Keep your wild strawberries

Bergman, Antonioni and the end of an error

Toby Young

08 August 2007

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John Ford was a far better director than Ingmar Bergman

Just to be clear, I am not sceptical about art-house films because I reject the idea that movies in general should be held to a high artistic standard. Another misunderstanding about the New Populism is that it is based on a kind of cultural relativism whereby all works of art are held to be equally valid. Far from being postmodern, my position is, if anything, pre-modern. In common with most members of my generation, I’m profoundly suspicious of the whole modernist project, particularly the notion that art and culture should only be accessible to an educated elite. As John Carey pointed out in The Intellectuals and the Masses, modernism emerged as a way for the literary intelligentsia to differentiate themselves from those they contemptuously referred to as ‘the masses’. By championing artistic endeavour that was deliberately obtuse, the intelligentsia succeeded in excluding ordinary people from sharing in their pursuits.

It is this notion, responsible for so much impenetrable gobbledegook in 20th-century music and literature, that produced the art-house cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. As Derek Malcolm put it in the Standard, ‘In Europe, when I first came upon Bergman and Antonioni, we called their work films, not movies.’ Unlike the champions of Bergman and Antonioni, it is popular movies I regard as true cinematic art, not obscure, art-house films — and I’m convinced that posterity will prove me right.