Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

Oscars for No Country for Old Men

Although many people admired No Country for Old Men, some were repulsed by its nihilism and violence, and quite baffled when the film captured four Oscars (best picture, director, actor in a leading role, and screenplay based on material previously produced or published). To be sure, Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote, directed, and edited the film based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, have rarely lingered over sunny aspects of human existence. Nonetheless, No Country’s gore seems especially relentless, unrelieved as it is by either comic or heart-warming turns such as somewhat soften, brighten and humanize Fargo (1996)--another tale of mad violence, and the sole other Coens’ film to garner Oscars (best screenplay written directly for the screen and best actress in a leading role). Indeed, No Country’s relatively uniform style and tone set it apart from most of the Coens’ oeuvre. One might even argue that surprising shifts of tone and generic allusion in Romance and Cigarettes (2005), a film executive-produced by the Coens but written and directed by John Turturro, are more Coens-like than the path charted in No Country.

Errol Morris is another director who has won recognition at the Academy Awards for a film that is uncharacteristic of his work as a whole. Morris’s The Fog of War, which received the Oscar for best documentary in 2003 and the companion book subsequently published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2005, is more linear and conventional in its imagery, picture-sound relationships, and other aspects of form than earlier, more experimental films by Morris. The insertion of staged scenes in The Thin Blue Line, along with apparently whimsical optical and aural effects as in later films by Morris, provoked the Academy Awards committee to disqualify it from documentary competition. Alert to such doubts as to whether Morris’s films were truly documentaries, Roger Ebert wrote admiringly when The Thin Blue Line appeared, “Although he makes documentaries, Morris is much more interested in the spaces between the facts than with the facts themselves.”

To return to the Coens, though, if in forgoing in No Country the playful shifts of tone and generic allusion that distinguish much of their earlier work, including O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) as well as Fargo, they retreat from experimentation, Javier Bardem’s performance of the horrific villain Anton Chigurh in No Country possibly represents a new perception on their part, while he offers perverse compensation to the film spectator deprived of playful generic turns. Anton Chigurh is not merely a killer such as appears in other films by the Coens, or in Westerns by other filmmakers. Rather, as he keeps re-emerging abruptly, magically, a ubiquitous, wounded figure of destruction relatively free of bodily constraint as well as reason, he represents an evil spirit overtaking the world--or at least the Southwest, where the action occurs. If one accepts the notion that films reflect broad concerns of the society in which they arise as well as of the filmmaker, it’s not inconceivable that this new film bedecked with Oscars points to an unusual surge of pessimism and foreboding in the American psyche.

Ira Jaffe is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Media Arts at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films.

Issues Raised by Writers Guild of America Strike

by Vincent Mosco

The strike of the Writers Guild of America captured a lot of attention because it deprived millions of their favorite television programs. But the issues it raised will persist long after people comfortably settle into new episodes of CSI. Here are some observations to consider.

The strike demonstrated the importance of new media for old media industries and especially for their workers. After all, a central issue in the strike was the distribution of revenues from new media uses of traditional television programming. What, if any, compensation should writers receive for work that is increasingly repackaged for the digital world, especially the internet? With the producers proposing to end the system of residuals and develop new forms of compensation, and the writers determined to press for expanded residual payments, it came as no surprise that the WGA took to the picket line on November 1, 2007. The strike, which lasted three months and cost Hollywood an estimated $2.5 billion, was resolved with a deal that promised writers a stronger foothold in the online world. In the first two years of the three-year contract, writers would get a maximum flat fee of about $1,200 for programs streamed online. In the third year, however, they would receive two percent of a distributor’s gross, a key union demand. Other provisions include increased residual payments for downloaded movies and TV programs.

No one is sure what the size of the revenue stream will be from streaming and downloading, but it should be clear to anyone familiar with research on labor, especially in the communication industry, Hollywood workers would benefit from greater solidarity among its many unions. With separate unions representing directors, writers, actors and technicians, it is difficult for them to speak with one voice against increasingly integrated media conglomerates that dominate both old and new media. The Communication Workers of America which represents journalists, telephone workers, media technicians, and high tech workers has benefited from solidarity. But attempts to bring together the Hollywood unions have failed, often on very close votes. There are many reasons for this but a narrow craft consciousness and a guild, rather than a union, culture have been especially difficult to overcome. In essence, they have failed to match technological and industry convergence with the labor convergence that would provide Hollywood workers with the resources to defend their interests.

