OCTOBER 2007

Purgmantonionitorio

Two film titans die within a day of each other, convene in purgatory.



By James Keepnews
DANNY HELLMAN ILLUSTRATIONBergman and Antonioni, poised to enter heaven - are stuck in purgatory!

SCENE: A lonely strip of shoreline, empty but for a solitary figure. The water is motionless, the sky is cloudy, daylight slight and wintry, a continuous dusk pervades. Purgatory, it turns out, looks very much like Faro Island, a fact whose irony is not lost on its former resident, the recently deceased INGMAR BERGMAN, the solitary figure alone on the beach. Wearing his standard fisherman's wool hat and tight, bemused pout, the late writer-director surveys his eternal reward.

Bergman: More bad comedy from a bad comedian. God punishes me with a hell indistinguishable from mortality! Maybe I should've lived in Miami...

Another figure emerges on the horizon, startling B into hushed whispers.

Bergman: But who? A new punishment? An ex-wife? (shudders) E-E-Elliott Gould?

His slow gait and aristocratic bearing reveal the approaching figure to be MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI. Even relieved in the afterlife of some of his stroke-induced disability, he's taking a long time to reach B.

Bergman: Fan ta mig, that bastard always did love long takes...

At long last, A reaches B They size each other up in silence, B's pout curdling into a scowl and A remaining courtly, impassive.

Antonioni: Christo, karma is truly a bitch, much like yourself, Herr Bergman. We appear well-suited to drive each other insane forever and ever. How terribly rich (yawns).

Bergman: (stage whisper) God, must you torture me again with doubt?! Do you prove your existence by shackling me for all eternity with this...this...fashion photographer, or is it merely a heedless universe's cruel impartiality? No, that's not it...is it...something worse?

Antonioni: Que cacarella, listen to you. Tell God I have nothing to say.

Bergman: I see you've finally been listening to your critics, Signor. Now, if only you'd listened to them before you made Zabriskie Point...

Antonioni: Tut. Just because I dropped acid with the Panthers and got blown by the Plaster Casters is no reason to be a spoil sport. It is, you might say, a film of its time, rife with the era's...inertia. Whereas you spent the late sixties in some kind of Fruedian tailspin, wolfen passions and shames and what have you. I showed the uselessness of it all. You were merely useless...

Bergman: Useless, was I? That was a Jungian tailspin, thank you, unleashing an archetypal unconscious in Hour of the Wolf, along with cinema verite real-politics providing different archetypes of modern war in Shame. There's only one use for hippie porn and exploding the most vapid Technicolor commodities imaginable to the accompaniment of Pink Floyd isn't what I mean...acid with the Panthers. You wish.

Antonioni: Whatever. After eulogizing European haute bourgeois post-partum depression for the comforts of modernism in L'avventura , La notte and L'eclisse, homeboy needed some hippie porn. It started out well enough with Blow-Up, though the lessons to be gathered from long hours in the company of Jane Birken, a shitload of hash and a topless Vanessa Redgrave led to a certain...re-ordering of priorities. So I followed my bliss to the '68 Democratic convention and Death Valley, respectively—your only bliss was to be followed by tormenting your actors through one Strindbergian hatefuck psychodramatic narrative after another, mirroring the torment you (or your Dad, I forget now) believed was delivered unto you by a vengeful Jehovah. For all that, you never even came close to filming something as cool Jeff Beck destroying his guitar! Faccia di culo!

Bergman: (despairing) Ah! What's the use? So, life among the bourgeoisie is alienating, you say, beset with impermanence? How controversial! Such courage, Signor Anti. Someone get our man a tracking shot! Ultimately, you were nothing but a tedious puppeteer, crushing everything into a wide Cinemascopic shot, with all the passion and artistry and beleaguered diffidence of a Milan Vogue shoot.

Antonioni: And what about you? Story I'm hearing, Pops wasn't so nice a man. Religious man, evidently. I mean, could you be just a little fucking withholding, Herr Bragmung? Couldn't you, you know, adapt another Mozart opera, or a comic book, or something?

