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<\/a>Ingmar Bergman<\/a> died yesterday at the age of 89. I have seen quite a few of his films but none of them often enough or recent enough to comment on them in any detail. (Though I did jot a few notes here on 1973\u2019s Scenes from a Marriage<\/a><\/i> and 2003\u2019s Saraband<\/a><\/i> a couple years ago.) However, Bergman did represent an interesting point in the history of the relationship between film and faith \u2014 by encouraging filmmakers to engage in theological and spiritual matters more deeply than they had ever done before, and by encouraging people of faith to engage with film more deeply than they had ever done before \u2014 so I need to note his passing here.<\/span><\/p>\n
Many tributes and obituaries are already out there, and they have all expressed the essential points much better than I ever could. Victor Morton<\/a> at the Rightwing Film Geek blog is especially eloquent and passionate on the topic. What follows are some excerpts from the other<\/i> tributes that have caught my eye.<\/p>\n Stephen Holden<\/a>, The New York Times<\/i>:<\/p>\n An existential dread runs through the entire Bergman oeuvre. Among the major directors who spearheaded the international art film movement after 1950, he was the one most closely in touch with the intellectual currents of the day. Freud and Sartre were riding high, and Time magazine wondered in a cover story if God were dead. Attendance at Mr. Bergman\u2019s films was a lot like going to church. Though many of those films are steeped in church imagery, God is usually absent from the sanctuary.<\/p>\n As a college student and avid art-film goer in the early 1960s, I was overwhelmed by Mr. Bergman\u2019s films, with their heavy-duty metaphysical speculation and intellectual seriousness. In those days, you would no more argue with Mr. Bergman\u2019s stature than you would question the greatness of the modern Western literary canon; like Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, et al., Mr. Bergman was an intellectual god whose work could reward a lifetime of analytical study.<\/p>\n Today the religion of high art that dominated the 1950s and \u201960s seems increasingly quaint and provincial. The longstanding belief that humans are born with singular psyches and souls is being superseded by an emerging new ideal: the human as technologically perfectible machine. The culture of the soul \u2014 of Freud and Marx and, yes, Bergman \u2014 has been overtaken by the culture of the body. Biotechnology leads the shaky way into the future, and pseudo-immortality, through cloning, is in sight. Who needs a soul if the self is technologically mutable? For that matter, who needs art?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jeffrey Wells<\/a>, Hollywood Elsewhere:<\/p>\n I wonder how many under-35s have even seen a Bergman film. The Bergman art- house aesthetic of the \u201950s and \u201960s is about as far from the Tarantino film-geek attitude as you can get. Film Snob Dictionary<\/i> authors Martin Kamp<\/b> and Law- rence Levi<\/b> wrote a couple of years ago<\/a> that \u201cwatching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n John Podhoretz<\/a>, New York Post<\/i>:<\/p>\n The darkness of Bergman\u2019s vision of the world and his uncompromisingly bleak expression of that vision resonated with those who viewed art not as a form of the most sublime entertainment \u2013 entertainment that transcends the merely pleasurable to offer a transformative experience \u2013 but rather as the secular version of a stern sermon.<\/p>\n Art, in this view, wasn\u2019t supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities. . . .<\/p>\n As for the society of people who needed Ingmar Bergman to stand as the greatest example of what the cinema should do, they too had had their day by 1982. For the basic truth is that the critics who described Bergman as the greatest of film artists were people embarrassed by the movies.<\/p>\n They didn\u2019t admire the medium. They were offended by its unseriousness, by its capacity to entertain without offering anything elevating at the same time. They believed the movies were a low and disreputable art form and that its only salvation lay in offering moral and aesthetic instruction to its audiences about the worthlessness of existence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Liam Lacey<\/a>, Globe and Mail<\/i>:<\/p>\n Bergman, who died yesterday at his home in Sweden at the age of 89, was a litmus test for cinematic seriousness, and, perhaps, in the long run many people, including critics, have preferred not to face the demands of his work. He has been parodied and dismissed as puritanical, misanthropic and, as Joe Queenan said in a 4,000-word for The Guardian last March, \u201cresolutely non-life affirming.\u201d<\/p>\n All this, of course, is reductive and exaggerated. In Fanny and Alexander<\/i> (1982), Bergman proved he wasn\u2019t above a good fart joke. And even in a world where God is apparently AWOL and hell is other people, Bergman\u2019s films hold their own form of exhilaration. As Aristotle recognized, other people\u2019s tragedies, in fictional form, help to place our own pity and fear into proper balance. . . .<\/p>\n Though it may sound facetious to say the themes of despair and Godlessness can go out of fashion, there is some truth to it. It has been 41 years since Time magazine created a furor by asking, \u201cIs God dead?\u201d on its cover. The vogue for the quest for spiritual authenticity has been displaced by postmodern questioning of authenticity and \u201cthe meaning of life\u201d is more a question of linguistics than destiny. That doesn\u2019t make Bergman any less significant than, say, Goethe or Shakespeare, but perhaps a similar kind of historical figure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Glenn Kenny<\/a>, Premiere.com:<\/p>\n One sometimes heard the complaint that Bergman\u2019s films are peopled with characters who can\u2019t see past the bridge of their own noses, and that they\u2019re reflections of Bergman\u2019s own self-absorption. That we rarely if ever hear anyone bemoaning the lack of \u201csocial engagement\u201d in, say, Samuel Beckett\u2019s work is, among other things, indicative of how cinema is still regarded as a stepchild of the fine arts in some respects. . . .<\/p>\n Well, what can one do? The self, and one\u2019s negotiation\/war with it, is one of Bergman\u2019s great themes. As in Beckett, some of Bergman\u2019s most powerful scenes are of one person in a room, or two people in a room. And the same thing over and over again. . . .<\/p>\n