Finally, as a communication scholar, it was disappointing to observe how few researchers in the field commented on the strike to offer the historical background and context for the events. Academics, especially those working on the issues swirling around new media and the internet, need to spend more time on the labor dimension. It is not enough to ask: What will be next new thing? We also need to ask whether media workers of the world will unite.

Vincent Mosco is professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society at Queen's University and co-author with Catherine McKercher of Knowledge Workers in the Information Society.

Michael Mann and Johnny Depp Make Public Enemies

By Steven Rybin

The recently ended WGA strike in Hollywood has prevented several new projects from getting off the ground, and several previously announced productions involving film director Michael Mann and actor Johnny Depp have been put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. Several planned Mann projects, including a film with Tom Cruise at Columbia, which Mann would only agree to direct if he could rewrite the script (which couldn’t be done during the strike) and a previously announced project with Depp based on the life of the spy Alexander Litvinenko, were shelved. It is the cancellation of those plans which has allowed Mann and Depp to plan their new collaboration. According to Variety, the project, an adaptation of the 2004 Brian Burroughs book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34, is partially based on the life of gangster John Dillinger and set during 1930s Depression-era America. Mann has made plans to film his own adapted screenplay of the novel with production set to begin in March of 2008.  The film is primarily set in Chicago, an environment Mann knows well; he was born there, and his film 1981 Thief was set in the city.

This is not the first time Mann has announced plans to shoot a film set in the 1930s: an earlier project, announced in the Spring of 2007, was to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in a film noir set in the 30s. That film – announced well before the WGA strike began – never got off the ground because Hollywood studios were unwilling to give Mann the large amount of money the production required (rumored at well over $100 million) in the light of the relative commercial disappointment and budget overruns of his 2006 film Miami Vice. Public Enemies, in many ways, seems a more natural follow-up, given Mann’s own filmography, which provides some explanation as to why the director might be attracted to material involving a dramatization of the FBI.: the federal agency is often a presence in the director’s crime movies, and rarely a sympathetic one. In the 1986 film Manhunter, Mann’s protagonist, Will Graham (William Petersen) is enlisted by the government to help catch a serial killer, an experience which very nearly destroys his relationship with his family, and in the recent film adaptation of the television series Miami Vice, the cavalier law enforcement of Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) is placed in stark contrast to the ineffectual pencil-pushing methods of the bureau. And although Christian Bale has been signed to play FBI agent Melvin Purvis in Public Enemies, it is quite doubtful that the remainder of the (as of now unannounced) actors who will play the other federal agents in the film could carry quite as much on-screen charisma as a gangster played by Johnny Depp, making it likely that viewers’ sympathies will be directed as much towards Dillinger as the authorities chasing him.

Such skewed direction of sympathies, of course, is nothing new for the gangster genre, which has long banked on the likelihood of audiences becoming fascinated with dapper criminality. That Mann’s filmography remains rewarding despite what some would consider familiar crime-film clichés indicates where the strength of his cinema lies; as I have argued elsewhere, the value of Mann’s work largely derives from the way in which he and several very talented collaborators build upon the canvas of the familiar genre conventions with a rich, suggestive film style. But it is not only the conventions of the crime drama that Mann is working within and through: the star personas of his leads, per usual, would also seem to inform his casting. Depp is a veteran of performances casting him as an anti-hero: think of Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, or the more recent Sweeney Todd. And Christian Bale (an exceptional actor who usually finds himself in films that cannot match his talent) seems a perfect choice to play a Mann FBI agent, given that many of his characters struggle with personal demons and character flaws despite finding themselves on the side of the law (think Batman Begins, Rescue Dawn, and the more recent remake 3:10 to Yuma). Genre and star persona, then, as in previous films such as Collateral, Miami Vice, and Heat, will be putty in the hands of Mann, who has quietly (relative to the more heralded careers of auteurs such as Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood) built up one of the strongest oeuvres of any American director since the decline of New Hollywood cinema in the late 1970s.

Steven Rybin teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University and is the author of  The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books).

Brokeback Mountain: A Short Story, a Film, Now an Opera?

By Eric Patterson

            During the summer of 2007, fans of Brokeback Mountain, the short story and the film, may have noticed rumors in the press and on the internet about the possible production of Brokeback Mountain, the musical. Many assumed it must just be another "joke" generated by the endemic discomfort the movie's success seems to have caused, at least for some, and dismissed the additional gossip that movie stars Hugh Jackman and James Marsden might be cast as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist as wishful thinking on the part of gay fans. Then at the end of the summer, it turned out that what actually might be in the works was Brokeback Mountain, the opera. This came from an unlikely source for opera information, the "Rush and Molloy" gossip column in the tabloid New York Daily News. But it was confirmed when representatives of the distinguished modernist composer, Charles Wuorinen, announced that he had received permission from Annie Proulx to compose an opera based on her short story. For all those who were moved by the story and the movie, and particularly for opera lovers, this raises intriguing possibilities about what the next representation of the lives of Ennis and Jack may be like.

