Jeff Goldblum is at Telluride to promote his new film, Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader. The film follows the story of a Holocaust survivor who also happens to be a clown. Committed to an asylum after the war, he becomes a ring leader of sorts. On the opening day of the festival Goldblum was graciously hugging young fans and striking odd poses for snap-shots. We got a chance to ask him about his media intake, which includes a substantial amount homework from Schrader.

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Wow––this is amazing. Enrico Enrica Fico, the widow of Michelangelo Antonioni, told Italy’s La Stampa that her husband essentially committed long, slow suicide by refusing to eat. The article is in Italian and I’m sure the Google translation is imperfect, but it’s good enough to get the gist.

The filmmaker went nearly completely blind after suffering a stroke and, according to his widow, “not to see for him had become absolutely unacceptable.” Fico says Antonioni actually asked her to shoot or poison him, but she refused, and instead allowed him to starve himself by subsisting on “only a few teaspoons” of food each day from September 2006 until his death the following summer.

Incredibly, Antonioni’s widow compares his chosen manner of death to his filmmaking style. The translation is mangled but the sentiment seems clear: “Like his films, even his death was a masterpiece. It went quiet in absolute and embracing the absolute, as if it were a mystic.”

Above: the end of Il Grido, in which the protagonist falls (accidentally) to his death at the feet of his horrified former mistress.

Via Hollywood Elsewhere.

I’ve been slowly gathering material for an academic article about the film references used by both bloggers and “real” journalists to talk about MTV’s The Hills. Stories and blog posts that discuss the show using the language of academic film/media criticism, some likening certain aspects of the show to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Eric Rohmer, have begun to stack up. Now, Jim Carrey and Peter Weir have been thrown into the mix, with a post on PopWatch titled, ‘The Hills’ is Like ‘The Truman Show’, Only Awful.

This cinematic reference is, in terms of the literal conditions of The Hills‘ production, probably more accurate than most, but when held up to any sort of scrutiny in terms of the content of the show, it’s proven to be off the mark.

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From the “Yes, I do occasionally leave my house” file: tomorrow I’m looking forward to seeing Trigger Man, which is screening at the Pioneer Theater, which is screening for one week as part of their Fourth Annual Month of Horror, Terror, and General Mayhem. Someone, at some point described Trigger Man to me as “Mumblehorror”; it’s also been spun as “a low-budget twist on a Michelangelo Antonioni film” and “Old Joy with guns.” If just one of those descriptors proves accurate, I’ll be happy. Check out the crappy-quality (but still sufficiently creepy) trailer, embedded above.

About a week after Ingmar Bergman’s death, the filmmaker’s Swedish state-run archive announced that they needed an additional $600,000 over their yearly budget to digitize Bergman’s early papers. At the time, the archive’s rep argued that the Swedish government’s refusal to pony up the funds (roughly three times what it costs to run the archive for an entire year) rendered the state derelict in their duty to preserve the nation’s art history. The next day, the Archive accepted a $10,000 donation from the people who put on the Golden Globes, and we haven’t heard from them since.

Meanwhile, in Northern Italy, a museum housing the personal archives of Michelangelo Antonioni has been closed for renovations for a year, and unless they get an influx of cash and soon, it look like they’re not going to be able to reopen. The mayor of the town of Ferrara says they might be able to save the archive by expanding the museum to include tributes to other filmmakers, but Antonioni’s niece insists her uncle donated his materials under the promise that the museum would be dedicated solely to him. Until the city and the family reach a compromise, Antonioni’s short films, drawings, on-set photographs, and other memorabilia will be stuck in storage.

Say what you will about Hollywood, but the U.S. film industry is extremely good at preserving its own history. What state-funded institutions such as LACMA can’t cover, enthusiastic millionaire movie buffs like Hugh Hefner step in to provide. The sad state of the Bergman and Antonioni archives may owe less to government apathy than to to the current fragmentary nature of the European film industry.

Once a month, cultural critic Camille Paglia publishes a lengthy assessment of the current moment in pop culture at Salon.com. This month’s installment went live today, and the meat of it is an Antonioni/Bergman inspired elegy for the art film. The whole piece is, as is the norm for Ms. Paglia, terribly quotable, but the part where she appears to elevate the entire Star Wars series to the status of those late Europeans’ “masterpieces” is probably the most controversial:

On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces — what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Persona? Perhaps only George Lucas’ multilayered, six-film Star Wars epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.

A lot of bloggers are reading this and doing a double-take, as if to say, “Did she just say George Lucas is as good as Bergman? OHNOSHEDIDN’T!!!” Example, from The Opinion Mill: “Only in the mind of Camille Paglia can Jar-Jar Binks push aside Antonius Block to play chess with Death on the stony beach. I’d always considered the mutual starfucking between George Lucas and Joseph Campbell to be the last word in intellectual vacuousness, but one should never underestimate Camille.”

This is not how I read Paglia’s statement at all — I read it as, “The only films of the last three decades that may in the future be considered classics are the Star Wars films, and that’s evidence of how far from the art house golden era we’ve fallen.” But maybe I’m wrong. For all I know, Paglia really did mean to equate Antoniennui with (let’s all make this joke at once) the travails of Jar Jar Binks. Later, in the very same column, Camille suggests that Kelly Clarkson has the potential to singlehandedly “revive…the American fine arts.” I’m all for being contrarian, but at some point, doesn’t the polemic start to strain credulity?

The gang over at IFC News have compiled a list of 10 references to Bergman and Antonioni in popular culture. Of course, everyone remembers the Twister-with-Death scene from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, but the IFC list includes a few unusual suspects, such as Haruki Murakami’s L’Avventura-inspired Sputnik Sweetheart. Overall, it’s a great list, although there’s two items I would add.

