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Posted: August 9

The magic of discovery

(Rome) Two of the giants in the history of film died on the same day last week, Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangel Antonioni. That news caught my attention even though I have not seen any of their films recently. I do not often think back to the era when they were in their prime and I was a university student discovering the possibilities of the idea that a filmmaker could be, without any qualification or compromise, a great artist. Movies were just entertainment to me when I was growing up in Denver, although my senior year literature teacher spent a lot of time leading us through Orson Welles’ film, Citizen Kane. Then I went on a cinematic fast, as it were, during the novitiate when we did not have any access to films. That rigor ended with a dramatic flourish when Father John Walsh thundered into the Juniorate. He came from Marquette University’s theater department and injected a huge burst of energy into our lives. And he brought us movies, not DVDs or videotape, but heavy reels of actual film which I threaded through projectors. That gave me a very personal relationship with the movies, because the films sometimes broke and were often capricious.

I remember one of the first films he brought us, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a heavily symbolic, brooding meditation that captured my imagination in a way that Hollywood cowboy stories never had. We saw many other of the Swedish filmmaker’s movies; it would be hard not to like a movie with Liv Ullmann in it, but Father Walsh opened a whole repertory of European movies. He introduced us to Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel and charming movies from Eastern Europe like Closely Watched Trains. Now that it is so easy to rent or buy a movie, it is easy to forget how difficult it was in the mid-60s to even get hold of the three-reels-long foreign films, especially when one lived in a religious house in the St. Louis suburbs. I even volunteered as a projectionist at Saint Louis University just so I could pore through the catalogues and order films that I wanted to see that would never get to a local theater.

I remember those evenings watching the movies as a magic time, and Bergman was certainly a part of that magic. Some articles on his passing praise him, but others raise doubts whether he was as great as people acclaimed him when he was making his major films. Actually, I don’t care. Reputations go up and down, and I have learned that it is much harder to create something than to be a critic. Now I find myself lamenting the thinness of contemporary filmmaking since we know so much about technique now, but use it in an ironic way that takes nothing seriously. One film I saw last Fall reminded me of Bergman’s "The Silence." This contemporary film, <"Babel,"> weaves multiple, interlocking stories of people in Japan, Morocco and the United States caught in the impossibility of communication. One character cannot speak and uses sign language instead; although her difficulty in communicating with her father parallels the problems other characters in the movie face. Babel was filmed in color with the fluidity that new lightweight equipment allows, but the heart of the stories was the same isolation that Bergman explored.

The magic of cinema might be different now, and I think the best new directors have a more difficult time getting their work seen. Of course, were it not for Father Walsh, I would not have seen Bergmann in the first place. I don’t miss having to thread the projectors, but I treasure the moment of discovery.

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