First, a little about the composer. Over the past half-century Charles Wuorinen has composed an extraordinary array of music, much of it in the challenging twelve-tone or serial style that originates in the work of Arnold Schoenberg, although Wuorinen has a highly distinctive individual voice, and in recent years has composed some music that is less strictly atonal. He has created works in virtually every form, including eight numbered symphonies, a "microsymphony," an "ecclesiastical" symphony, four piano concerti, tone poems, chamber and solo works, and vocal and choral pieces; some of his works have descriptive religious titles, such as Theologoumenon and Pentecost. Wuorinen already has done one opera, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on the novel by Sir Salman Rushdie, with a libretto by the British poet James Fenton. Haroun is a highly imaginative children's story on the serious subject of freedom of imagination and expression, which Rushdie published in 1990, after the Ayatollahs had issued their notorious fatwa ordering his assassination. The opera first was staged in 2004 by the New York City Opera, and has met with considerable critical success. Like Annie Proulx, Wuorinen is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, which he won in 1970 for Time's Encomium.

The news that Wuorinen is working on an opera based on Proulx's story has led to speculation about what such a work might be like. The film already has a subtle, beautiful, and evocative score in a style quite different from Wuorinen's, which raises the question of what relationship his opera might have, if any, to the music from the movie. Using a small group of players, including guitar, pump organ, pedal steel guitar, and percussion, the Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla created music wonderfully suggestive of the beautiful, lonesome landscapes in the film, the awakening desire between Ennis and Jack, and the fear, frustration, and sadness they and their wives endure. Santaolalla's own instrumental compositions are integrated with popular country hits of the Sixties and Seventies, such as "King of the Road," "The Devil's Right Hand," "It's So Easy to Fall in Love," and "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," performed by artists including Rufus Wainwright, Teddy Thompson, Roger Miller, Steve Earle, Linda Ronstadt, and Tammy Wynette, along with traditional songs such as "He Was a Friend of Mine," sung by Willie Nelson. Santaolalla and his collaborators also composed original songs in an appropriate country style, including "A Love That Will Never Grow Old," "No One's Ever Gonna Love You Like Me," "I Will Never Let You Go," and "I Don't Want To Say Goodbye," which are performed by Emmylou Harris, Mary McBride, Jackie Greene, and Teddy Thompson. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences certainly demonstrated its limitations in its failure to recognize the quality of the acting in Brokeback Mountain or the overall quality of the film (which may well have been the result of the widely reported failure of many of its members even to watch the film), but it did honor Santaolalla with the award for Best Score. Given the success and popularity of Santaolalla's music, those who are curious about the possible opera wonder whether it would refer to the film score. Would Wuorinen use a similar tonal style, or even quote Santaolalla's music, or quote some of the country music characteristic of the time and place in which the story is set? Or would he compose completely original and different music? Though the film music is beautiful, probably the best approach would be to create something entirely new.

                Some have suggested that the spare, restrained nature of the story and the lyrical, subdued quality of Ang Lee's film should incline the composer toward a work on a small scale, a chamber opera, but Howard Stokar, Wuorinen's manager, has said instead that "It would be a big piece, something for an actual opera house." What sort of big opera would Brokeback make? Opera is perhaps the most wonderfully complex and artificial of art forms, and for many Americans is almost synonymous with extravagance, with music, singing, acting, and staging on a giant scale. Though some of the most moving and popular operas, such as La Boheme or Tosca, are in the verismo style, presenting relatively realistic characters and situations, they often have gorgeously dramatic music, and of course many other operas transport their audiences to utterly fantastic realms inhabited by kings and princesses, gods and valkyries. Apart from the magnificent landscape, the world of Brokeback Mountain is about as far from the mythological grandeur of The Ring or Turandot as you can get. Certainly the brilliant technical staging skills of a major opera company could evoke a sense of the rough beauty of the mountain wildernesses where Jack and Ennis are able to be together, and could effectively contrast this with the shabbiness of the places they live in Wyoming and the gaudiness of the Newsomes' world in Texas, but what would the singing be like? Even operas with realistic settings usually have powerful music to express the characters' big emotions. Jack certainly has his share of these, but central to the tragedy is Ennis's fear to express what he feels. He's naturally a man of few words, and though he opens up to Jack, and eventually feels overwhelming loss and grief, he does so without grand gestures that would seem to lend themselves to a big operatic performance. In the film, perhaps the most powerful of many powerful scenes comes when Heath Ledger depicts Ennis finding the two shirts Jack has saved and hidden for twenty years in what amounts to a closet within a closet at the Twists's ranch house. Ledger's understated acting is superb, but in the scene he is virtually silent. How do you write a music drama about a character who's inherently so inexpressive and undramatic as Ennis?

