Opinion: Who is killing the great hipster directors?
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Jean-Luc Godard, watch your back! Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni... Which art-house lion of generations past will be next?
Just kidding, J-L! Next to the 89-year-old Bergman and the 94-year-old Antonioni, the 77-year-old viellard terrible of the New Wave is practically a kid. Two underexplained points about the deaths of the elder filmmakers this week: First, despite their association in popular imagination with the Baby Boom’s cultural exfoliation, Bergman and Antonioni both were primarily icons for fifties-era hipsters. As A.S. Hamrah illustrates in his must-read review of Ray Manzarek’s Light My Fire, the art-house film had become mainly a nostalgia trip by the sixties:
...dust particles made out of degraded ‘50s hipsterisms that floated down to college level; ideological positions that must’ve appeared very out-there but were getting a little shopworn by the time they came into Ray’s and Jim’s possession. These included—but weren’t limited to—Chess Records blues, Ferlinghetti-approved books, Bergman films, Weimar Germany (at one point Manzarek describes something as ‘so Weimar’), Eastern spirituality, 19th century German Romanticism, even musique concrète...
Second, the reactions I’ve seen to the two filmmakers’ deaths have been remarkably insular: Either they meant a lot to you or they meant nothing to you. There’s been very little (beyond noting the connection between The Seventh Seal and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey) to indicate why anybody who never took a film history course should be interested. But there are plenty of relatively recent movies that have continued to draw on two of the late directors’ sixties classics. Without Bergman’s Persona, you wouldn’t have Fight Club, for example. Antonioni’s most popular movie, Blow-Up, may be a little underwhelming if you’re expecting an Austin Powers-esque romp through the swingin’ sixties, as I was when I first saw it. But there’s a good argument that it was the most influential movie of the postwar era.
Much of that influence is direct: in virtual remakes like The Conversation and Blow Out, and in the film’s alleged breaking of the full-frontal nudity barrier (you’ll need to do your own frame-by-frame exploration of that claim). But Blow-Up also continues to be the patron of numberless cheesy did-the-crime-even-happen? thrillers. From David Hemmings making it with two groovy chicks in Blow-Up to Jodie Foster getting all crazy in Flightplan may strike you as a downward slope, but that’s the way cultural transmission works. And we’re not even counting the ultimate grandchild of Antonioni: the 2000 presidential election.