Monday, July 30, 2007
So Long, Ingmar
Ingmar Bergman is dead. Always having been drawn to bleak art, I shall miss him. I rarely say that about Scandinavians. My extended thoughts on the man can be found here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Haven't seen alot of Bergman but of course a great artist with a real humanity. I don't think he was quite in Tarkovsky's league of almost miraculous, intuitive genius, though where life is revealed as inherently a spiritual domain in its present moment...Tarkovsky isn't referring to a philosophical/spiritual premise...this is clearly an experienced reality for him. Bergman said that Tarkovsky was in a league of his own in film-making & that before setting out on making any film himself he would watch Andrei Rublev, presumably as a kind of pilgrimage of the mind to help prepare or purify himeslf for the work ahead.
ReplyDeletei always miss Scandinavians. The ones i've met, ranging from a Xian priest to a full-on Viking warrior chemist, were all reliably bonkers. i felt at home with them, sane, as i did watching The Seventh Seal - it seemed perfectly realistic.
ReplyDeleteHaving seen all of Bergman's films, I can assure you that he was building up to this moment as the perfect expression of his art.
ReplyDeleteEither somebody is expending vast amounts of time and talent coming up with an amazingly convincing blog persona or that really is you, Richard. Which?
ReplyDeleteHey, it takes surprising little time or talent to blog, so I can’t understand your scepticism. Why would anybody pretend to be me? Except for the chance to live vicariously through my many talents and achievements, there would appear to be no point to it.
ReplyDeleteRichard, which books do you recommend reading this week?
ReplyDelete