So far no libretto has been completed for Wuorinen's project. The composer must decide what his relationship to Santaolalla's music will be, but the writer of a libretto will have to decide how to respond to both the story and the screenplay. The film has an outstanding screenplay, in which Larry McMurtry and Diana Osanna perceptively and subtlely adapted and expanded Annie Proulx's brilliant story. They treated her work with great respect, for the most part only adding sections that developed the implications of what Proulx had written, as in their development of Alma and her daughters and Lureen and her family. As those who've read about the making of the film are aware, when it was shot some episodes not in the story, particularly one involving Ennis and Jack assisting a group of hippies whose van gets stuck, wisely were dropped. Some have criticized the movie for not presenting more scenes depicting the love between Jack and Ennis, though it does have the courage to affirm the directness of the story's depiction of their sexual relationship in several important scenes, one of which-- their second night together in the tent-- is original to the film. Others have noted that one of the sources of the power of the story is Proulx's use of a frame at the beginning and end, describing Ennis's thoughts about Jack some months after Jack's murder; she implicitly presents her account of the love between Ennis and Jack as Ennis's nostalgic recollection, and this quality is lost in the film, since it presents the story in simple chronological sequence, beginning in 1963. Writing the libretto provides the opportunity to respond to such criticisms, but does pose the danger of expanding or changing the narrative in ways that may not work. Also, though one of the richest aspects of the story is Proulx's extraordinary ear for the Western vernacular, and the filmmakers bring this to the screen effectively in the dialogue, you have to wonder how the ungrammatical, earthy, pungent, vivid language of the characters will sound when it's sung.

An opera performance, of course, is very different from a film. The filmmakers show much of what goes on between Ennis and Jack, and their families as well, through close-ups rather than through dialogue. Fortunately, all of the actors are gifted, and succeed effectively, often eloquently, in presenting what their characters feel and think through looks, gestures, posture, and expressions. For those who liked the film, so many moments stay in the mind: the way Jake Gyllenhaal sits and concentrates on peeling potatoes by the campfire, resolutely not looking, but entirely aware, as Ledger washes, naked, behind him; the way Ledger's face becomes more relaxed and open, expressing Ennis's attraction to his friend, and then how severe and closed it becomes when they part at the end of their summer together; the look of mingled fear and dying hope in Gyllenhaal's beautiful eyes as Ennis dismisses him… The movie shows rather than tells. But there are no close-ups in an opera. It takes place on a stage far away from the audience, and the performers must signal what their characters feel and think through big gestures and powerful singing in order to reach those watching and listening. There's little possibility of the kind of quiet, subtle intensity that distinguishes the movie. Indeed, opera often requires considerable resolve on the part of the audience in suspending disbelief, particularly depending on who the performers are; even though certain opera stars may have great voices and histrionic ability, it can be challenging for some viewers to believe that they are the delicate maidens and athletic heroes they're meant to portray. Those who watch video recordings of opera sometimes wish that those operating the cameras would recognize this, and avoid close-ups in an art whose performers are meant to be seen from far away.

