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

Why do I say this? Here, I want to skewer another misunderstanding about the basis of the New Populism (I’ve invented the term, obviously, but you get the idea). My reason for dismissing the famous art-house directors of the 1960s and 1970s is not that they failed to light up the box office. I would no more measure something’s artistic worth by how popular it is than I would by how unpopular it is — though the defenders of high culture are often guilty of precisely that elision. Consequently, it is not a rebuttal of my position to point out that James Joyce never wrote a bestseller.

Antonioni may have been no more popular than Joyce in his day, but A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners and Ulysses have entered the canon of great literature, whereas L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse have all been rightly forgotten. It is not a film or a book’s commercial success in the year of its appearance that matters — I agree with the defenders of art-house cinema on that point — but how it fares over time. As George Orwell said, the only true test of artistic merit is survival and posterity has not been kind to the films of Bergman or Antonioni — or, indeed, the vast majority of art-house directors. Most of their work now seems hopelessly dated, not least because their so-called ‘ideas’ consisted of little more than regurgitating the leftwing cant of their day.

Of course, it isn’t out of the question that some art-house films will still be watched in 100 years time — La Dolce Vita, The Seventh Seal, A Bout de Souffle, and perhaps a few others. But the odds are stacked against them. If a film strikes contemporary audiences as difficult and inaccessible, how is it likely to be received by generations to come? Most art-house directors eschewed conventional narratives in favour of stylistic innovation, but it is great stories that will resonate with future generations, not experiments in form. A compelling narrative has universal appeal, whereas the visual trickery of directors like Antonioni means very little when taken out of context.