Keep your wild strawberries

Bergman, Antonioni and the end of an error

Toby Young

11 August 2007

John Ford was a far better director than Ingmar Bergman

Like many people who questioned the status quo in their youth, I now find myself in the uncomfortable position of being in the majority. The Modern Review went belly-up in 1995, but its once heretical ideas have become widely accepted. This became apparent last week following the almost simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Sixteen years ago it would have been unthinkable to criticise these two giants of European cinema — virtually every movie critic at the time considered art-house films superior to contemporary Hollywood ‘schlock’ — but Bergman and Antonioni could muster few defenders in 2007. The Times’s chief critic decided to commemorate Bergman’s death by compiling a list of his most unwatchable films.

So what is the basis of this New Populism? Nothing more than Little England-ism, according to Derek Malcolm, who was one of the few critics to praise Bergman and Antonioni last week. ‘There was once a survey of French and English students about who was the best director in the world,’ he wrote in the Evening Standard. ‘The French students reeled off a dozen names to be considered without a moment’s hesitation. The only names the British students could muster were Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.’

Yet to ascribe the declining interest in art-house cinema to anti-intellectualism is to misunderstand the present mood. The reason that so many members of my generation are sceptical about the value of Bergman and Antonioni’s work isn’t that we’re suspicious of any films with artistic pretensions. On the contrary, I believe that the medium is as capable of producing great artists as classical music and English literature. Where I part company with Derek Malcolm — who singled me out for criticism last week — is in thinking that the celebrated art-house directors of the 1960s and 1970s are the greatest practitioners of cinematic art that the medium has given rise to. I believe that honour belongs to the great popular film-makers of Hollywood’s Golden Age — Ernst Lubitsch, John Ford, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Howard Hawkes, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston and Billy Wilder, among others.

It’s at this point that the argument becomes complicated. Defenders of art-house cinema are quick to point out that they, too, revere these masters. The contributors to Cahiers du cinéma who went on to become the vanguard of the French New Wave — Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol — were all great admirers of Hollywood genre pictures. The argument, then, isn’t about the artistic merit of films like The Shop Around the Corner, The Searchers, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Lady Eve, His Girl Friday, North by Northwest, The Maltese Falcon and Some Like It Hot — which we can all agree are masterpieces — but about whether art-house directors belong in such exalted company. And to my mind, they don’t.