DANCE OF DEATH, 2

When I wrote yesterday's blog in tribute to Ingmar Bergman, I compared him to Antonioni without realizing as I wrote that Michelangelo Antonioni, the great Italian filmmaker, had also just died, at the age of 94. So that dance of death moving over the hill into the distance can boast two of the most remarkable figures of the great era of European auteur filmmakers among its number.

L'Avventura (1960), the film that audiences hissed at Cannes, is the definitive Antonioni experience. The remarkable composition of shots will be reason enough to stay riveted to the screen, or if not, you might find yourself, like the Cannes audience, wondering why the film doesn't seem concerned to resolve the mystery of Anna's disappearance. For me, watching this film is almost purely a visual experience so I can't say I ever cared greatly about "the plot." But if you're concerned with that, there is a story unfolding, it's just that it's ignoring all the usual cues about how we're supposed to read important moments, how we're supposed to "add it up."

It's that kind of indifference to what other filmmakers consider to be the storytelling value of films that made me a fan of Antonioni. I'll admit that L'Eclisse (1962) is too static even for me, but La Notte (1961) and especially Red Desert (1964) and The Passenger (1975) are movies I can watch again and again because knowing "what's going to happen" has little to do with the process of watching them. If I had to describe one quality of Antonioni's use of character that sets him apart, it's the way in which ambiguities of motive and of response, of thought and feeling, are maintained -- against all the conventional ways in which screen-acting broadcasts feelings in broad strokes so that we're never in much doubt as to who is bad, and good, and sympathetic, and hurting, and so on. In the films L'Avventura, Red Desert, The Passenger -- my three favorites (which I've seen between three times -- Red Desert -- and countless times -- The Passenger) the audience is left to "figure people out" without being privy to how we're supposed to feel about them. It's a true test of whatever one deems one's "moral sense" to be, and that seems to me a significant challenge for any art form, particularly a popular one. 

That aspect may be a bit less true in Red Desert (1964), where Antonioni famously used color as an expressive element (and which I wrote about in an earlier blog): the dramatic situations feel at times a bit heavy-handed, but that's offset by the pleasures of watching a meticulous film craftsman, having mastered the art of composition long since, work with a new language of color composition.

About Antonioni's best-known film, Blow Up (1966), apart from what I said yesterday in comparing it to Bergman's Persona, I'll simply say that the film has never lived up to my expectations, that it has always "let me down." But, oddly, I have great admiration and even affection for it. And I know that I will watch it again hoping that this time it will be different, that this time something that didn't click for me finally will and I'll see -- like David Hemmings studying those blow-ups -- something I missed before. It's that possibility -- that all the movie contains has not been exhausted by one or even several viewings -- that keeps me going back to Antonioni, and keeps me disturbed by him because, more than any of the other auteur figures of my youth -- Truffaut, Fellini, Kubrick, Altman, Bergman, Godard (all but the latter dead now) -- Antonioni alienates even me. 

I recall that when I finally saw Andrei Tarkovsky's final film The Sacrifice (1986) a few years ago, it struck me as Bergman meets Antonioni. I was moved, and very happy.

THE DANCE OF DEATH

Ingmar Bergman died today, the Swedish filmmaker who brought us the indelible image of the dance of death at the close of his landmark film The Seventh Seal (1957). I remember coming under the spell of Bergman’s movies in my teens, watching as many of them as I could on PBS, eventually HBO, then later still at the old TLA repertory movie house in Philadelphia. That was in the late '70s, a decade not particularly notable for new Bergman work -– but by then he had become known as the filmmaker of choice of Woody Allen, who did amusing take-offs on Bergman in Love and Death (1975) and then tried to make a Bergman movie with Interiors (1979) -– don’t go there.

