Francois Truffaut disses Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman trashes Orson Welles, Tim Burton flips off Kevin Smith -- and everybody piles on Jean-Luc Godard

At a dinner party I attended several years ago, it was my great misfortune to be seated near a woman who wanted to know -- no, make that demanded to know -- what was so freakin' great about Citizen Kane. I politely attempted to explain why the movie was such an artistic breakthrough, how it continues to influence other movies and moviemakers, what technical and storytelling elements are so thrillingly impressive... and she didn't buy any of it. It all boiled down to this: She thought that it was a pretentious bore, and that anyone who thought otherwise was a pompous twit. Finally, I had to tell her -- again, politely -- that she had every right to her opinion, and we'd have to agree to disagree.

(It's an occupational hazard for film critics: Random encounters with folks who seem irrationally enraged by the possibility that they don't "get" something that other people do. As I have told several such aggressively opinionated people: "Look, I can't argue you into liking something you obviously don't.")

I was reminded of this unpleasant encounter while reading "The 30 Harshest Filmmaker-on-Filmmaker Insults In History," Jason Bailey's funny and fascinating piece for Flavorwire.com. Bailey catalogs some of the nastiest critiques, putdowns and bitchslaps ever aimed by one auteur at another. And No. 3 on his list is a scathing dismissal of Orson Wells in general and Citizen Kane in particular, offered by no less a luminary than -- are you ready for this? are you sitting down? -- Ingmar Bergman:

“For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable.”

Ouch. Maybe I should have asked the lady at the dinner party if she liked The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.

Elsewhere in the Flavorwire piece, Bailey quotes Francois Truffaut on Michelangelo Antonioni (described by Truffaut as “the only important director I have nothing good to say about"), Tyler Perry on Spike Lee ("Spike can go straight to hell!"), and Tim Burton on Kevin Smith (who, you will not be at all surprised to discover, responds in kind). And while I should be shamed to admit this -- indeed, it might even get my film reviewing license revoked -- I laughed out loud while noting that Bergman and Welles did agree on at least one thing: The films of Jean-Luc Godard are far short of unalloyed delights.

How many of these barbs were inspired by professional jealousy or private agendas? Who knows? After all, not every filmmaker is as honest as Norman Jewison, who once told me he “didn’t necessarily want to like” The 400 Blows when Francois Truffaut unveiled his first feature in 1959, “because I knew he had been a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, and there were a lot of things that I disagreed with him on. And when he said he was going to make a film, I said, ‘Here you are, you asshole. Now you’ll find out that it’s not so goddamn easy.’"

But then Jewison got a look at Truffaut's handiwork. "And he was brilliant," Jewison said, expressing equal measures of amusement and appreciation. "Totally brilliant.”

R.I.P.: David Carradine (1936-2009)

David Carradine worked with everyone from Ingmar Bergman to Quentin Tarantino, Charlton Heston to Chuck Norris, Paul Bartel to Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby to Walter Hill, in movies and TV series of wildly uneven quality, in just about every conceivable genre, during a screen acting career that spanned five decades. But it’s the role that made him a ‘70s icon – Kwai Chang Caine, the mystical martial artist adrift in the Wild West of Kung Fu – for which he remains, now and likely forever, best known. He seemed to be a good sport about being so closely identified with Caine, even to the point of more or less reprising the character in an updated ‘90s spin-off series (Kung Fu: The Legend Continues) and frequently spoofing it in various movies and TV commercials (most recently – to hilarious effect – in Big Stan, Rob Schneider’s under-rated direct-to-video comedy, which, no kidding, is well worth a spot on your Netflix queue). But he also demonstrated his versatility in an impressive variety of roles while amassing scads of credits as a steadily employed character actor. Of course, remaining “steadily employed” as any sort of actor often requires… well, taking employment where you find it. Much like his famous father, Carradine occasionally picked up easy paychecks while slumming through forgettable clunkers. But never mind: His best work greatly overshadowed his worst projects. And besides: It’s easy to forgive an icon almost anything. Especially one who walked the earth like Caine in Kung Fu.

A modest proposal

While meditating this morning on the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, I found myself remembering something Billy Crystal, of all people, said to me during a 1992 interview. We were talking about show business – appropriately enough, since he was promoting Mr. Saturday Night at the time – when Crystal, sounding more amazed than egocentric, remarked: ''When The Tonight Show ended, when Johnny Carson's reign ended, show business as I knew it stopped, and a new show business began. And my group of contemporaries -- Robin (Williams) and Jay (Leno) and (David) Letterman – we are now show business. Like it or not, it's us, until our faces start to fall. You know what I'm saying? We're show business now.”

