(Copyright Aug. 17, 2007 by The Chronicle of Higher Education) Rarely are contemporaneous deaths so culturally synchronous as well. The film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni (who died within hours of each other on July 30) were twin titans of the art-cinema era of the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s -- figures who defined metaphysics and aesthetics for a generation and who pushed movies to the center of cultural discourse.
Some critics are calling the events of July 30 cinema's equivalent of the same-day deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Others are using them as an occasion to freshly mourn that now long-departed era when a movie could seem to really change your life. While opinions diverge on how Bergman's anguished existentialism and Antonioni's suave alienation have aged, the nostalgia for their artistic ambitions and solemnity is almost unanimous.
David Mamet, playwright and director: When I was young the World Theatre, in Chicago, staged an all-day Ingmar Bergman Festival. I went at 10 o'clock in the morning, and stayed all day. When I left the theater it was still light, but my soul was dark, and I did not sleep for years afterwards. (RogerEbert.com)
Michael Atkinson, film critic: For people who never cared to know from imported cinema, Bergman represented the self-aggrandizing absurdity of Euro-film, even more so, remarkably, than Fellini -- perhaps because Federico's excesses exuded a carnivalesque pandering toward the eternal low-brow. Bergman always aimed high and deep, philosophical and God-searching and proto-Freudian, and his doggedly literal questions were more vital to him and his devoted audience than Yankee ideas of showmanship. His only competition for Bullgoose Depressive was Antonioni, but Antonioni had the advantage of modern Mediterraneanism, cool-hip visuals, and urbane desolation. Bergman had only the dayless winters, the Svealand plains, and a seemingly never-ending supply of Protestant guilt. Today, we are aswarm with Antonioni imitators, but no one seems to want to be the new Bergman. (Zero for Conduct)
Stephen Holden, film and music critic: Antonioni's fashionableness shouldn't distract us from his accomplishment. He was a visionary whose portrayal of the failure of Eros in a hypereroticized climate addressed the modern world and its discontents in a new, intensely poetic cinematic language. Here was depicted for the first time on screen a world in which attention deficit disorder, and the uneasy sense of impermanence that goes with it, were already epidemic. (The 
New York Times)
Dennis Lim, Museum of the Moving Image: If Antonioni's movies have proved more resistant than Bergman's or Fellini's to the tides of fashion, it's partly because they were often so achingly hip to begin with, so unmistakably adorned with the trappings of their period that they now serve as vintage time capsules. (Slate)
Glenn Kenny, film critic: Unlike a lot of younger filmmakers today, Bergman was a highly, richly cultured individual. He knew the Bible backward and forward, Shakespeare too; fine art, music, and so on. All of his knowledge did more than inform his work ... his work is suffused with it, it gains much of its texture and heft from it. Of course, Antonioni is similarly cultured, but his depth in this area doesn't play so much upon the surface of his work; it motivates the form, rather than thickens it. Today's young filmmakers aren't, for the most part, as polyglot. For a lot of them, all the culture they've got is film. And Antonioni's got a signature style that's accessible to them, and seems imitable: Shoot some architecture and negative space, have characters disaffectedly utter banalities, and you think you've got it. To emulate Bergman, you've got to know what he knew, and knowing that ... go on to be yourself. (Premiere.com)
Peter Rainer, film critic: Bergman -- despite the high-toned metaphysics that overlays many, though not all, of his greatest films -- was a showman first and a Deep Thinker second. His philosophical odysseys might have been epoxied to matters of Life and Death, of God and Man, but this most sophisticated of filmmakers had an inherently childlike core. He wanted to startle us as he himself had been startled. He wanted us to feel his terrors in our bones. A case could be made that Bergman was, in the most voluminous sense, the greatest of all horror-movie directors. (Los Angeles Times)
David Bordwell, University of Wisconsin at Madison: More than Fellini or even Antonioni, Bergman gave cinema a cultural cachet. ... For me, the overwhelming work was Persona. I was around 20 when it was released in the U.S., and it gripped me from first to last. It was utterly of its moment, responding to the innovations of Godard and others; it reminded us of Bergman's roots in Strindberg and Expressionism; but it was also utterly original. Nobody had seen anything quite like Persona before, and even today it retains tremendous force. Who would dare something like it now? (RogerEbert.com)
David Thomson, film critic and historian: There's no point in comparing Antonioni and Bergman. There's every reason to wonder whether the climate and culture of film -- I mean the extent to which we and filmmakers need it, desperately -- is likely to go on producing masterpieces. In any comparison between film and the novel, Antonioni may have made films as subtle, as nuanced, as filled with doubt and certainty as the best modern writing. In 1960, or so, I think there's no doubt that the world craved such work, even if they booed it when they saw it. Now? I'm not so sure. When was the last time you met an audience that cared enough to boo a film? (The Guardian)
Stephen Holden, film and music critic (in a second article): Today the religion of high art that dominated the 1950s and 60s seems increasingly quaint and provincial. The longstanding belief that humans are born with singular psyches and souls is being superseded by an emerging new ideal: the human as technologically perfectible machine. The culture of the soul -- of Freud and Marx and, yes, Bergman -- has been overtaken by the culture of the body. Biotechnology leads the shaky way into the future, and pseudo- immortality, through cloning, is in sight. Who needs a soul if the self is technologically mutable? For that matter, who needs art? (The New York Times)
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