Antonioni & Bergman

The White Screen Has Blacked Out

Another film giant has passed away following the death of Ingmar Bergman who was coined as the “greatest director alive” by the Time. From now and on, Michelengelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman will be remembered as the “greatest directors ever”.


Ingmar Bergman, who followed a unique path of his own through the labyrinths of feelings, passed away on the 29th of July. It was only a day after, on the 30th of July, when the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni died: a director who beautifully embellished the alienation of men from men with the ironies of the age of miscommunication, and projected all of these on to the white screen with a poetic understanding of aesthetics.
Without any doubt, and happily, we still have great directors breathing with us and whom we follow closely. However, Antonioni and Bergman are not here anymore. They were the last representatives of the 'auteur' generation known for their remarkable contributions to the film industry, that is growing further apart from arts and transforming rapidly into an object of consumption.

We are more alienated than ever...
Antonioni was narrating the feeling of alienation, which emerged with the industrial revolution and reached to a climax with the rise of capitalism, and the pains of the early modern individual follwing the depression of the world wars and the psychological traumas reflecting onto the social.
He was a film maker who preferred telling stories through images rather than situations. In fact, most of the time the situations in his films would not follow a cause and effect relationship. However, most importantly, Antonioni had managed to establish a film language of his own by bringing images together in a poetic fashion and by using the feeling of emptiness created via space. Perhaps this was why he was interested more in location than scenario.
Antonioni was in the effort to “bring our hearts and eyes to the same level” just like the way the great photographer Henri-Cartier Bresson did. Drawing a line from our eyes to our hearts through camera angles, locations and images, he was delivering 'humanly feelings' by giving us a smooth rather than a big slap on the face.
Masterpieces such as L’Avventura (The Adventure, 1960), La Notte (The Night, 1961), L’Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962), Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert, 1964), Blowup (Blow-Up, 1966), Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975) narrated the problems of the modern individual, male-female relationships, problems in communication, the inner feeling of emptiness created by the world and alienation. Although he will not be able to create new ones, his existing masterpieces will keep on explaining 'men' to 'men'...

'The Magic Lantern' has gone out...
Another film maker who passed away in july was at the same time an actor, a playwright and a philosopher: Ingmar Bergman... Coined by the Time in 2005 as “the greatest director alive”, Bergman focused on issues of death, religion, solitude, the indiviual, identity and memory in a joyful, yet more often a pessimistic way. This pessimism was at such an extreme degree that he once said “When I watch some of my films, I feel my nerves wreck; tears grow in my eyes... This is so scary...”
However, there are moments when joy and melancholy melt into each other in the cinema of Bergman... For example, whereas one of his most 'joyful' films, “Wild Strawberries”, was marked by a deep melancholy, it was possible for a character in a rather noire scenario to crack into laughter. Perhaps what defined Bergman was a lyrical melancholoy; or maybe, his characters were in love with melancholoy in a lyrical fashion...
The possibility of mentioning both Tarkovsky and Woody Alen in the same sentence while giving an example to the directors influenced by Bergman might also be a sign of this fact.
Despite focusing on a variety of matters with his camera, the great director was actually reflecting the mirror to his very own self the whole time. Sometimes, his films were psychoanalytical narratives projected on to the white screen. Was it this commonality which brought Tarkovsky and Woody Allen into the same sentence?
Having directed such masterpieces as Sommarnattes Leende (The Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955), Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1956), Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963) ve Persona (Persona, 1965) Ingmar Bergman directed a sum of 54 films, produced 126 plays and wrote 39 radio dramas.
It was the 70th birthday of Bergman when Woody Allen said that “Bergman is the greatest artist that came about since the invention of the movie camera”. The movie camera is still recording images in the hands of others. However, Bergman who dealt with existential dilemmas on the editing desk with the coolness of a Scandinavian, played chess with death, confronted his body in his own coffin and embodied other faces in the mirror, will not be able to hold the camera in his hands ever again.
We can only find comfort in believing that the cinema of Bergman, which gave meaning to existentialism, will keep on shedding a light on the 'human' like a 'magic lantern'...

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