Category: people

“Since Mr. Bergman was 89 and Mr. Antonioni 94, neither man’s death came as much of a shock, but the simultaneity was startling. Not only because they were both great filmmakers, but more because, in their prime, Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Bergman were seen as the twin embodiments of the idea that a filmmaker could be, without qualification or compromise, a great artist.”

“Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were a formidable pair, and by all accounts, soul mates for the last 12 years. So a few weeks ago, when Duncan committed suicide at the age of 40, friends and family knew that Blake, 35, was devastated. No one, though, knew how devastated.” A week later, Blake, one of the New York art world’s certified stars, walked into the Atlantic Ocean and drowned.

“Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkened back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cinephiles demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.”

“No single artist can stand for all the traditions of film (and film itself plays a more limited and ambiguous role in the media economy than it used to), and Bergman was undeniably a middle-class white European from an affluent, highly homogeneous society. Maybe we can agree that Bergman was the greatest of the 20th-century artists who tried to adapt the traditional craftsmanship of European theater to a new cultural form. Maybe we can agree that he believed in art as a redemptive, spiritual, even magical force, and did much to carry that ancient view of art into the movie theater.”

“Michel Serrault, a French film star known internationally for his role as the temperamental drag queen Zaza in the original film version of ‘La Cage aux Folles,’ died on Sunday at his home in Honfleur, France. He was 79. … Mr. Serrault, who appeared in more than 130 films, worked with some of the most celebrated directors in French cinema, among them Claude Chabrol.”

“Bergman’s ruthlessly honest investigation of his demons is what lends such images their crushing weight. However fictional, they are undeniably truthful expressions of one artist’s personal torment, redeemed by fleeting glimpses of eternity and redemption in a long, dark night of the soul.”

“He will always be remembered first and foremost as one of the most influential of European auteurs, a filmmaker whose enthralling forays into characters’ interior darkness were unmatched in their psychological acuity and inward intensity. But Bergman, who died Monday at 89, will also go down in history as one of the greatest stage directors of the second half of the 20th century, a figure comparable to Britain’s Peter Brook, Italy’s Giorgio Strehler, France’s Ariane Mnouchkine and Germany’s Peter Stein.”

In his more than 40 years in the cinema, Mr. Bergman made about 50 films, often focusing on two themes — the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.”

South African playwright Athol Fugard is one of those rare artists who is credited with having effected true change on his entire country, through his plays that many feel helped to bring an end to the brutal apartheid system. But “postapartheid South Africa has disillusioned Fugard… His country, he says, is in denial about its problems, busy ‘blaming the past while taking no responsibility for the present.'”

“It’s a happy accident that two of the most self-absorbed legends in the history of jazz — the bassist Charles Mingus and the alto saxophonist Art Pepper — married women who wound up equally absorbed in the preservation of their legacies. The men have been dead now for a quarter-century, yet their widows, Sue Graham Mingus and Laurie Pepper, keep unveiling major discoveries.”