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I adore Bergman's "Persona", which is my favorite of his many great films. I also deeply admire Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries." Speaking of the latter, I have always assumed that Woody Allen's underrated film "Another Woman" was an homage to Bergman's "Wild Strawberries." Do see all 4 of these films mentioned above if you have not done so already.

I love Antonioni's "L'Aventurra" and "Blow Up". I'm not sure if the following is an explicit homage or simply a similar film, but Peter Weir's classic "Picnic at Hanging Rock" has elements in common with "L'Aventurra." Again, all three of these are excellent films and well worth seeing.

A minor gripe, and an obvious tangent, but are there other fans of "Picnic at Hanging Rock" who wish that the original version were available on DVD? Currently, as far as I know, only the director's cut is available. As is far too often the case, the director's cut is not as good as the original.

I'd agree on DePalma's Blow Out, but for Woody, I might go more whimsical and actually choose Love and Death, which even apes the end of The Seventh Seal with its climax.

Well, Edward, if we're talking Bergman and whimsy, then I'd have to say "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life."

You know, Carrie, I always found both Bergman and Antonioni to be absolutely singular, particularly Antonioni. And so, for better or worse, their respective styles were easily imitated and yet always managed to remain elusive. As a result, for me, most of the homages by other filmmakers tend to be terribly flawed, largely because most of those homages are American variations. Neither filmmaker could be Americanized, in my opinion. However, I agree with you that DePalma pulled it off the best in "Blow Out," one of my all-time favorite films and certainly my favorite DePalma title. But if you look at it really closely, it isn't that much like Antonioni at all. But it manages to work as a great tribute nevertheless.

Perhaps it is just me, but I am left unconvinced by DePalma's "Blow Out". I watch it if only to look for Philly refrences, but it seems to lack all the qualities that made "Blow Up" special. Despite DePalma's fascination with suspense, I don't feel the urgency that Antonioni gave to "Blow Up". The film is intrinsically linked to the spirit of the times, something I do not get with DePalma's "Blow Up". Just me perhaps...?

And Carrie, I whole-heartedly agree with your Woody Allen pick in "Crimes and Misdemeanors".

I went to the last Woody Allen retrospective in NYC this past winter to see "C&M". It was such a wonderful experience to watch it with a NYC audience. Because everyone in the theater was tapped in to the NYC experience, I feel I was also. You could feel the connection to the film in the room.

For another Allen pick that delves a bit more into the nostalgia, non-permanence, and fantasy elements as "Wild Strawberries" does, I would pick "Stardust Memories" or even "Deconstructing Harry", a later film I like very much.

Nice conversation going on with this post, thank you!

How about Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey?

Thanks, Geoff. I cited Bill and Ted playing Twister with Death in my Bergman obituary (see link in story), although I think I said it happend in "Excellent Adventure" rather than "Bogus Journey." I just checked my review and you're right.

Many thanks.

I'm with Joe. There are some artists whose influence is best left indirect. Chekhov, for instance. Or Eliot. You try to write like them and what you get is bad parody. The same with Bergman and - at least in the case of Blow-up - Antonioni. Your homage is likely to seem cheap imitation - which is what I think Blow Out amounts to. Crimes and Misdemeanors works because, while influenced by Bergman, it is not tied to him.

Friends of the Boyd, Inc. (www.FriendsOfTheBoyd.org) were very pleased to show "Blow Out" last year as our 1990's Philadelphia themed film event. We had a great turnout, including our special guests Dave Roberts of TV Action 6 News, Michael Tearson of FM radio, and actor Tom McCarthy, all of whom had cameo roles in the film. "Blow Out" is indeed a wonderful film and with so many scenes of Philadelphia, a movie that Philadelphians can especially appreciate.

What i find so strange is that, because of the proximity of their deaths, Bergman and Antonioni are now (somehow) linked, which they actually never were in their lifetimes.

Bergman was very much "of the 50s": he was a filmmaker who gained an international reputation in the 1950s, and he was dealing with "profound" themes (Is there a God? How do we respond to Death? etc.)... it's like everything in Bergman was in capital letters (Death, God, Etc.) in stark black-and-white. Bergman was a filmmaker whose "contemporaries" (in the sense that they were also gaining their reputations in the 1950s with films with "profound" themes) were Fellini and Akira Kurosawa.

But Antonioni (no matter his age) was a filmmaker of the 1960s. He was a post-existential filmmaker (God's already dead, get over it), and he was always listed (at least in the literature of the times) as the antithesis of Fellini (who was regarded as a filmmaker of the previous generation; again, age isn't the issue, it's when they gained prominence), and as the contemporary of Alain Resnais, and the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers (Godard, Rivette, Truffaut). Fellini became an international name with LA STRADA in 1954 and its "message" that everyone has a place in the universe; Bergman became known for SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT and THE SEVENTH SEAL, but it was WILD STRAWBERRIES in 1957 which really made him popular in this country, with its message of finding forgiveness as you near the end of your life.

