The three iconic directors Ingmar Bergman hated
Too often forgotten in the conversation of the greatest filmmakers in cinema history, the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman has made some of the most accomplished movies of all time, including Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander. As a result of so many artistic achievements, he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky and Yasujiro Ozu.
Inspiring countless filmmakers across the world, including the likes of Martin Scorsese, Thomas Vinterberg and Paul Thomas Anderson, Bergman’s extensive legacy has become an essential part of film history. Still, even as an icon of the art form, Bergman didn’t hold a great fondness for many of his contemporaries, calling out three of the 20th century’s finest filmmakers for their artistic bankruptcy.
The first of such directors was Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian filmmaker behind the 1960 movie L’Avventura and the 1966 favourite Blow-Up with Vanessa Redgrave. Suggesting that he initially liked the filmmaker, Bergman criticised Antonioni in his autobiography The Magic Lantern, stating: “Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness”.
Antonioni was an iconic filmmaker within the industry, but beyond the walls of Hollywood and the Cannes Film Festival, he was somewhat unknown by the general public. The same cannot be said for Orson Welles, however, the influential filmmaker and actor who worked with the likes of Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Rita Hayworth and Roddy McDowall and helmed the classic movie Citizen Kane in 1941.
Regularly called the greatest movie of all time by critics and filmmakers, Bergman wasn’t much of a fan, stating in an interview: “For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable”.
Having gone after the iconic American creative Orson Welles and the Italian innovator Michelangelo Antonioni, the other director Bergman wasn’t too fond of was the French new wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard. Not without his critics, the films of Godard groove with experimental liberation, giving off an air of unabashed, optimistic creativity, acting in contrast to the director’s own cynicism.
“I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies,” he stated, explaining: “They have felt constructed, faux intellectual, and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore”. Criticising the filmmaker for his lack of freneticism, Bergman adds, “He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin, Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring”.
Bergman passed away on July 30th, 2007, the exact same day as Michelangelo Antonioni, with both filmmakers leaving a staggering filmography in their wake.