Michigan Today - September 2007

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Talking about movies

Memories of film greats

By Frank Beaver

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Over the past nine months we have witnessed the deaths of an unusual number of great figures in film art and history:  Robert Altman, Rudolf Arnheim, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo Antonioni. 

As someone who began film study in college in 1956, the year that Bergman’s "The Seventh Seal" reached American movie theaters, I was privileged to be "connected to" cinema's revolutionary transformation from its inception—a revolution led by Bergman, then reinforced by the French New Wave directors in 1958-59, followed by the emerging importance of Antonioni with his masterpiece "L’Avventura" in 1960.  A decade later Robert Altman with "M.A.S.H." (1970) came to the forefront as an American revolutionary who would defy commercial-film dictates in favor of highly personal, eccentric expression.  

Rudolf Arnheim, who died in Ann Arbor in June at age 102, earned his reputation as a critic and theoretician who began to write about the aesthetic importance of film in the 1930s.  At his death, Arnheim was indisputably the most renowned, senior film scholar to have emerged in the twentieth century. 

 Before offering some comments on Bergman, Antonioni and Altman, I want to say a few words about Rudolf Arnheim and his close association with U-M. Arnheim moved to Ann Arbor after his retirement from Harvard.  For a number of years he taught a very popular course at Michigan on the psychology of art, and he also agreed to serve from time to time on film-related doctoral dissertation committees in the American Culture program.  It was in the latter capacity as a fellow committee member that I first came to know Arnheim and to appreciate his great intellectual mind. 

I remember well how he would use the prelude to committee meetings to engage us faculty and graduate students in discussions of contemporary films that he had found particularly engaging. Once the topic was Peter Greenaway’s "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982), a film about a 17th-century artist whose commissioned  paintings of an English country house serve as an entrée to the private world of the wealthy family who inhabit the estate.  Not surprisingly, the narrative’s playful conceits and lush imagery had titillated Arnheim, and I can still see the glint in his eyes as he drew us out on our own reactions to Greenaway’s film.

Students cherished him and he them. One played chess with him regularly and another, Jose Sanchez, produced a documentary video about Arnheim's "up north" home near the dunes of Lake Michigan, a house which he—being the visual aesthetician that he was—designed and located so as to capture the special light of each passing day.  Arnheim’s hobby was wood carving, and "the right light" was essential to the effort.  At the time Arnheim was already in his 90s but he would remain until the end as charming, provocative and engaging as any youthful and animated intellect.

As he began to down-size about this time, he donated copies of his many books and scholarly articles to the Department of Communication, and that collection is now housed in the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures. Arnheim wrote not just about film but about the other mass media as well and thanks to his generosity the scope of his work is available at the University in his donated collection. And you can find his indispensable book "Film As Art" still in print and on the shelves of bookstores everywhere.

Anyone who has sat through Ingmar Bergman’s early stark black-and-white films or later plush symbolic color films will hold strong memories of a deeply reflective genius who took the motion picture into narrative and visual areas previously unexplored. Among my own favorites there are two. First, "Wild Strawberries" (1957), a psychological road picture that reflects on the self-centered values that can obstruct a rewarding, meaningful life. It is film of startling dreams and epiphanies, and in the end one with a sense of personal recovery and joy.  Second, there is the autobiographical "Fanny and Alexander" (1983), a beautiful color film in which Bergman examines his life and his career.  It's the only 3-hour-plus film I went to see twice in the same day.  Appropriately much has been written in the press over the past few weeks about Bergman inestimable contributions to film art.   For a truly exhaustive critical analysis of  his films and thematic interests,  I recommend University of Michigan Professor Hubert Cohen’s acclaimed book "Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession," from 1993.

Bergman’s death reminded me of an evening spent with Max von Sydow, one of the many great actors nurtured by Bergman and who appears in what must be the most widely shown image from  Bergman’s large body of films: a medieval knight engaged in a game of chess with Death in "The Seventh Seal."  In the late 1980s von Sydow came to Detroit to receive a special cultural award from the Swedish community, and he agreed to come to Ann Arbor for a Q and A between the showings of two of his films at the Michigan Theater.  The film faculty at Michigan were able to sit down at a leisurely dinner with von Sydow and share an intimate conversation about him and his work with Bergman.  A large crowd awaited von Sydow at the Michigan, anxious for their dialogue with this great actor.  As I walked von Sydow back to his hotel, a young couple on two bicycles pulled up beside us on State Street and stopped.  The woman called out: “Mr. von Sydow, I have told my husband here that you are the only man I could leave him for; isn’t that true?"  The husband replied: “It’s true!”  Von Sydow’s craggy, seemingly self -absorbed face—so vital in many of Bergman’s soulful character films—broke into a broad smile as the couple rode away into the night.

 The challenges posed by Michelangelo Antonioni’s emergence as a complex filmmaker were many, not  the least of which was learning how to say his name.  In his films narrative plotting was often kept to a minimum in stories mostly about wealthy, alienated people for whom life has become boring and joyless. Characters exist in stagnant environments, in relationships that are cold and ambiguous.  Nowhere were these qualities more evident than in what has been called the ‘malaise’ trilogy: L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962).  Antonioni’s fame, and controversy, spread with three non-Italian based works: Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point (1969), and The Passenger (1975).  Each continued to reveal Antonioni as a committed visualist with mise en scene full of color abstractions and the plot suffused with mystery and ambiguity.
 
The film that I would recommend as quintessential Antonioni is "The Red Desert" ("Deserto Rosso," 1964).  Monica Vitti, the director’s favorite actress, portrays a women alienated within a stultifying environment, a figure edging toward emotional collapse and madness.  In atmospheric styling reminiscent of Georgio de Chirico industrial landscapes exude a sense of mystery and loneliness; color motifs act as correspondents for psychological mood and flights of fantasy. "The Red Desert" finds Antonioni at a visually inspired, emotional peak.

As for Robert Altman, I've already detailed that great director’s long association with the University of Michigan—as a guest professor, opera director, and filmmaker ("Secret Honor," 1984, shot in the front parlor of Martha Cook Dormitory). You can read the article here

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Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.