The best Bergman –- who a friend affectionately dubbed “ol’ ball and chain” –- was in the '50s, the decade of Summer Interlude, Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, and of course The Seventh Seal. The latter seems to me only to improve with the years. Set in the Middle Ages, the film seems more and more “timeless” in the sense of not belonging to any particular time and place. It doesn’t feel like a cinematic period piece at all. In general, these films have the quality of the theater: Strindberg, whom Bergman admired and whose plays he produced, but also Chekhov and Ibsen. They are northern European, certainly, and could probably only have been made in a country like Sweden, relatively untouched by the war, but, thanks to Bergman’s films, suffering as much angst as anyone. But in the '50s, that era I associate with the apotheosis of kitsch and melodrama, the humanism of the films is what stands out. They are poetic to a degree that makes them almost literary, part of an effort to make cinema not only artistically successful as spectacle and characterization, but as symbolic and psychologically compelling.

Hence the “ball and chain” epithet. In the '60s, Bergman’s films are rife with psychological crisis that is also existential, and in a way that none of the other big name auteurs tried. Even in Antonioni, the parables of man’s crisis are specifically aimed at modern man, urban, socialized, imbued with anomie to the marrow. In Bergman, the crisis condition is simply man’s fate, forever and ever. There really isn’t any way out. It’s as if earthly life is purgatory with no fixed time of atonement. And we don’t even know if there’s a God, so atonement becomes a rather vague concept, adding to the crisis. And adding to the bleakness is the use of the island of Faro as the setting for a number of films, and all those intense close-ups of souls in torment. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann were Bergman’s standout performers, always willing to unmask themselves before the camera, able to play a range of characters all recognizably Bergman characters. When I think of Ullman it’s her unflinching gaze into the camera, when I think of von Sydow, it’s his averted gaze, with that slight curl of a rueful smile on his lips.

Persona (1966) is the film I would set aside as something completely different. It’s the same year as Antonioni’s Blow Up, and the two would make for an interesting double feature as both try to plumb the “modern problem” par excellence: if art is supposed to imitate life, what happens to art when life itself has become a form of imitation? Both films are about reality not as something you know and live with, but as something you try to find, something underneath all the images of what you think it is. It’s a grim film at times, but also oddly playful, as if Bergman might have got wind of the idea (it’s the '60s after all) that it’s ok to laugh, even if the joke’s on us.

But the film of Bergman’s that I consider far and away his masterpiece, the “one film” if we have to pick one, is Fanny and Alexander (1983). On DVD now you can get the five hour version made for Swedish TV (which became Bergman’s medium from the late Seventies, as though in the era of “blockbusters” it was best to be as insular as possible and withdraw from movie biz). A shortened version of Fanny and Alexander was released theatrically and received a Best Foreign Language Oscar in 1984. In this film, Bergman gets even closer to the Chekhovian mastery he had almost managed in his '50s films, only the film is closer in spirit and theme to the fiction of Thomas Mann. Which is to say that Fanny and Alexander is more like a film-novel than any other movie I can think of, its mood and perspective fully mature, warm without being sentimental, its images seen with a clarity that fully inhabits them.

And speaking of Bergman’s images, they would not be what they are without the work of perhaps the greatest cinematographer of them all (certainly my favorite) Sven Nykvist, who died last year. Nykvist understood and used lighting like Vermeer. His camerawork is truly painting with light. Together they made movies like no one else.

MUSING ON MUSIL

"Persons who would before never have been taken seriously became famous. Harshness mellowed, separations fused, intransigents made concessions to popularity, tastes already formed relapsed into uncertainties. Sharp boundaries everywhere become blurred and some new, indefinable ability to form alliances brought new people and new ideas to the top. Not that these people and ideas were bad, not at all; it was only that a little too much of the bad was mixed with the good, of error with truth, of accommodation with meaning. There even seemed to be a privileged proportion of this mixture that got furthest on in the world; just the right pinch of makeshift to bring out the genius in genius and make talent look like a white hope, as a pinch of chicory, according to some people, brings out the right coffee flavor in coffee. Suddenly all the prominent and important positions in the intellectual world were filled by such people, and all decisions went their way. There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent and goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitely arrived."--Robert Musil, 1930

I'm reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities for a possible reading group in the fall. I read the first 336 pages of this 1000+ page unfinished opus 15 years ago while reading for generals. At that time I remember finding the text vastly entertaining, the tone so wryly satiric, but never falling into caricature or farce. It's just that Musil was able to see how stupid people are. And he didn't really hold it against them, really. It isn't as if stupidity is uninteresting -- there are as many varieties of it as there are of anything else one could name. And of course adding chicory to coffee is a matter of taste -- for one it enhances, for another it ruins, no need to say that one view or the other is stupid, thick, or stubborn. Musil is always gracious in allowing that things which seem to make no sense must be sensible to someone, even if only as trivial vanities and statements of some subjective verity.

