BLUE MAG

He was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera,” Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988. For me the last of the GREAT filmmakers has passed.

From the NYT:

An existential dread runs through the entire Bergman oeuvre. Among the major directors who spearheaded the international art film movement after 1950, he was the one most closely in touch with the intellectual currents of the day. Freud and Sartre were riding high, and Time magazine wondered in a cover story if God were dead. Attendance at Mr Bergman’s films was a lot like going to church. Though many of those films are steeped in church imagery, God is usually absent from the sanctuary.
As a college student and avid art-film goer in the early 1960s, I was overwhelmed by Mr Bergman’s films, with their heavy-duty metaphysical speculation and intellectual seriousness. In those days, you would no more argue with Mr Bergman’s stature than you would question the greatness of the modern Western literary canon; like Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, et al, Mr Bergman was an intellectual god whose work could reward a lifetime of analytical study.

From Flickhead:

Throughout the years I’ve found myself jaded and not as attracted to Bergman as I once was but make no mistake, there is much to be mined, from the adult themes to his innate grasp of the human condition; the captivating cinematography of Sven Nykvist; and those wonderful casts of actors. He made me fall in love with Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Ingrid Thulin, and I still marvel at their performances in that raft of films that were once in constant demand in theaters: Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician (1958), The Devil’s Eye (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962), The Silence, Persona (1966). There isn’t one filmmaker working today who could come anywhere near that output of sheer quality.

From Time:

At the time, the foreign films that made an impact with the cognoscenti were mainly from France, Italy and Japan. Bergman, though, was a one-man film movement; his instant eminence created a cottage industry of Bergmania. Janus Films, with US rights to most of his pictures, ran Ingmar Bergman festivals in theaters around the country. Full-length studies of his work appeared in English, French, Swedish. In 1960 Simon & Schuster published a book of four of his screenplays (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician). For a generation of budding cinephiles, that settled it. Film was literature. Movies were art. And Bergman was the Shakespeare of the cinema.
They certainly launched a generation of film critics, this one included. Dozens of us have the same story of teenage revelation: of seeing a Bergman movie, usually The Seventh Seal, and saying, “This is what I want to study, devote my life to

.