               Gay opera fan sites on the internet are full of speculation about what Wuorinen's opera may be like and who might be cast. Clearly the principals need to be right in age, appearance, acting ability, and, perhaps most important, the apparent chemistry between their characters. Many seem to perceive Ennis as a baritone, and Jack as a tenor, a discussion that's led to some interesting speculation about whether baritones should be thought of as "tops" and tenors as "bottoms." Names that have been mentioned (with enthusiastic acclamation by various fans) are those of Stephen Costello, Nathan Gunn, Scott Hendricks, and Norman Reinhardt. Not surprisingly, there continues to be discussion of the rumor that Hugh Jackman and James Marsden might be cast, though neither is an opera singer. Perhaps this isn't as far-fetched as it may seem. Jackman has substantial successful experience in stage performance in musicals, including his role as Curley in the London production of Oklahoma!, and was acclaimed for his portrayal on Broadway of fellow Australian Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, for which he won a Tony Award. Not only can he sing, but he also seems quite capable of playing a role a lot gayer than either Ennis or Jack. (It's a little scary to think of what Jack and especially Ennis might have thought of Peter Allen.) Marsden-- a former Versace model-- has played gay characters in two movies, Heights, with Jesse Bradford, and The 24^th Day, with Scott Speedman. Marsden's also worked with Jackman in the three X-men films, playing cool, leather-clad Cyclops to Jackman's lupinely hirsute Wolverine. And he can sing, as demonstrated in his performance as Corny Collins in Hairspray. Still, it's quite a ways from a John Waters musical to the opera house. Nonetheless, the speculation and anticipation continue. At least for all the fans of the X-men comics and movies who perceive a gay subtext in the stories about misunderstood mutants with special powers, it's gratifying to imagine Cyclops and Wolverine finally locked in each other's arms. And Jackman and Marsden certainly would look good in cowboy hats and jeans. Or out of them.

The United States has great opera companies and American composers have contributed to an impressive list of varied and distinctively American operas: Scott Joplin's Treemonisha, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Howard Hanson's Merrymount, Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe, Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, Aaron Copeland's The Tender Land, Gian Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Bleeker Street, John Adams's Nixon in China, Phillip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, to name just a few. With Brokeback Mountain Charles Wuorinen has the opportunity to contribute another, and to address the subject of love between men, a theme that's been marginalized in too many areas of artistic expression for far too long. It's high time for a great American opera about men who love men, especially considering the number of gay opera fans. So we'll have to wait and see-- and listen.

Eric Patterson is associate professor of American studies and American literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the author of an upcoming book On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film.

Michael Mann Directs a Nike Commercial

By Steven Rybin

The phenomenon of noted film directors helming television commercials is hardly a new one; everyone from Martin Scorsese to Jean-Luc Godard have made advertisements during their careers, and even the recently deceased paragon of the European art cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni, once lensed an ad for Renault. So the fact that news comes of Michael Mann (the director of Ali, The Insider, and Heat, among other notable films) having directed a slate of new commercials for Nike’s new Zoom product line should come as no terrific surprise. The commercials themselves, which come with the tagline “Quick is Deadly” and which feature high-profile professional athletes such as LaDainian Tomlinson and Steve Nash, are reminiscent of the cinematography and cutting used in the boxing sequences of the director’s biopic Ali: the camera is dropped into the middle of the action, in between defenders and offensive linemen, generating a sense of tension before Tomlinson runs for a touchdown. This sequence is intended to give the viewer a sense of complete immersion in an exciting NFL play – and, of course, a sense that one should run out and buy Nike shoes.

These Nike ads follow the Mercedes advertisement the director made a few years ago, and commercial directing was a part of Mann’s apprenticeship before directing his first film in 1979. But Mann’s recent return to commercials after establishing credibility among cinephiles as well as his own place in the Hollywood industry is somewhat ironic. Many of the director’s initial films, such as Thief (1981) and Manhunter (1986), were compared – derisively – with the superficial patina of commercials and music videos made during the 1980s. Indeed, Mann’s Nike ads remind one of what the French critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret, in a perceptive essay entitled “The Aquarium Syndrome,” once pointed out about Mann’s work in television during the 1980s, when Mann served as executive producer of the popular and visually novel Miami Vice television series. Thoret suggested that commercial television offered the director (who did not actually direct a single episode of Vice, but who closely controlled the visual and sonic sheen of the series in his role as producer) the opportunity to experiment with style before confirming the results with a feature-length film for cinema screens. Perhaps Mann is just using the commercial format to toy with sound and vision until his next proper film begins production.

But given his industry success, Mann hardly needs this sort of template anymore, and given that, except the plug for the shoes, the “Quick is Deadly” series is largely derivative of Mann’s cinema work, it is debatable whether or not this return to television functions in quite the same way as Thoret claimed Mann’s earlier televisual work did. Instead of providing Mann with the room to experiment with image (I know of more than a few people in academia who would bristle at the thought of commercials as a site for any kind of meaningful experimentation), the making of these commercials seems more like the sharpening of already well-honed filmmaking skills.

