Bergman, Antonioni and the end of an error

Sixteen years ago I got together with a group of like-minded friends and started a magazine called The Modern Review. Its premise was that popular culture is as worthy of serious critical attention as high culture and, to that end, we commissioned intellectuals and academics to write about the likes of Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Believe it or not, this was a fairly radical idea back in 1991 — though not a wholly original one — and the magazine caused quite a stir. The previous generation of writers and critics attacked us on an almost weekly basis.

Like many people who questioned the status quo in their youth, I now find myself in the uncomfortable position of being in the majority. The Modern Review went belly-up in 1995, but its once heretical ideas have become widely accepted. This became apparent last week following the almost simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Sixteen years ago it would have been unthinkable to criticise these two giants of European cinema — virtually every movie critic at the time considered art-house films superior to contemporary Hollywood ‘schlock’ — but Bergman and Antonioni could muster few defenders in 2007. The Times’s chief critic decided to commemorate Bergman’s death by compiling a list of his most unwatchable films.

So what is the basis of this New Populism? Nothing more than Little England-ism, according to Derek Malcolm, who was one of the few critics to praise Bergman and Antonioni last week. ‘There was once a survey of French and English students about who was the best director in the world,’ he wrote in the Evening Standard. ‘The French students reeled off a dozen names to be considered without a moment’s hesitation. The only names the British students could muster were Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.’