Two prominent film makers pass away in the same week, and I care not a wit for either. The work of either Bergman and Antonioni are what I'd imagine would be the in flight movie on jetliner to Hell. Humorless, witless, static, depressed, didactic and incorrigibly arty rather than artful, the films of both these sticks in the mud were popular at a time when a generation of art majors and movie critics eager to up their intellectual credibility all managed to convince themselves that movies were the last great medium for self expression. It became Art with a capital "a", "Culture" with a capital "cul". And most certainly, the medium ceased to be movies, a medium where image , angle, editing and rhythm worked with craftsman synchronization to move a narrative forward and instead became film or, more pretentiously, Cinema. The implications were obvious; movies no longer about movement, but rather about time and the micro-cosmically morphing moods and perceptions within the elongated takes of self-annihilating characters trapped in dank terrains. The movies dragged, in other words; cameras stopped dancing with the actors through the sets, but rather became stationary recorders of some one's view of a empty alleyway. I put up with these two directors for decades, and always lost the conversation among the cinephiles who regarded their movies to surpass even the best literature, and now I feel obliged to say farewell to the two of them, bid them a congratulations for managing to make a living creating the kind of sludge paced films they preferred, and then to thank God that are no more movies forthcoming from either of these over estimated icons.

umm...ok, troll. the term movie isn't and never was a medium. the medium has always been film. so, thats the first silly argument within your opinion. and honestly, why did you have to "put up with it?" if you really hate the stuff that much then don't watch it; just go and watch the same old narratives, themes, and plots being rehashed through a new filter. i think that guys like these were trying to do something new for the medium and get it out of a rut. and on your final sentence: i think you're going to be disappointed, because while there will not be anymore movies from these two in the flesh, their oeuvres will live on in directors to come, who will add their works to the pantheon of great films.

Troll? Hardly. This forum isn't intended exclusively for further praise to be bestowed upon the recently passed. We have all read and will continue to read career post mortems on these two that will praise both these fellows greatly. All the same, if you ask me; those like yourself will dust off their copies of "How to Read a Film" by James Monaco and trot out those cliches no one uses any more with a straight face. Sorry, but these guys were so dull that a dry oatmeal seemed more animated than their best work.

ok, i admit that calling you a troll was a silly ad-hominem. i don't know what book you're talking about, but i recommend this one: Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Braudy and Cohen, ed. It is the book we used in my film theory class last year. otherwise, try backing up some of your opinions with an actual argument instead using cheap metaphors to attack the subjects that you're discussing.

The metaphors are clever and they fit the subjects. If you're interested in film history and theory, I suggest getting ahold of How to Read a Film. You might also try Negative Space by Manny Farber. Rather than defend these guys with boiler plate phrases, why don't you explain how these two have expanded your horizons and made you a better person because of their stationary projects? The burden of there greatness falls on your shoulders.

"The burden of [proving their] greatness falls on your shoulders."

Why? These directors are canonical. I think that is part of your grouse against them--that they are canonical (part two: they but bore you to tears.)

If they are canonical, their greatness is the base assumption and hence needn't be proved (or, rather, can't be proved within the limits of this forum). The burden instead falls on the debunkers who must argue their case.

Not that I disagree strongly with Ted Burke's notions regarding the overestimation of this pair--only with a metacritical position that I heard too much of during the Canon Wars of my doctoral candidacy.

say what you will about your own work. i think that their long shots force the viewer to examine and contemplate the subjects within the films. the final scene in Blow Up exemplifies this point really well. the scene forces the viewer to examine the potent question of examining the lifestyle presented in the film. the author of the article describes the film as a paean of the swinging 60s culture in london, but this scene makes the viewer question the point of it all. so, im not sure if i would say that the film is singing praise for the culture. the people within the film who languish in decadence and ennui are having no actual impact on the world. the scene right before the final fadeout represents this idea. the main character mimes a game of tennis, and then proceeds alone into the middle of the meadow and disappears. he is simply going through the motions without actually accomplishing anything. the whole film creates tension between representation and reality.

anyway, the film brings salience to a lot of pressing existential questions of the era and possibly even today, although i dont think we're lavishing in quite as much decadence now. when i saw it, i thought, wtf were those people doing. he talks to the model at the party and he says, "i thought you were going to paris." and then she says, "i am in paris." and i think, no, you're just stoned and sexed up in london. and none of these questions and ideas could be represented more powerfully than in antonioni's style. the duration shots that follow the main character through the party, the architectual lines within the loft, and of course the tennis game all come together to make a profound film.

maybe the reason that people are so quick to write off this film is that they don't like being forced into dealing with existential questions. there is no doubt that the director is forcing the viewer to focus on certain issues through the use of duration shots, so maybe some viewers simply don't want to try to appreciate one guys specific vision. but i think that's the most important aspect in looking a piece of art, is to find and contemplate the artists perspective. well thats why i want to defend antonioni, because i think Blow Up is a really great film.

This is a fine defense of the languid style, but it has deep echos of lectures I've attended and criticism I've read and written twenty five years ago when I was satisfying my fine arts requirement. The points are valid and well taken, but for me the matter is more about shtick than inspiration. After a time the long takes, the dead pan visages, the exotic marginalia at the edge of whatever plot line there is became mannered and conventional; it seemed more to do with reputations having to be lived up to than a fresh take on a storyline being crafted.

"Forcing" an audience to deal with issues or ideas they would rather avoid--the eternal emptiness of the soul one discovers once the surety of a loving God is undermined being the issue here--is one of the cardinal conceits critics have used to justify the problematized stylistics of the difficult directors they champion, and for me the phrasing is a tacit admission that there's some amount of failure by the director to convey a set of narrative concepts through image and sound. It's an elitist claim, I think, and is handy way to side step a considered defense of the style and jump right into the next nest of literary conventional thinking one can claim is the result of the director's visual approach.

"Existential" questions have been a bedrock part of character and plot development in literature for centuries--go no further than Hamlet or King Lear or Faust (either Marlowe or Goethe), and as such that whole issue of being and becoming, of achieving genuine authenticity , has fairly much been absorbed by film makers since the medium was first used to portray fictional narratives. Audiences are well used to having to confront existential situations and spaces in the films they attend, and consider the whole issue pretty much a given. It is not a daring or cutting edge theme for either Bergman or Antonioni to have used in their work. The real issue is about style, and whether one prefers puffed up artiness over a subtler , crafted artfulness when one picks a director with whom to confront their despair.

the first thing that stands out is "the eternal emptiness one feels that god is dead...," to paraphrase, isn't really what i was talking about in regard to the existential questions within the film. that is more the line of how to talk about nietzsche. i think this film deals more with the idea of radical freedom, and the ability to create whatever meaning you want for a given situation. this is the idea that i think troubles some people. and it is more in line with sartrean existentialism.

as for the narrative structure, i disagree that this narrative follows the course of other more classical narratives. it is based on a short story by julio cortazar that is a pretty thick piece of meta-narrative to tackle, for its length. cortazar constantly plays with perspective in the story, and i think antonioni carries this over rather well into his film. we are in some instances completely within the protagonists head, believing everything that he is creating within the situation, and then we are rocketed into an outside perspective in which we are able to question all of his assumptions. and again i think the last scene leaves us to question our own assumptions about how we live and what, if anything, we're living towards.

the forcing thing isn't an admission of defeat, and it is perhaps the wrong word. its more that the author is playing with perspective constantly, because the shot moves and slips into different perspectives.

i think this is all i have to say on this argument, but thank you for the compliment :)