A Belated Memorium

August 9, 2007 by Dave.

“What the hell is in the water?” That’s what I asked myself last week after learning about the spate of celebrity deaths last week—Ingmar Bergman, Michaelangelo Antonionni, talk show host Tom Snyder, football coach Bill Walsh and French Actor Michel Serrault. Bergman’s and Antonionni’s death, both on July 30, were the ones that really hit home , and Bergman’s more than Antonionni. Don’t get me wrong, Antonionni, who’s best known films include The Passenger and Blowup, has earned great appreciation for his contributions to the film world. However Bergman’s influence on cinema is much more far reaching. Yes I do say “cinema.” He was in many ways responsible for the art house movie fascination in the 1950s and ’60s, which influenced the movie makers of the ’70s—of course most notably Woody Allen (whose films he often emulated and even used Bergman’s cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, for four films), but also Scorcese, Speilberg, Coppola and others owe a debt of gratitude to Bergman. And me, too.

I’ve been studying film since I was 17, but I hadn’t seen any of Bergman’s films until 1995, when I was studying for my Master’s in screenwriting. We had to watch a number of his films and read some of his screenplays. To see his films for the first time was astounding. His films were the stuff of wonder. Seeing great films and reallying studying them, you never look at film the same way. Bergman’s films were just that. Some of the images he created in films like the Seventh Seal or Persona or Hour of the Wolf will leave you breathless; some of the images in the last two films mentioned will completely freak you out, too. To see a Bergman film is to also see what film is capable of. After seeing Hour of the Wolf, I realize that a script that I thought was too far out and couldn’t be done had been done before to great effect.

But it’s not only his visual sensibilities. Richard Schickel was talking about him and said that “his explosions were mainly in the conversation between two people.” He is an incredible writer and writing like his could never be filmed today in today’s Hollywood climate. They come close once in a blue moon in the independent film scene, but they too are few and far between. If you want to see how family dynamics can be portrayed on the screen in all it’s fascination and horror, look at Scenes From A Marriage or Fanny and Alexander or Cries and Whispers or Saraband (revisiting Scenes From A Marriage 30 years later). These are chamber pieces—limited number of characters, limited location, but powerful on emotion and drama. These films have serious gravitas; hell, they practically have their own planetary pull. He is one of those filmmakers you see a few of his films and are permanently altered, either by refusing to ever sit through a film like that again or to realize what true cinema can be and achieve. I definitely am part of the second group.