Word: bergman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Ingrid Bergman "wasn't beautiful like Garbo, but she was radiantly appetizing...her presence was like breakfast on a sunny morning," Christopher Isherwood confessed to his diary in 1941 when he was a recent arrival in Hollywood, writing scripts for MGM. Nine pages later, he's not only describing the Marx Brothers jumping all over Somerset Maugham, "screaming like devils," but also watching Aldous Huxley and Charlie Chaplin singing old London music-hall songs on the Santa Monica Pier. No wonder the unchanging center of Isherwood's life, the Hindu Vedantist teacher Swami Prabhavananda, asked his worldly disciple to bring...
...labyrinthine Alain Resnais epic, to the glory days of foreign-language films--the '50s and '60s. Back then Hollywood was Doris Day and Jerry Lewis on the low side, Tennessee Williams and biblical spectacles on high. Meanwhile, artists in other countries were leading film to a robust maturity: Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in France, Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy, Luis Bunuel in Spain. As each director found a constituency, U.S. distributors would pick up his earlier films, as well as other movies from the same country. Americans...
...about Antonioni's seductive use of existential ennui. And when foreign films didn't tax the brain, they stirred the loins. In pouty Brigitte Bardot, in statuesque peasant Sophia Loren, in the knowing rapture of Jeanne Moreau, Americans saw ideals of glamour more complex than Jayne Mansfield. Even Bergman gave you bosoms along with the angst. These films were invitations to European decadence; each American became a Henry James innocent abroad, primed for education and debauchery...
...foreign genre wasn't dead, it was missing. Some of the best directors died (Truffaut) or retired (Bergman). Others kept working, but in the U.S. their work was shown sporadically at best. The last films Fellini and Satyajit Ray made never opened here; neither have the most recent films by Godard, Resnais, Antonioni and Kurosawa. The Netherlands' Paul Verhoeven (Spetters) joined a century-long exodus of European talent to Hollywood (where he made Robocop and Showgirls). Denmark's Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) stayed in Europe but made films in English. That leaves a new generation of world masters...
...lust for power betrays his best instincts. Ikiru 1952; Akira Kurosawa In his final days, a government functionary discovers the joy of living. Kurosawa, justly celebrated for his muscular action spectacles, achieves a delicate and totally unsentimental irony in this small, glowing gem of a movie. Persona 1966; Ingmar Bergman A famous actress falls silent, unable to speak of and to the world's brutalities and banalities. Her nurse fills the emptiness with chipper chatter, eventually talking herself into her patient's tragic view. Bergman has never been more bleak, austere, enigmatic or hypnotic. Chinatown 1974; Roman Polanski Dewy-fresh...