Mann’s commercials also bring to mind the always tenuous balance held between commerce and art in the realm of Hollywood. Although an idea of the filmmaker-as-author has arguably existed for as long as the cinema itself, modern studies of film authorship were more or less initiated in the 1950s when the film critics which became the future directors of the French New Wave school (Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, among others) argued that Hollywood directors (whom they called ‘auteurs’), although working in a highly regimented and standardized studio system, were able to “smuggle” in their own personal visions in a studio system that, on the face of it, was inimical to the very idea of individual personality. This particularly romantic conception of authorship – sometimes called “the cult of personality” – doesn’t hold much weight in academic circles anymore, partially because of the very tension between commercial interests and artistic vision that much of Mann’s own filmmaking suggests. After all, these days, the words “a Michael Mann film” are nearly as much a part of the marketing apparatus of Hollywood as the presence of Tom Cruise or Will Smith in one of his films.

But these commercials, like the director’s films, suggest that Mann himself probably doesn’t buy into the cult of personality anymore than film academics do; unlike the recent series of American Express commercials directed by Scorsese, Wes Anderson, and M. Night Shyamalan, Mann’s commercials do not make use of the director’s on-screen presence, and despite the familiarity of his name, it is at any rate unlikely that most filmgoers could pick him out of a lineup (unlike celebrity directors such as Scorsese, Woody Allen, or Clint Eastwood). Although Mann has claimed in interviews that he could never have operated as an anonymous figure in the classical Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 40s, his own work (relying as it does upon the framework of familiar genres) suggests that he is comfortable enough with such anonymity, letting the style itself speak for the absent presence of the director. In terms of his film work, style speaks powerfully: in The Insider, a dramatization of 1990s television journalism, Mann was able to use style to reflect upon his own agency (or lack thereof) within contemporary image-making. Such reflection is not really possible within the form of the commercial, which suggest that Nike CEO Phil Knight could just as well be an auteur as could Mann, something that Godard and Truffaut probably would not have been able to predict in the 1950s.

 

Steven Rybin teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University and is the author of The Cinema of Michael Mann published by Lexington Books.

Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007: An Appreciation

by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Ingmar Bergman passed away on July 30, 2007 at the age of 89. As soon as the sad news got around, the world honored his oeuvre as that of one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. In Sweden flags were flown half-mast and the nation was aware that it had lost its most famous son. In this context, some Swedish journals could not ignore the fact that the Bergman phenomenon has something uncanny (or should we say Bergmanesque?) about it: in a way, this artist, who exposed themes that are familiar to every Swede, had been “too large” for this small country.

Foreign journals, on the other hand, seldom mentioned details about Bergman’s cultural context. As a matter of fact, explorations into this theme are rare; just as rare as philosophical examinations of Bergman’s films, though his films are (as everybody agrees) as profound and metaphysical as the work of, say, French existentialist writers.

The death of this giant produces an uncanny feeling: there is a gap between the explicit concreteness with which Bergman described the relationships between “real” (Swedish) humans, and his abstract way of sticking out of a culture to which he is so strongly linked and at the same time not linked at all. The most uncanny of all questions can thus be formulated like this: is Bergman too big not only for the Swedes but also for everybody else?

Bergman is indeed full of contradictions. Seemingly mainly preoccupied with his own pains and indifferent about “influences,” he is at the same time recognized as an integral component of European cinema. When he received the Erasmus Prize for his artistic contribution to European culture he declared, in the official speech that he held, that in his opinion European culture would simply not exist. This was perhaps, as wrote Vernon Young, the “most sovereign discourtesy publicly committed by any artist in our time” because the Erasmus Prize is explicitly awarded for the “intensification of European spiritual life.”

But there are more contradictions. Bergman was highly professional though at the same time widely “self-taught;” he was cultivated and profound though he preferred to describe himself modestly as an “entertainer;” his films are vernacularly savage though speaking at the same time the artistic language of an international bourgeoisie; throughout his career Bergman remained internationally influential though he clung at the same time to an outside position from which the world can be observed rather than changed.

If we really want to understand Bergman we should perhaps catch up some basic understanding about the evolutionary process of culture through a dialectical exchange between periphery and centre. First of all, instead of putting Bergman into the mausoleum of great directors we should try to perceive his work through the cultural context established by, for example, Mauritz Stiller (the Finnish-Swedish film director who “discovered” Greta Garbo), Victor Sjöstrom, or the Dane Carl Dreyer. Then, Bergman can be studied as the perhaps unique case of an artist who not only came from the periphery but who stayed in the periphery without turning the periphery into a center. Bergman influenced the center from the periphery and this is indeed uncanny or simply Bergmanesque.

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is professor of philosophy at Zhejiang University, China. He is the author of the upcoming book Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai.