{"id":1414,"date":"2007-08-14T01:52:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-14T01:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2007\/08\/bergmans-entertaining-anti-entertainments\/"},"modified":"2007-08-14T01:52:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-14T01:52:00","slug":"bergmans-entertaining-anti-entertainments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2007\/08\/bergmans-entertaining-anti-entertainments.html","title":{"rendered":"Bergman’s entertaining “anti-entertainments”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Owen Gleiberman<\/a> at Entertainment Weekly<\/i> has a fun article up on the late Ingmar Bergman<\/a> and what Gleiberman calls \u201cthe Four Stages of Watching Bergman\u201d (\u201cYouthful Befuddlement\u201d, \u201cCollegiate Awe\u201d, \u201cThe Mary Wilkie Phase\u201d and \u201cReally Seeing Bergman\u201d). He also takes special aim at that Jonathan Rosenbaum article<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

But something else, too, conspired to make Bergman pass\u00e9, and that was the rise of a new mystique in art film \u2014 a cult of austerity that persists to this day. In a staggeringly wrong-headed but quite revealing harangue that ran in The New York Times<\/i> five days after Bergman\u2019s death, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, \u201dThe hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn\u2019t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock<\/a>, Orson Welles, or Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson \u2014 two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman\u2019s heyday\u2026. The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman\u2019s films go down more easily than theirs \u2014 his fluid storytelling and deftness in handling actresses, comparable to the skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor \u2014 also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure where Rosenbaum is getting his statistics. From everything I\u2019ve Googled and read, Bergman\u2019s films are more<\/i> popular now, on DVD and in college classes, than those of Bresson, Dreyer, or Godard. (Hitchcock is another story, but then \u2014 he\u2019s Hitchcock.) I also don\u2019t know how anyone could think that a movie like Persona<\/i>, with its naked acting and mind-warp structure, or Scenes From a Marriage<\/a><\/i>, which so captures the music of relationships that I could it watch forever, is lacking in eternal secrets. What\u2019s truly notable about Rosenbaum\u2019s dismissal, however, is the battle line he\u2019s really drawing: between Bergman the middlebrow, an art filmmaker who actually deigned to tell his stories fluidly (how vulgar!), and Rosenbaum\u2019s heroes, such as the arid, oblique Bresson, with his dessicated zombie acting and general lack of forward motion.<\/p>\n

Specious as it is, this argument represents what has become a vanguard attitude in the way that foreign films are now routinely celebrated \u2014 not for their expression, but for their benumbed lack<\/i> of expression. You see it in the canonization of directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami<\/a>, 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 \u201950s, \u201960s, and early \u201970s, Ingmar Bergman\u2019s films held sway as a \u201dclassy\u201d 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\u2019s what made his art, and art film itself, matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so the battle of the brows \u2014 high vs. middle \u2014 continues!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly has a fun article up on the late Ingmar Bergman and what Gleiberman calls \u201cthe Four Stages of Watching Bergman\u201d (\u201cYouthful Befuddlement\u201d, \u201cCollegiate Awe\u201d, \u201cThe Mary Wilkie Phase\u201d and \u201cReally Seeing Bergman\u201d). He also takes special aim at that Jonathan Rosenbaum article: But something else, too, conspired to make Bergman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBergman's entertaining "anti-entertainments"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly has a fun article up on the late Ingmar Bergman and what Gleiberman calls "the Four Stages of Watching Bergman"\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2007\/08\/bergmans-entertaining-anti-entertainments.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bergman's entertaining "anti-entertainments"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly has a fun article up on the late Ingmar Bergman and what Gleiberman calls "the Four Stages of Watching Bergman"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2007\/08\/bergmans-entertaining-anti-entertainments.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-08-14T01:52:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. 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