Word: bergman
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...created indelible allegories of postwar man adrift without God. He was the movies' great dramatist of strong, tortured women, and the finest director of actresses. More than any filmmaker, he raised the status of movies to an art form equal to novels and plays. Yet when Ingmar Bergman died on Monday, the popular description of him was: Woody Allen's favorite director...
...domineering Swedish tragedian and the self-depreciating American comedian have in common? Plenty. Both created original scripts from their experiences and obsessions. Both worked fast - at least a movie a year for most of their long careers - and relatively cheap. Both forged long relationships with their sponsoring studios. And Bergman was a strong influence on Allen's work: from his New Yorker parody of The Seventh Seal, "Death Knocks" (in which the hero plays not chess with Death but gin rummy) to a cameo by a Grim Reaper in Love and Death and, more deeply, the inspiration for the theme...
...Shooting his new film in Spain, Allen took time out to talk with me about Bergman. We began by remarking on the death, the same day as Bergman's, of Michelangelo Antonioni - the Italian director of L'Avventura, Eclipse, Blowup and The Passenger, and another prime depicter of modern alienation...
...young, Bergman's was not a name worth knowing - though they might be expected to connect with the dark, near-suicidal introspection of his films, with their sense of a tortured psyche swirling into the quicksand of its own making. In 2005, when I proposed a TIME feature on Bergman to coincide with the U.S. release of Saraband, none of the college-age interns that summer had heard...
...though, his name will be in the papers, on TV and the web sites. The Ingmar Bergman brand has a last chance to interest, and addict, those for whom serious foreign films now just sound like homework. If they take a look, they will find the pleasures films can offer: personal dilemmas with universal reverberations; beautiful women suffering deeply and gorgeously; excoriating drama as enthralling entertainment; the ineffable made visible. It's the right time, and past time, for a new generation of Bergmaniacs. They will find that there's nothing more invigorating than total immersion in the dark night...