M. Duss at Alterdestiny tipped me to this typically dense and witless column by John Podhoretz in which he shows that he doesn't know his ass from his elbow about film history, film criticism or Ingmar Bergman. Where to begin.
Let's start with this comment:
Bergman used motion pictures to explore grand and grandiloquent themes - the fear of death, the horrors of old age, the mysteries of womanhood, the disasters of marriage, the trauma of living without God. Happiness, contentment, even momentary good feeling are all but absent from a Bergman movie, which is a portrait of a traumatized species.
This is the writing of a dilettante, who has apparently seen one Bergman film, most likely The Seventh Seal. It is not the comment of someone who has seen the wry wit of Smiles of a Summer Night, the clever plotting of The Magician, the familial warmth of Fanny and Alexander, the moving tribute to life in its twilight in Wild Strawberries, the cathartic ending of The Virgin Spring or to see Don Juan get his comeuppance in The Devil's Eye.
The second example of Podhoretz's nonsense is in this comment:
Bergman had been the key figure in a painstaking effort, by him and by critics worldwide, to elevate the cinema into an art form equivalent to novels, poetry or classical music.
These were not the kinds of critics who wanted people to believe that westerns or gangster movies or musicals could be great art on the order of Tolstoy and Dickens. These critics wanted the movies instead to mimic the forbidding demands and even more forbidding themes of high modern art - from the difficult poetry of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound to the assaultive aesthetic of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.
Johnny boy should probably ask himself where the term Film Noir came from. In the past he has expressed utter contempt for the French. What he doesn't know is that the critics who he has lambasted have also championed westerns and gangster films and musicals - and they are French! Practically the entire French New Wave consisted of film critics such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol whose writing was featured in the magazine Cahiers du Cinema. They championed Hollywood films and directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock, among others. When they became filmmakers they emulated many of Hollywood's genres, albeit for their own purposes. Godard made an homage to Hollywood musicals. Chabrol became essentially the French equivalent of Hitchcock, but with less interest in the MacGuffin and much more interest in the complexity of the characters and their motivation. Truffaut excelled in such Hollywood genres as thrillers (The Bride Wore Black, Shoot the Piano Player) and coming-of-age stories (Stolen Kisses).
When they were critics, however, they did admire filmmakers like Mizoguch, Rossellini and Bergman. Indeed, they saw no inconsistency in seeing the art in a genre film or an "art" film. I certainly don't either. The other day I watched the DVD of Casino Royale followed by Bernardo Bertolucci's first film La Commare Secca.
Podhoretz's column is mere wanking with all the intellectual rigor of the old joke that asks "Why does a dog lick his balls?"*
Podhoretz has a media outlet for no other reason than being the fruit of Midge Decter's and Norman Podhoretz's loins (that image will put you off your food). It is certainly not through having an intelligent or coherent point of view. Jonah Goldberg refers to him as the "resident pop culture expert" of the Corner, the execrable group litterbox wankfest blog of The National Review. Could they set the bar any lower?
*Because he can.
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