The IFC list rightly cites Interiors as the apex of Woody Allen’s expression of his passion for Bergman, but Allen also paid tribute to Antonioni. The “Why do some Women have trouble reaching Orgasm?” segment of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) is a clear homage to Antonioni-style urban decadence and ennui. It’s also shot in black and white in Italian, so the reference is not exactly subtextual. It’s an absolute crime that a clip of this is not available on YouTube.

And in terms of Bergman references, I’d include “Seventh Seal” by Scott Walker, which you can download here. The opening track on Walker’s 1969 solo album Scott 4, “Seventh Seal” is basically a five-minute remake of Bergman’s 1957 film, set to Spanish guitars. In other words, it is to Bergman’s masterpiece what The White Stripes’ “The Union Forever” is to Citizen Kane, except it pre-dates Jack White’s brush with relevancy by about 30 years. Footnote: Last year, when Walker released The Drift, his first record in a decade, a rapturous Pitchfork review compared it to “a painstakingly fine Ingmar Bergman film, moves slowly and deliberately, with an intense focus and refusal to turn away from disturbing ‘images.’”

Via The House Next Door comes this post from Scanners, where Jim Emerson (editor of Roger Ebert’s website) pays tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni by posting a letter to Ebert from actor Ronan O’Casey. The letter dates back to 1999: Casey, who played the corpse at the center of Antonioni’s biggest commercial hit Blow-up, read an appraisal of the film written by Ebert and felt compelled to contact the critic with some further details about the production.

According to Casey, key scenes depicting his character’s murder were scripted, but due to budget issues, were never shot:

You stated in your article that Antonioni must have been happy while he was making this film. Well, yes, he was, at least while he was overspending his budget lavishly…The producer was Carlo Ponti, and he had been supervising another production which delayed his arrival in London. When he got there, he was furious. “Basta, Michelangelo, finito, we are done!” Shooting stopped and the crew went back to Italy. Antonioni took the bits and pieces of the film that had been shot and wove them together in a film since hailed for its “mystery” and “enigma.” Of course it was mysterious; it was never finished!

The letter is pretty juicy; you can read the whole thing, including an anecdote about Jane Birkin’s “unadorned pudenda,” at this link.

Interestingly, Emerson contextualizes the corpse’s testimony by placing it alongside a quote from another letter to Ebert, this one pre-dating Casey’s letter by thirty years, in which Antonioni himself confesses that most of his films were the product of on-set improvisation and editing-room experimentation: “Until the film is edited, I have no idea myself what it will be about. And perhaps not even then.”

To me, that only strengthens the argument put forth earlier this week by David Hudson, that “as we head into the late 00’s, the almost standardized “festival film” bears the mark of no other director more than Antonioni’s.” And in fact, Antonioni’s self-described working method sounds remarkably similar to that of many of today’s festival darlings. But oh, how I can’t wait to hear the Derrièrist response…

Yesterday, an obituary for Jeremy Blake (see previous coverage here and here) appeared in the New York Times, alerting many to the story of his disappearance and his girlfriend Theresa Duncan’s death for the first time. Coming right on the tail of the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, some suggested that the death-in-threes cliche was now complete.

On a comment on a post at The House Next Door, I wrote that I thought that Blake’s actual death occurred “too long ago to fit into this trifecta.” But then again … it might just be that no other moving image artist has died yet this week, but on further reflection I do feel as though Blake, though obviously not as accomplished or as well-known as the late European vanguards, can comfortably be spoken of in the same breath. At the very least, as someone known for producing a kind of moving painting (see his video for Beck’s “Round the Bend” above), he’s definitely got a kinship with Antonioni, a filmmaker who thought of himself as a painter and who literally painted props and locations in order to get his desired color effects.

I’ve rounded up a few odds and ends relating to all three deaths:

• Kate Coe has a long, investigative report on Duncan in the LA Weekly. The tenor of the piece can be gleaned pretty accurately from the subtitle: “A writer–game designer and her boyfriend commit suicide, and a façade falls away.” Duncan’s alleged first feature-in-progress was apparently part of the façade. Many, many additional details at the link.
• The Bergman Obit Master List has been updated to include comments from Woody Allen and Roger Ebert. If you know of a Bergman tribute that I’ve missed, please paste a link in the comments to that post.
• The Playlist offers an, um, playlist of songs from Antonioni movies.
• Jon Swift takes the opportunity of Bergman and Antonioni’s passings to coin the name of a new movement in critical theory: Derrièrism, inspired by Jack Warner’s habit of judging pictures “by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them.” Says Swift: “The deaths of Bergman and Antonioni have given Derrièrism is a shot in the arm, or a shot somewhere anyway.”
• Roger Ebert has compiled a number of celebrity tributes to Bergman, including testimonials from Studs Terkel, Guy Maddin and Richard Linklater. Says Maddin: “I subconsciously thought that guy would live for ever. Even though he’s dead now he must still be perceptibly animated somehow by his unkillable Swedish lust and dread.”

Here’s another one for the horror fans: The House Next Door contributor Kevin Lee is producing a series of video essays based on this definitive list of the 1,000 Greatest Films. His most recent installment tackles Inferno, Dario Argento’s horror classic about architecture, identity, and death-by-cats.

In Lee’s mind, Argento’s style contains “a touch too much camp in its perversity to be truly horrifying.” He instead “locates [his] pleasure” in Argento’s emphasis on place and space, recasting Inferno as something like “a horror version of an Antonioni movie.” But whereas Antonioni was concerned with the psychology of his wandering women, Argento’s female protagonists, though similarly traumatized, are little more than graphic elements, “as abstract as the concept of red or blue.” It’s really fascinating stuff. You can check out all of Lee’s videos here, or read his blog here.