Volume 20, Number 3 · March 8, 1973
Seeing Bergman
By Michael Wood
Cries and Whispers
directed by Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman Directs
by John Simon
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 315 pp., $9.95
Encountering Directors
by Charles Thomas Samuels
Putnam's, 255 pp., $12.50
Deeper Into Movies
by Pauline Kael
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 458 pp., $12.95
Bergman, as Pauline Kael wrote recently in the New Yorker, is a movie-maker for people who don't like movies, and it is hard to stop this fact from counting either too much for him or too much against him. For him, because he helps us to feel better about the movies as an art form, about their chances of surviving comparisons with painting or literature. Against him, because we may feel that art of this cultivated, antiquated, borrowed kind has nothing much to do with the movies we really like. Bergman is a fascinating case, since he really is an artist in two senses: in whatever sense Buñuel and Renoir are artists, but also in whatever sense Welles and Hitchcock are—and if they are not artists, then Bergman, in so far as he does the things they do, is not an artist either.
Review, 4121 words
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