Remembering the Titans
I grant they were geniuses, and leave behind a body of work that is impressively varied and complex. Of the two, I enjoy Antonioni the best. About a year ago, I watched Blow-Up for the first time in about 20 years. This meditation on the power of recorded images, privacy, and perception set amid swinging London of the 1960s has held up surprisingly well. The story is slight, somewhat confusing at times, and dependent on the sustained moody dreaminess that Antonioni creates throughout the film (it ends with a famous scene of two mimes playing tennis). I think I was drawn in a bit more than the first time I saw “Blow-Up” during those heady early days of film school, when it was the promise of full-frontal female nudity (a first in mainstream late 20th century cinema) that had me and my friends on the edge of our seats. It was the mood, the subtext if you will, that captured my imagination this time (maybe maturity does add depth to the psyche).
But as good as Blow-Up is, it and The Passenger (with the star-fueled power of Jack Nicholson behind it) are probably the only films that would interest a casual and even devoted cineaste. I know this firsthand. I had his Red Desert (starring Richard Harris speaking Italian—blech) inflicted on me by my film professor Frank P. Tomasulo (a noted Antonioni scholar). After developing a splitting headache from the sheer ponderousness of the movie, I ducked out of the classroom—causing a near legendary blow up of its own—at the time. In the backlash from this incident, Frank offered me a large bottle of aspirin and a few (deserved) cutting remarks as compensation for the injuries Antonioni inflicted on my fragile, film scholar soul. This did little to encourage further explorations of Antonioni’s films.I’m even less enthusiastic about Bergman—not because of any lack of skill on his part, but because his movies are so depressing. But they are beautifully made. Persona and The Virgin Spring are among my favorites of the small number of his films that I’ve seen. (I hate to admit, I’ve never seen The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.)
Should these men be mourned—of course. But we should mourn them for a reason only briefly touched on by the conventional critics that I’ve read over the last week or so. Their passing has dimmed the creative flame of the world a bit more at a time when we need it to burn as brightly as possible. Though both Antonioni and Bergman created recent works—they weren’t bringing out a film a year (they never really did particularly over the last two decades), and when one of their films appeared, it was acclaimed and quietly ignored by the cine-masses—theirs was not the cinema of the unthinking or easily daunted; theirs was for the viewer who wanted something challenging, tough, and maybe even unsatisfying. Theirs was not cinematic comfort food.It is the creative energy that we have lost that makes this double passing that much harder to bear. Their films remain, but these are, in a sense, only the evidence of their greatness as artists. The act of their creation—at the typewriter, behind the camera, in the editing room—the ineffable is what we have lost most of all. And even if they hadn’t made a film in years, their spirit, the promise they could create again, as Antonioni did while virtually unable to communicate due to a stroke, always served as a buoy, a beacon for those of us who craved artistic giants. Even if they were reduced to serving as a kind of creative placeholder until someone of equal stature emerged from the brow of Zeus—that was a comfort in of itself. And that goes for those of us who didn’t feel a deep kinship for these obviously talented men.
The real price of this double extinguishment is that it makes us open our eyes, and forces us to survey a scrub-filled cinematic landscape dotted with few (too few) oases. It is now only their dreams made reel that we have—hopefully that will be enough, and we won’t have to wait too long for other giants to emerge to light the way again.