True enough. And when Jay Leno steps down as Tonight Show host two years from now, I assume there will be yet another changing of the guard, or passing of the baton. But let’s focus on right now: Who are the heirs to those esteemed filmmakers – some living (such as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer), most dead (Bergman, Antonioni, Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, many others) – who came to prominence during the post-WWII era, who I would label The Art House Elders? And looking ahead: Who’s next? Who will be the Conan O’Briens to those Jay Lenos?

In my view, the natural heirs to the Art House Elders are those filmmakers I would collectively define as members of The Renaissance – as in “Hollywood Renaissance.” That is, filmmakers who came to prominence during the period roughly defined by Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as the 13-year stretch between Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Heaven’s Gate (1980). Mind you, that definition should, I feel, be sufficiently elastic to include auteurs who, strictly speaking, started making movies prior to ’67 – think Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola and John Cassavetes – but completed many (if not most) of their best and most enduring works during the 1967-80 period. Among the other MVPs, living or dead, in this division: Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Sam Peckinpah, Bob Fosse, Hal Ashby, William Friedkin, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and, near the unofficial cut-off point, Ridley Scott (whose Alien was released in 1979) and Oliver Stone (who made his directorial debut with 1974’s Seizure, but remained best known as a scriptwriter until 1981’s The Hand).

Yeah, I know: That list – a tentative one, by the way; please feel free to add other names – doesn’t include many international directors. That’s why I also propose a separate but equal grouping – The Cannes Club – for other influential filmmakers of the same period. Such as? Milos Forman, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog… and, of course, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But if you want to lump both groups together under Renaissance (or some other label), fine by me. Either way – these are, I repeat, the natural heirs to the Art House Elders, because theirs are the movies that, collectively or separately, have equal (if not greater) impact and influence on audiences and other filmmakers today. They are the Jay Lenos of the movie world. (Well, OK, those of them who are still alive.) Indeed, you could argue they've claimed that position for a decade or two -- only now, it's more or less official.

And after them? Well, excuse me while I suggest another label: The Sundance Generation. (A disclaimer: I’m talking more about a state of mind, or a filmmaking philosophy, than a literal Sundance Festival connection.) In this category, I would include Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater, Hal Hartley and, arguably, John Sayles (whose 1980 Return of the Secaucus 7 can be viewed as a seminal influence for the entire group). Once again, I’d also propose a separate but equal category – The Toronto Generation – for equally prominent international filmmakers (many of whom work, periodically or frequently, in the U.S.) who have been either launched or elevated at the You-Know-Where Festival: Ang Lee, John Woo, Abbas Kiarostami, Wong Kar-wai, Patrice Leconte, Tom Tykwer and others. (Cannes would like to claim them, too, but never mind: That festival already has its own category.) These are filmmakers who, while continuing to produce outstanding and (here’s the key word again) influential work, are ensuring that they, too, will have their day as grey eminences. Or Conan O’Briens.

Are these categories arbitrary? Absolutely. Could some names be shifted from one category to another? Well, if you can make a strong case for it, sure. (It's like, some folks want to group Jean-Pierre Melville with the French New Wave; most don’t.) And should other names be added? Almost certainly. (Where do we put undeniably influential directors such as John Hughes? Or James Cameron?) All I have tried to set out here is a modest proposal for a new way of looking at generational shifts and lines of succession in regard to classic and contemporary cinema. Your suggestions and (constructive) criticisms are most welcome.

And, of course, if anybody would like to toss an advance my way to develop all this into a book, what the hell, I'm willing to take a meeting.

On Antonioni (and more)

Yes, I know: I’m ridiculously tardy in getting around to eulogizing Michelangelo Antonioni. My excuses? Well, OK, at the risk of sounding like a real wuss, I was already bummed out by other recent demises – especially by the loss of Ingmar Bergman – to face the grim task of writing yet another obit within so short a time. (That I got the news of Antonioni’s death one day before the first anniversary of my father’s passing certainly didn’t help matters.) And, yes, I’ll also admit that Antonioni always has been an auteur whose work I admired and respected without ever really liking, and that his enormous gift for conveying an almost palpable sense of ennui and alienation, disengagement and discontent, all the while suggesting the dark undercurrent of meaninglessness that seems (for some of us, at least) to lurk just beneath our day-to-day lives…. Well, being someone who’s already given to episodes of blue-funk melancholy, that’s simply not a part of the woods where I care to spend too much time, even while in the company of a demonstrably great artist.