The sense one gets from his book -- and why it's so hard to pin down -- isn't the viewpoint of someone above it all, looking down on human frailties and laughing up his sleeve. As the above quotation indicates, the point of view is of someone who has seen the pageant go by and has noted, not bitterly, not desperately, but somewhat good-humoredly that it really wasn't a pageant worth taking part in. Fifteen years ago, when I was in my early 30s, that perspective seemed that of a "cold, hard eye," perhaps of a wisdom won from disenchantment. But I was still ready for enchantment, or at least wanted to believe I was, but the more I read Musil, the more I too found myself unable to believe in the passions such as the ego conceives of them. I saw the book as a bracing tonic.

Turning 48 in a few weeks, I feel closer than ever to the tone and outlook of this quotation. The feeling of "something missing in everything" is only too apparent somehow, even though I probably have as many enthusiasms currently as I usually do, but that's just habit. One senses none of them is really going to provide a new lease on life. Often I like to speak as though "the world has really grown worse" (in many ways it has -- who would deny it?), but I know that what is really at work is the fact that the "new era" is simply one in which I have to admit my age, as it were. Musil turned 50 the year he published the first volume of Der Mann. It just seems time to read him straight through.

MIGHTY MARCEL

For Proust's Birthday: July 10, 1871

Of the writers I consider the most influential on myself -- the ones I can't imagine NOT having read -- Proust came last. Which is to say I was already twenty-four when I finally got through the old Moncrieff translation called Remembrance of Things Past. I think why Proust so definitely marks "the end of an era" for me is that not only was it the end of youth -- twenty-five arbitrarily marking the move toward maturity -- but it's the end of that phase in which I read only by my own lights. Shortly after that my reading would be shaped by syllabi. I doubt anyone has been significantly altered by a syllabus, but I could be wrong.

I'm not altogether sure why I believe that, but Proust could be considered part of what I cling to in that particular myth of the mind-altering readings of youth. No one has dramatized so effectively, so subtly, the definitive effects on a growing consciousness of new experiences, especially but not solely aesthetic experiences. In fact, all experience is a kind of aesthetic experience for the narrator of the Recherche and that's as it should be. What a writer finds in Proust is nothing less than the assertion that life as it is lived is incomplete if not given aesthetic expression. But one receives this wisdom in vain if one assumes that a certain kind of aesthetic experience is proscribed. Proust is much more open-ended than that. Some like to say that the Recherche is the book that the narrator imagines writing at the close, but that's simply an inference, the kind that those who like closure like to rest on. What the narrator in the end provides is an insight about how life could become the basis of a great fiction. And of course we've just concluded reading a great fiction that the author, Marcel Proust, made from his own life. The difference is that the life the narrator is imagining "translating" into fiction is already a fiction. A fiction concocted by Monsieur Proust and not "life" at all. So what would the fiction based on that fiction be? Postmodernism, I guess.

Proust gives the reader the greatest artistically achieved presentation of the effects of time on human beings, but I think it's for the act of ending with the proleptic prospect of writing fiction against time, of converting existing fiction into further fiction, that I award the palm of greatest novelist of the twentieth century to cher Marcel. And it's partly for that reason that those "Johnny-come-latelies" I read après Proust -- for all that they impressed me in quite new and exciting ways (the likes of Garcia Marquez and Henry James and Austen and, yes, even Cervantes and Flaubert and Musil and Mann) -- only filled in "gaps," didn't really alter the playing field. But even that perspective is Proustian, because what the formula for fiction that the narrator gives us in the end amounts to is a conversion of the past into the eternal present of fiction, for the sake of futurity. And it may be that whenever one receives that message -- on one's pulses, as it were -- there's not much left over for new discoveries. Everything is already over. Toujours déjà vu. Let the fiction begin!