Bergman: A comic book? Why not?!? (turns to face the sea) Black and white...the essentials...no, that's not it. It's something about shame. My chilblains. My boners. Their absence. The presence of their absence. The horrible viscosity of existence, especially that last time, all over some chesty teen extra from a late, disconsolate production of A Dream Play. The smell of bleach. Bubble Yum Outrageous Orange. Sawdust. Tinsel. Ben-Gay. Non-oxydol-9 spermicidal lubricant. My tears.

Antonioni: Merda! How did you score so much booty, extra-marital or otherwise, Casanova? Or, any, at all? It must have been this roguish charm, the breezy, romantic insouciance we always associate with the man who gave us Through a Glass Darkly. It had to be the rep.

Bergman: No secrets, ever again. The rep helped, granted. But, in truth, it's because I know where the REAL G-spot is...not that waxy mound of flesh above the pubis. No. Not there. Sort of on the :35 of the hour from there...SSW, as it were. A glancing attention and any woman is turned into a convulsing, maniac outpatient who quacks like a duck, moreover—God, it's all so sordid. Like a grotesque circus. Or a petting zoo.

Antonioni: Dio mio! All that huffing and puffing, like you're the Big Bad Wolf. Or Lena Endre. Though in this respect, my respect. You bequeathed cinema with more stacked, depressive hotties than I could have ever dared dream—you were like Russ Meyer in analysis. Liv and Bibi in Persona alone. Think they might join us for a beach party?

Bergman: A dream of the condemned! Fat chance! Anyway, Bibi stopped returning my calls after that last time. Just as long as you keep that poster girl for lip reduction surgery, Monica Vitti, out of the picture.

Antonioni: Christo, now I KNOW you're fucked in the head! Surely you mean poster girl for abject sensuality in the face of abject existential emptiness. I thought she'd be your kind of girl.

Bergman: Gott, no—she don't send me. Those moist, engorged lips. The dreadful stickiness of existence. No, that's not it.

Antonioni: "No, that's not it"!! How many goddamned times am I going to have to hear that across all eternity? Motherfucker, would it kill you to make up your mind before you open your mouth?

Bergman: Temper, temper, Toni. Where's that famous Antoniennui? You need to calm down. I know! Let's call Maria Schneider's smack dealer.

Antonioni: To each of us, our bad habits. Don't dismiss her or The Passenger, my final masterpiece. Even more than Zabriskie, I keyed in on the drift of identity in the context of corrupt socio-politics, and how we are all indeed strangers in the end, and the lovely futility of it all. Jack Nicholson was never to be so well-cast against type, ever. A great film, some would say...

Bergman: (snorts) Mmf! And as you say, your last. Whereas I still had The Magic Flute, Autumn Sonata, Fanny and Alexander and After the Rehearsal to make, plus retiring into a second career batting out screenplays a clef, to say nothing of dropping acid during my German exile with David Carradine.

Antonioni: The horror, Herr Bugfuck! As if.?... Allora, we may as well get used to being around each other, the very manifestation of a dueling mind-body dualism for 20th century art cinema, a Pyrrhic battle for—and against—the sick soul of late-20th-century Europe. Our time has surely passed. For our sins, we belong dead—together.

Bergman: Speak for yourself, you lapsed voidmonger! I—Bergman's words catch in his throat as B and A turn to face a new approaching figure. It's the freshly late American talk show host, TOM SNYDER, who, upon recognizing the pair, hurries to join them on the shore.

Snyder: Marvelous! If Purgatory's brow was any higher, it'd need a scalp replacement!! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. (suddenly very grave) Gentlemen, seriously, I'm very honored to be denied entrance into heaven in the company of two of the great figures of yesterday's movie magic. Mr. Bergman, Mr. Antonioni, let's talk modern directors: Michael Bay. Brett Ratner. Eli Roth. Adventuresome colortini trailblazers? More? Discuss!

A and B stare at each other for a long time.

Then:

Antonioni and Bergman: (simultaneously) Kill me!!!!

jameskeepnews@yahoo.com