With the deaths, on the same day, of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, the golden age of European arts cinema became past tense. I'm currently making a documentary series on the history of world cinema; both directors were near the top of my interview wishlist. As I struck them off, I realised that almost no one remains to talk about the emergence of European art cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. The wall between it and us feels sealed now, which is sad.
This sadness was complicated by the acres of media coverage devoted to the directors' deaths. Bergman and Antonioni were essential figures for intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, when most of today's newspaper editors were educated. No doubt this is why their deaths made the front pages. On Newsnight Review, Toby Young did his now standard oik revisionism (Bergman was for bores). In Prospect in February 2003, I too tried to describe why my generation (born in the mid-1960s) took Bergman down a peg or two, but ended by saying that he was growing on me. So mostly I was pleased by the attention Antonioni and Bergman received. But mixed in with this was truculence at how little of a mark was made by the recent deaths of two other directors, Senegal's Ousmane Sembène and Japan's Shohei Imamura, figures of equal significance in world cinema. From the viewpoint of the European narcissist, their African and Asian worlds were largely irrelevant.
Although Bergman and Antonioni tripped off the same tongues in the 1950s and 1960s, and their self-evident seriousness and aesthetic confidence forced film finally to be accepted as art, they were profoundly different from each other. The best way to see this, I believe, is to think of how it feels to watch, on the one hand, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and Persona, and, on the other, Antonioni's trilogy L'Eclisse, L'Avventura and La Notte. As I do so, I can imagine myself stepping into the worlds of the latter but not the former. I want to be the characters in Antonioni films, but it wouldn't occur to me to be Bergman's. The structures of Antonioni films feel open, those of Bergman closed.
What do I mean by this? I've long argued that the three truly great directors of European art cinema to emerge in the 1950s—Bresson, Fellini and Bergman—were all masters of closed worlds. Bresson's central metaphor was life as a prison. Fellini's was life as a circus. Bergman's was life as a theatre. In every Bergman film I've seen, the characters feel as if they are on stage. They have symbolic status conferred on them at the very moment of their conception, and there's an invisible proscenium between them and us. Not only are Bergman's worlds physical microcosms—bourgeois homes, islands—but the human themes he addresses are distillations. We do not go to Bergman films to see the transient fashions of European or Scandinavian life. He is concerned with essences. His films feel as if they are about the first human beings—Adam and Eve, or perhaps Tristan and Isolde.
Compare this to Antonioni. His human beings are as unhappy as Bergman's, and as far from paradise, but there's no proscenium. Settings are contemporary. Space is photographed as an architect might photograph it—as if it's real. Antonioni "got" urbanism. There is no back wall in his films, no stage left or right, just infinite possibilities for wandering. Watching Antonioni brings to mind Le Corbusier or de Chirico.
The realness of the spaces in Antonioni's films affects his characters and how they behave. Whereas Bergman's people circle each other, spiralling inwards, honing in on the knot of the matter that discomforts or separates them, in Antonioni they lose themselves. In the famous ending of L'Eclisse, Monica Vitti walks out of an apartment, on to a street, and pauses in a doorway. We see an empty street corner, other people, the occasional passing vehicle, modern buildings. Minutes pass. We expect her to return, but slowly it dawns on us that she has fled the movie. In The Passenger, we follow the meandering of Jack Nicholson's character, but, in a famous shot at the end, the imagery continues to wander without him. When it returns to him, we discover that he has died. One result of such dissolutions is that Antonioni films don't always feel as if they are about real people. When I interviewed Jeanne Moreau, three decades after she starred in La Notte, she could still hardly contain her irritation at how uninterested Antonioni had been in what she, as an actress, could bring to the part.
Much of the media coverage of the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni noted that they both loved actresses and had bleak worldviews, which is true as far as it goes. But their differences were far more profound. More than any other director, Bergman insisted that cinema could look inside human beings, forensically. In looking, he found an irreducible core, a knot. Antonioni looked at human beings just as intensely, but as he did, they dissolved before his eyes—the opposite of Bergman. Capturing this dissolution of the self had never been attempted before in film. This was his great significance.
In the last few weeks, I've argued this point with friends and colleagues. Few dispute the contrast, but many argue that Bergman's probing of the inner self is more valuable, more humane, more of a contribution to the culture of Kant, of Hegel, of Hume. I disagree. Antonioni's sense of what a human being is—a figure that can dissolve or disperse—is in a tradition that stretches back to ancient myth, to Buddhism, to Socrates. For me, this is a truer portrait of human nature—and so, in the end, I love Antonioni's films more.
