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Pauline Kael brilliantly puts Bergman into perspective in her

Posted by tinear (A) on January 17, 2009 at 08:53:23

wonderful book, "Going Steady." Arguably America's (or anywhere) best film critic (perennial The New Yorker reviewer), in the chapter, "A Sign of Life," analyzes Ingmar's oeuvre.
A sample of her insight:
"But his won way had become a bleak and thorny path in a landscape by Edvard Munch and he took it so often, with the same actors representing "the artist's"---i.e. HIS--- conflicts and anguish, that it was becoming a well-travelled psychotic freeway. By "Hour of the Wolf," released earlier this year, I no longer found him "interesting""; if a movie director isn't going to provide a joke or two and some dancing girls, if he's going to be serious then he'd better have something serious to say. I knew a Catholic girl in college who was losing her faith and who spent a semester going around asking everybody, "If you don't believe in God what basis do you have for going on living?" Bergman pulled that same dumb stunt for a much longer period, and when he graduated to the agony-of-the-creator theme, it really seemed about time for him to give us more creation and less agony. I wanted a sign of life from him--- not just masterly passage like the great erotic monologue in "Persona" but the kind of sign I thought I had seen back in the mid-fifties when "Summer Interlude" first turned up (as an exploitation picture), followed by "Smiles of a Sumer Night" and " The Seventh Seal" and his early "Torst." But then came ten years that were a regular death knell of movies, from "Wild Strawberries" to "
Hour of the Wolf," though he developed an extraordinary expressive technique and an extraordinary control over actors, and though, intermittently, he produced sequences of great intensity. But what a tiresome deep thinker of second-rate thoughts he had become--- the Billy Graham of the post-analytic set. And how absurdly gloomy and self-absorbed--- a man living alone in the world and stewing in his own intellectual juice. When the Heroine of "Persona turned on the television and saw Vietnam atrocities, we in the audience experienced culture shock--- a medievalist had crossed the time barrier. If, despite his erratic brilliance, I was fed up with Bergman, it was because of the pall of profundity that hung over his work and because so many people had come to think that that pall was art."
AMEN!

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