At last, a smart personal tribute to Bergman. Thank you Woody.
via NYTimes:
The Man Who Asked Hard Questions
By WOODY ALLEN
Published: August 12, 2007
I GOT the news in Oviedo, a lovely little town in the north of Spain
where I am shooting a movie, that Bergman had died. A phone message
from a mutual friend was relayed to me on the set. Bergman once told me
he didn’t want to die on a sunny day, and not having been there, I can
only hope he got the flat weather all directors thrive on.
I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the
artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you.
No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu
of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful
knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the
end of “The Seventh Seal.”
And so, on a summer’s day in July, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of
mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the
finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.
I have joked about art
being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an
afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public
is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly
Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV
and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I
am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his
films for an additional year of life. This would have given him roughly
60 more birthdays to go on making movies; a remarkable creative output.
And there’s no doubt in my mind that’s how he would have used the extra
time, doing the one thing he loved above all else, turning out films.
Bergman
enjoyed the process. He cared little about the responses to his films.
It pleased him when he was appreciated, but as he told me once, “If
they don’t like a movie I made, it bothers me — for about 30 seconds.”
He wasn’t interested in box office results, even though producers and
distributors called him with the opening weekend figures, which went in
one ear and out the other. He said, “By mid-week their wildly
optimistic prognosticating would come down to nothing.” He enjoyed
critical acclaim but didn’t for a second need it, and while he wanted
the audience to enjoy his work, he didn’t always make his films easy on
them.
Still, those that took some figuring out were well worth the effort. For example, when you grasp that both women in “The Silence”
are really only two warring aspects of one woman, the otherwise
enigmatic film opens up spellbindingly. Or if you are up on your Danish
philosophy before you see “The Seventh Seal” or “The Magician,”
it certainly helps, but so amazing were his gifts as a storyteller that
he could hold an audience riveted and enthralled with difficult
material. I’ve heard people walk out after certain films of his saying,
“I didn’t get exactly what I just saw but I was gripped on the edge of
my seat every frame.”
Bergman’s allegiance was to theatricality,
and he was also a great stage director, but his movie work wasn’t just
informed by theater; it drew on painting, music, literature and
philosophy. His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often
rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the
silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of
religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to
communicate with one another.
And yet the man was a warm,
amusing, joking character, insecure about his immense gifts, beguiled
by the ladies. To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative
temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who
intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful
fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this
silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t
figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty
good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those
nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie
where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit
frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”
What does one say on
the phone to a genius? I didn’t think it was a good idea, but in his
hands I guess it would have turned out to be something special. After
all, the vocabulary he invented to probe the psychological depths of
actors also would have sounded preposterous to those who learn
filmmaking in the orthodox manner. In film school (I was thrown out of New York University
quite rapidly when I was a film major there in the 1950s) the emphasis
was always on movement. These are moving pictures, students were
taught, and the camera should move. And the teachers were right. But
Bergman would put the camera on Liv Ullmann’s face or Bibi Andersson’s
face and leave it there and it wouldn’t budge and time passed and more
time and an odd and wonderful thing unique to his brilliance would
happen. One would get sucked into the character and one was not bored
but thrilled.
Bergman, for all his quirks and philosophic and
religious obsessions, was a born spinner of tales who couldn’t help
being entertaining even when all on his mind was dramatizing the ideas
of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. I used to have long phone conversations
with him. He would arrange them from the island he lived on. I never
accepted his invitations to visit because the plane travel bothered me,
and I didn’t relish flying on a small aircraft to some speck near
Russia for what I envisioned as a lunch of yogurt. We always discussed
movies, and of course I let him do most of the talking because I felt
privileged hearing his thoughts and ideas. He screened movies for
himself every day and never tired of watching them. All kinds, silents
and talkies. To go to sleep he’d watch a tape of the kind of movie that
didn’t make him think and would relax his anxiety, sometimes a James
Bond film.
Like all great film stylists, such as Fellini,
Antonioni and Buñuel, for example, Bergman has had his critics. But
allowing for occasional lapses all these artists’ movies have resonated
deeply with millions all over the world. Indeed, the people who know
film best, the ones who make them — directors, writers, actors,
cinematographers, editors — hold Bergman’s work in perhaps the greatest
awe.
Because I sang his praises so enthusiastically over the
decades, when he died many newspapers and magazines called me for
comments or interviews. As if I had anything of real value to add to
the grim news besides once again simply extolling his greatness. How
had he influenced me, they asked? He couldn’t have influenced me, I
said, he was a genius and I am not a genius and genius cannot be
learned or its magic passed on.
When Bergman emerged in the New
York art houses as a great filmmaker, I was a young comedy writer and
nightclub comic. Can one’s work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman?
But I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on
genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and
developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work
ethic but is really plain discipline.
I learned from his
example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given
moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or
succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making
a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in
his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality
maybe I can approach his quantity.
New Yorker cover by Bruce McCall, Mar. 5, 2007
