in the spring of 1960, when I was 17. The only way I could watch the film this week after the Swedish director’s death was on a remaindered DVD I bought in Paris. Like many of his films, “The Magician” hasn’t been widely available here for ages.
Right out of the gate Rosenbaum is making what is known in debating circles as an "Appeal to Authority." It won't be the last time he does so in the article. An "Appeal to Authority" is, to borrow the definition provided by Skepdic.com, "a fallacy of irrelevance when the authority being cited is not really an authority." In other words DVD manufacturers are not, as far as I am aware, the authority on what makes great cinema. I have yet to experience a moment when someone arguing against the greatness of a film uses the example that Criterion has not yet released it on DVD. I hope I never do. After a mere one paragraph of describing the wonderful tributes to Bergman since his death he is back to the old "Appeal to Authority" trick:
Sometimes, though, the best indication of an artist’s continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about. The hard fact is, 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.
First he tells us that film schools just aren't teaching Bergman with the same gusto as Hitchcock, Welles or Godard. I am not sure how one measures the "intensity" of how professors and students are discussing a director's works but Rosenbaum seems to have stumbled across a magical film class viewing mirror that allows him to conduct "Passion Polls." And then - again - perhaps fearing we did not quite get it the first time, he's back to the DVDs. To my knowledge all of the Smokey and the Bandit movies are available on DVD. Should I start studying them?
Next Rosenbaum submits, "What Mr. Bergman had that those two masters lacked was
the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits..." Bergman had the power to entertain? Heaven for fend! This could be held up to be a valid argument against Bergman if he were merely a commercial director but Rosenbaum takes an inexplicable leap from being entertaining to reluctance to "challenge conventional film-going habits." He has now moved from "Appeal to Authority" to "Begging the Question" which as Skepdic.com again points out is "what one does in an argument when one assumes what one claims to be proving" (His article is quickly becoming a debating professor's nightmare). Rosenbaum is assuming that being entertaining often means not being challenging. Frankly, I am not prepared to make this assumption. Citizen Kane with its adventurous use of sound, astonishing special effects and non-linear timeline is quite challenging and when compared against the films released alongside it in 1941 damn-near groundbreaking on all fronts. But it's also extremely entertaining. And am I to believe that Howard Hawks, one of the most entertaining directors of all time did nothing challenging to conventional film as a result?Rosenbaum tells us that Bergman's films, due to his "fluid storytelling," somehow "make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart. What we see is what we get, and what we hear, however well written or dramatic, are things we’re likely to have heard elsewhere." Because he is a "fluid storyteller" his films are less important. It's a bit like telling an accomplished clarinetist that because he possesses fluid playing abilities he should take up truck driving instead. He says "what we see is what we get" by which I am a bit puzzled. One of the pleasures of Bergman for me has always been his exploration of character as opposed to exploration of technique. Because of this I "get" more from each subsequent viewing, not less, because as I grow with each passing day I have new connections I can take from the characters. An exploration of technique can be equally laudable but the experiments of Michael Snow and Andy Warhol with technique in the sixties, extraordinary as they may be (especially Wavelength by Snow) leave me cold without any emotional context surrounding their work.
Rosenbaum then wonders, "So where did the outsized reputation of Mr. Bergman come from?" and proceeds to provide an extraordinary answer (make sure there is a pillow under your chin as your jaw may likely thrust itself to the floor after reading it): "At least part of his initial appeal in the ’50s seems tied to the sexiness of his actresses and the more relaxed attitudes about nudity in Sweden; discovering the handsome look of a Bergman film also clearly meant encountering the beauty of Maj-Britt Nilsson and Harriet Andersson." Film professors everywhere can now express their gratitude to Jonathan Rosenbaum for at last unlocking the secrets of Bergman: He gave us foxy babes to ogle. I always suspected Bergman was just a Russ Meyer in disguise.
At this point Rosenbaum discovers, "The stylistic departures I saw in Mr. Bergman’s ’50s and ’60s features — the silent-movie pastiche in “Sawdust and Tinsel,” the punitive use of magic against a doctor-villain in “The Magician,” the aggressive avant-garde prologue of “Persona” — were actually more functions of his skill and experience as a theater director than a desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new." And? What? I'm sorry but I'm not following. If his stylistic departures came from his love of corn on the cob they would still be noteworthy, would they not? Is Rosenbaum implying that "stylistic departures" must come from a specific source or face dismissal? Sadly, it would seem so.
We are informed in due course that Bergman's "movies aren’t so much filmic expressions as expressions on film." This is a none too subtle way of reiterating that Rosenbaum prefers technique to exploration. Filmic expression as opposed to simply presenting a great story on film are two very different things but I am not at all convinced they are either mutually exclusive (an absence of overt technique could, after all be argued to be a technique in and of itself) or that one is preferable to the other.
As he wraps it up we are told, "Yet what Mr. Bergman was interested in recording was pretty much the same tormented and tortured neurotic resentments, the same spite and even the same cruelty that can be traced back to his work of a half-century ago." But don't all great artists have preferred themes that they return to because they are not confident they will ever understand them? Why should an artist continually trying to answer pivotal questions on film be derided? Shouldn't the fact that he has not yet found the answer and feels further exploration is necessary signal to the viewer that he continues to grow?
He finishes with this:
Despite all the compulsive superlatives offered up this week, Mr. Bergman’s star has faded, maybe because we’ve all grown up a little, as filmgoers and as socially aware adults. It doesn’t diminish his masterful use of extended close-ups or his distinctively theatrical, seemingly homemade cinema to suggest that movies can offer something more complex and challenging. And while Mr. Bergman’s films may have lost much of their pertinence, they will always remain landmarks in the history of taste.
Talk about burying the lead. In the final two sentences he praises Bergman for many of the things he spent two pages arguing against. His "masterful use of close-ups" and "seemingly homemade cinema" speak directly to technique. It would seem Rosenbaum likes Bergman after all. As for me, I like him too. I think Bergman was a master of combining technique with character exploration, something too few filmmakers have the ability to do. I feel his sense of "theatre" will be sorely missed in age where many filmmakers weened on the ease and accessibility of video viewing have lost a sense of how much the other arts (literature, painting, theatre) can contribute to the world of film.
And now I'm going to bury my lead as well. I think Jonathan Rosenbaum is one of the most enlightened, well-rounded critics in the world of film journalism. As with all critics I have disagreed with his opinions on many occasions but always found him to be illuminating nonetheless. For me, this is a rare (very rare) lapse of argumentation on Rosenbaum's part. I fully believe that one could make the case for Bergman not being a great director (although I think it would be a cumbersome task) I just don't believe the case was made here. I have no doubt that Rosenbaum's views of Bergman's work are honest and well-intentioned. I would simply like him to express it more thoroughly, more coherently, perhaps in a longer piece in the Chicago Reader or the DVD Beaver website. Perhaps the limited space of the New York Times Op-Ed page just didn't provide him with the latitude necessary to make a more formidable case. If anyone can make that case it would be him. His knowledge and expertise in the world of cinema is unparalleled in my opinion and I hope that soon he will provide us all with more insight into why Ingmar Bergman may well not be one of the greats. Until then, I'm sticking with Bergman's "out-sized reputation" and "overrated career." And there's no shame in that.
