Word: bergman
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...last Monday, Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director who diagnosed and dramatized postwar alienation, died Monday, the same day as the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. In less than 24 hours, the emperors of angst were gone. Bergman, 89, and Antonioni, 94, were two of the three surviving auteurs who defined serious European movies in the 60s - when serious movies pretty much were European. Of the decade's transcendent film figures, only that perpetual iconoclast Jean-luc Godard, 76, is left standing. If I were he, I'd insist on round-the-clock medical attention...
...Antonioni - a slender, handsome fellow who in his prime, as Woody Allen will attest, was a killer ping-pong player - didn't enjoy the brand recognition that Bergman did. But in several ways his influence was even greater. His L'Avventura (1960), which sets up a mystery it never resolves, quickly became a rallying cry and furious debating point for serious film lovers. La Notte (1961), Eclipse (1962) and Red Desert (1964) cemented Antonioni's reputation as an anatomizer of malaise and a supreme picture-maker. Blowup (1966), his first full-length English-language film, was a sensation...
...Bergman's men (and especially his women) might rage against the prevailing gloom; Antonioni's people (and especially his men) sink into it. Their problems are hard to define, and beyond salvation by God, psychoanalysis or madness. They don't cry; they barely have enough energy to shrug. Are they alive at all, or the reduction of humanity to zombies? Long before George Romero, and in chic Rome instead of a Pittsburgh cemetery, Antonioni filmed his own Night of the Living Dead...
...worked with Nykvist on four films. And you seem to share Bergman's work ethic...
...someone who hadn't seen any of his films asked you to recommend just five, what would be your Bergman starter...