Kicking A Swede When He’s Down

Ingmar Bergman is dead. And even though I was a Cinema Studies minor at university, I never much understood all the Ingmar love. Woody Allen said Ingmar was, “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.” Well, if you ignore Griffith, Lang, Murnau, Ford, Welles, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Leone, Peckinpah, Godard, Eisenstein, Bresson, and that Hitchcock fellow, then Woody might have a point. As far as I’m concerned, however, Bergman is the Kafka of the cinema.

Now, I don’t have anything in particular against Kafka. I highly recommend you read Kafka, just as you should be open to checking out some of Bergman’s flicks. But why would I want to read Kafka when I could read Nabokov? And why would I want to watch a Bergman movie when I could watch a Robert Bresson film instead? It’s the same basic idea: a bunch of people standing around, being really quiet. But for me, Bresson’s quiet is so much more interesting than Bergman’s quiet.

I suppose part of Bergman’s reputation could be due to the fact that he seemed to be a fairly decent interview. Just read through the New York Times article, it’s filled with suitably artistic quotes like, “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon,” “I was very much in love with my mother,” or “sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was.” Really, you can remember things? Fantastic! That truly is a quality unique to introspective artists like yourself.

But I suppose I shouldn’t speak ill of Ingmar. He is, after all, quite dead, which make it all the more likely that he now wants to eat my brains. I had always suspected that Ingmar wanted to eat my brains. But now that he’s dead, there’s no doubt in my mind that Zombie Ingmar would like nothing more than to crack open my skull and scoop out the tasty innards into one of those silly waffle cones the Swedes are always using. Looks like I’ll have to sleep facing the door tonight.