But Antonioni arrived in 1960 with L'AVVENTURA, which was seen as a depiction of the alienation of the emerging "professional" classes in post-industrial societies. Though (obviously) a lot less humorous than his French counterparts, nevertheless, his style and his themes linked him to the then-current French filmmakers. (Tom Milne noted this when he compared Godard's THE MARRIED WOMAN with Antonioni's RED DESERT, both films about a well-to-do housewife's possible drift into adultery.) Back in 1964, Pauline Kael characterized these art house icons: "The leaders of this new left-wing formalism are Resnais, who gives us his vision of a bomb-shattered, fragmented universe, and Antonioni, the master practitioner of the fallacy of expressive form, who sets out to demonstrate that boredom (and its accompanying eroticism) is the sickness of our time...." And in Sight & Sound, Penelope Houston, Richard Roud and Tom Milne likewise linked Antonioni and Resnais (though in a more positive light).

So growing up, i never confused Bergman and Antonioni, and it's a little disheartening to find them linked now. It's a little like waking up and finding out that there's no history, or that history is getting scrambled, and the 1950s are merging with the 1960s, and no distinctions are being made.

(I'd like to end by saying that Bergman's biggest vogue seemed to have been in the US: although he "influenced" a number of Scandinavian directors, such as Mai Zetterling, a lot of the Scandinavian directors who followed him, such as Bo Widerberg and Jan Troell, were very explicit in wanting to countervene Bergman's influence, but he remained a very influential filmmaker here. There was a time when every year brought somebody's version of WILD STRAWBERRIES, i.e., a road-trip through the past in which the protagonist had to confront his/her demons, cf. FIVE EASY PIECES, SUMMER WISHES WINTER DREAMS, THE PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD, etc. And of course we've got Woody Allen, who can't seem to stop trying to do a Bergman movie, either as parody, cf. LOVE AND DEATH, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY, or "straight", cf. ANOTHER WOMAN, INTERIORS. And there's also Robert Altman with IMAGES and 3 WOMEN.... But Antonioni has proven to be the more influential filmmaker: his style of long takes and of space defining his characters has been especially appropriate for many filmmakers in countries that are just now going through post-industrial economic development, and so you can see his influence on Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang from Taiwan, on Hang Sangsoo from South Korea, on recent European "modernists" like Bela Tarr and Angelopolous, on Jim Jarmusch and on Todd Haynes, certainly SAFE is like a coda to RED DESERT and STRANGER THAN PARADISE is like L'AVVENTURA turned into a SNL skit.)

That said, my favorite Bergman remains PERSONA, i remain fond of Bergman from his "modernist" phase (runners-up: THE PASSION OF ANNA and SHAME); my favorite Antonioni is LE AMICHE (runners-up: L'AVVENTURA and L'ECLISSE).

Daryl,

I couldn't have hoped to get a more nuanced exegesis about the differences between Bergman and Antonioni. But I would argue that they are contemporaries who emerged as filmmakers at roughly the same time (late 1940s, early 1950s) and whose films addressed the Big Issues not only verbally but visually. I agree that Bergman wrestled with the question of whether God was dead and that by the 1960s Antonioni had become, as you put it, "post-existential. " And, not to put too fine a point on it, the Swede was at heart a sentimentalistand the Italian anything but. Yet they died the same day and, for deadline whores like me, that provides a convenient hook on which to hang ruminations on their work and their inluences. I on a generation of filmmakers. I see them as diverging rivers.

During the 1950s there are many parallels between the two filmmakers, who were simultaneously excavating the landscape of the soul and that of its physical surroundings. I think both were fame-hungry artists who questioned whether one could be fulfilled in love and in work (contrast Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night and Antonioni's La Signorina Senze Camelie).

A probable doctoral thesis in cinema studies will contrast Bergman's '60s trilogy with that of Antonioni. And I don't have the space here to offer a preliminary return of your volley. As to the filmmakers they influenced, directly and indrectly, I see the children of Bergman and Antonioni everywhere.

Thanks for your thoughtful post.

I was just watching Another Woman last night on a cable channel and was completely sucked into it. Gena Rowlands is wonderful, but this time I was taken with Sandy Dennis' scene where she blows up (not literally, though she is bigger here) and accuses Rowlands of luring her husband away.

But my favorite homage to Bergman is Interiors, also directed by Woody Allen. Geraldine Page is mesmerizing. Everyone is so distraut and enveloped in earth tones that when Maureen Stapleton shows up wearing a RED dress, it punctuates how alive she is and how close the others are to playing a chess game with Death.

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