Indeed, the only time I can remember actually having fun at an Antonioni film occurred during the mid ‘60s, when, in the midst of my guilt-tripping Catholic high school education, I managed (like many of my more venturesome classmates) to slip into three or four screenings of Blow-Up at the RKO Orpheum Theatre in downtown New Orleans. It was there, on the big screen, that I got my first glimpse at full-frontal female nudity – and better still, savored the iconic image of a topless Vanessa Redgrave. An image, not incidentally, that was preserved on a very popular poster of Redgrave with her arms strategically crossed over her, er, attributes. And to answer the obvious question: Yes, I had such a poster, and it had a place of honor on my bedroom wall.
Back to Antonioni: Check out GreenCine Daily’s copious coverage to fully appreciate the filmmaker’s influence and accomplishment. Jim Cheng’s appreciation in USA Today also is worth reading, as is Jeff Wells’ passionate tribute and Eric Harrison’s concise tutorial (which covers Bergman as well). I felt a bittersweet shock of recognition while considering Cheng’s observation that “[e]ven for those who were not intimately familiar with his work, Michelangelo Antonioni’s name was synonymous with art-house cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s…” Yes. Quite so. Thinking of Antonioni and Bergman reminds me of a bygone era – a time when I came of age as a lover of film -- when campus film societies programmed subtitled imports out of the Janus Films catalogue, book stores prominently displayed anthologies of serious film criticism (Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Judith Crist and Andrew Sarris, etc.) and art houses that routinely booked “the new Truffaut” or “the latest by Fellini” served free coffee in the lobby to encourage interaction, conversation and an overall sense of a “film community.” (It also encouraged attempts to pick up girls, though my success rate was tragically low.) And that, too, is part of the reason I’m so late with this Antonioni posting: At 54, going on 55, I don’t need many more reminders that, as Paddy Chayefksy wrote for William Holden to so memorably rant -– at age 58! -- in Sidney Lumet’s Network, “it’s closer to the end than it is to the beginning.”

Speaking of Francois Truffaut: I soon will be three years older than the great French filmmaker was when he died in 1984. This is depressing for any number of reasons, but here’s the worst part of it: Unlike, say, Antonioni (who died at age 94) or Bergman (who was 89 when Death dropped by for a final game of chess), Truffaut was just 52 at the time he went to the Great Screening Room in the Sky. And not for the first time, I find myself wondering: How many Truffaut movies were we denied by this untimely demise?

OK, that’s it: Time to stop writing and start drinking. Well, either that, or dig out that DVD of Airplane! to lift my spirits.

R.I.P.: Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

It's difficult to know where to begin when taking the final measure of an artist as inspired and awe-inspiring, as justly revered and pervasively influential, as Ingmar Bergman. Right now, I find my mind is swimming with too many memories of powerful scenes and indelible images for me to properly focus. I start to type something about, say, the extraordinary eroticism of Bibi Andersson's mesmerizing monologue in Persona, and I think, no, what I really want to describe is the melancholy grace of Victor Sjostrom's aged professor in Wild Strawberries... or the inconsolable despair of Gunnar Bjornstrand's rural pastor in Winter Light... the evanescent sensuality of Smiles of a Summer Night, or the terrifyingly chaotic civil war of Shame... or Max Von Sydow... Liv Ullmann... and, yes, of course, Death playing chess...

As usual, GreenCine Daily is the place to go for the most complete guide to eulogies and appraisals. The Guardian offers a very clever quiz about the man and his movies -- I can't help laughing out loud at Bergman's brusque dismissal of another noted auteur -- and here is a link to an interview with B-movie mogul Roger Corman, who delights in describing how he turned a tidy profit when his New World Pictures released Bergman's Cries and Whispers.

Regarding the latter: Corman recalled in his 1990 autobiography: "We were the first to get Bergman into drive-ins, the first to book him into multiple cinemas in the same city... The film took in $1.5 million in rentals, or a profit of close to $1 million... When I finally met Bergman years later, he mentioned that he thought it was great that we put his film in the drive-ins. 'Nobody ever thought of that before,' he said. 'I've always wanted my pictures to get the widest possible audience. That's an audience that never saw my pictures before New World.'"

Reports of Ingmar Bergman's death have been greatly exaggerated

I think it says a lot about Richard Corliss' ability to sustain reader interest that no one made it to the second-to-last paragraph of his tedious rant about the Sundance Film Festival. Well, either that, or everyone besides me is too polite to point out that -- no, Richard, Ingmar Bergman has not yet joined the Choir Invisible.

BTW: Just in case the posting has been, ahem, revised by the time you get to it, here's the money quote:

"What's saddest is that the ersatz indie drove out the previously dominant alternative to Hollywood: the foreign film. Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut are dead, but there are still exciting, challenging movies being made in Europe, Latin America and especially Asia. Some of these films get theatrical release, but to see many top films from Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand and India you need to rent them. A good video store or a specialty DVD catalog is the new art house. Trying to get your intellectual fill with Sundance films is like choosing homemade popcorn over the concession-stand variety: higher quality, little nourishment."