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.’”

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.”

You know that old chestnut about deaths coming in threes? Yesterday, Defamer assumed that Ingmar Bergman’s death was part of a triptych that also included Tom Snyder and actor Michel Serrault. But with this morning’s news of the death of Italian maverick Michelangelo Antonioni, you’ve got to wonder if there’s another 90-ish European art house master who’s about to go.

Yesterday I organized a round-up of Bergman obits, which as an afternoon activity was time consuming but not exactly rigorous — everyone has something to say about Bergman, so I just sat back and collated. But Antonioni was, to my mind, a different kind of artist, far more polarizing and uneven, one that I don’t think I could passively pay tribute to. I don’t love everything he made, but films like Blow-up, Red Desert and Zabriskie Point were crucial to my personal film education. Let me stew on this for a few hours, and then I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, you’ll find the famous final scene from Zabriskie above. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it later today.