Musical theater legend Robert Goulet died yesterday at the age of 73, while awaiting a lung transplant. Goulet first made his mark starring in Camelot on Broadway in 1960; he was a staple of variety shows made-for-TV musical adaptations until both went out of fashion; he appeared in Beetlejuice and Atlantic City; he voiced the penguin in Toy Story 2. But most people of a certain age probably know Goulet best through Will Ferrell’s impersonations on SNL. So, in tribute to Goulet, I’ve embedded my favorite of Ferrell’s Goulet clips above. You get the idea.

Bob at Forward to Yesterday informs us that yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the death of Groucho Marx. If you’d like to honor the godfather of motor-mouthed, self-reflexive comedy by watching Horse Feathers or Duck Soup, you need look no further than YouTube. I’ve embedded the speakeasy scene from the former above, and as a bonus, you get a chunk of Zeppo singing “Everybody Says I Love You.”

In some dusty file in the back of my mind, I’ve been compiling a list of Unbelievable Anecdotes Related To The Death of Celebrities. I haven’t heard a really good one since Indian film fans went on a bus-burning rampage in Bangalore ithat left five people dead, in response to the death of aging film star Rajkumar. Here in America, we love our stars, but apparently not enough to try to burn down our technology capitals when they die of natural causes.

So here’s another one for the file: according to the Associated Press, a 67-year-old woman died in a trailer at a Graceland campground yesterday after suffering heatstroke during a graveside procession intended to honor the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. An 8-year-old boy was also hospitalized after suffering heat stroke during the event, which took place in 105-degree heat; another mourner, dressed in a black Elvis jumpsuit, “pulled an oxygen tank behind him with a breathing tube attached to his nose.”

I’m not at all prepared to go to such lengths to honor the occasion, but I did pull together a list of resources and writings related to Elvis’ movie careers. You can check that after the jump.

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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.’”

I’m going to add this to the Bergman Obit Master List in a moment, but I just had to excerpt this great quote from Richard Corliss’ interview with Woody Allen about Ingmar Bergman for TIME. With all the inflation of Bergman’s legacy in the past few days, it’s interesting that his greatest (or, at least, most famous) fan seems determined to prove that Bergman was really just like any hack director: nervous about where to put the camera and neurotic about making money and appeasing the studios.

Woody Allen: [Bergman] and I had dinner in his New York hotel suite; it was a great treat for me. I was nervous, I really didn’t want to go. But he was not at all what you might expect: the formidable, dark, brooding genius. He was a regular guy. He commiserated with me about low box-office grosses and women and having to put up with studios.

Later, he’d speak to me by phone from his oddball little island [Faro, where Bergman lived his last 40 years]. He confided about his irrational dreams: for instance, that he would show up on the set and not know where to put the camera and be completely panic-stricken. He’d have to wake up and tell himself that he is an experienced, respected director and he certainly does know where to put the camera. But that anxiety was with him long after he had created 15, 20 masterpieces.

TIME: You knew he was Ingmar Bergman, but maybe he didn’t. He didn’t get to view his reputation from the outside.

ALLEN: Exactly. The world saw him as a genius, and he was worrying about the weekend grosses.

In semi-related news, Allen’s latest, Cassandra’s Dream, has been added to the lineup of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. I’ll be there, and I can’t wait to see it.

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.”

Several days ago, Scott Kirsner linked a CNET story about YouTube’s plans to automatically block all copyrighted content beginning in September. Google already pulls content based on copyright holder request, but if this ends up going through, it would have a much farther reaching impact on the kinds of fil m clips and oddities that I often link to on SpoutBlog. I think it’s a mistake. Right now, YouTube is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive online archive of 20th century culture. Just in terms of its educational potential, it’s invaluable.

So, while we can, let’s put the YouTube archive to good use. If there’s any filmmaker whose work lends itself to an introduction via YouTube, I’d say it’s Michelangelo Antonioni. At the very least, the YouTube watching experience may be the only way to transform his work for short attention spans. His best scenes worked almost as self-contained shorts; his poderous narrative pacing can make a full feature feel at best like an event, and at worst, like an unbearable slog.

Almost all of the Antonioni clips currently available on YouTube represent the last scenes of their respective films, which makes sense, as several of these are now film school staples, although I’d love to be able to show you, say, the opening of Red Desert. Still, I’ve compiled four final scenes here; consider the fifth spot reserved. If someone manages to upload a clip (ANY clip) from Red Desert (available on frill-free DVD) before YouTube’s proposed regulations go into effect, I’ll update this post.

1. Zabriskie Point (1970)

Antonioni’s much-maligned hippies-in-Death Valley film is by turns laughable and stunning. It’s most famous for its two hallucinogenic set pieces: in one, two beautiful road-tripping strangers screw on rocky desert shoal. As Fiona A. Villella noted at Senses of Cinema, this “leads to a complete breakdown in realist narrative logic as multiple couples and groups of young people engaged in sexual play magically appear throughout the valley.” Antonioni repeats the logic of multiples in the latter set piece, in which the female half of this couple watches as her boss/sugar daddy’s vacation home spectacularly explodes to sounds of Pink Floyd on the sound track. Antonioni presents the explosion in slow motion, over and over again from different angles, cut with close-ups of the innards of the house (the TV, the fridge) combusting as if part of a separate demolition. Thus hippie bliss gives way to violent, anarchic destruction. Absolutely, without a doubt, the best art film explosion sequence of all time.

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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.

While we’re on the subject of Ingmar Bergman, let’s talk about Bergman parodies. To gauge the Swedish’s master’s impact on 20th century culture, one needs to look no further than YouTube, where you’ll find “Bergmanesque” clips from Mystery Science Theater 3000, French and Saunders and an Alamo Drafthouse video contest. Then there’s the above clip, which appears to be an NYU student short. Titled simply Thirst, its YouTube summary reads in part: “What if director Ingmar Bergman did a commercial for Coca Cola? Written and directed by Leslie Chase, the film is set in the late 50’s and follows the thirsty, lonely lives of two Swedish sisters.” It’s tribute, it’s dead-on parody, and it’s genius.

As promised, here’s a master list of Bergman obits and tributes. Everything I’ve come across today is linked here; if you’ve written or read something I’ve missed, please leave a link in the comments to this post.

Most recent updates follow immediately after the jump.

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Last updated August 7, 2007

“Well, goddamnit.” — Keith Uhlich, The House Next Door

“Non-cinephiles likely have heard of Bergman even if they somehow think that the woman from Casablanca directed a seminal foreign film about death.” — Aaron Dobbs, Out of Focus

“I wonder how many under-35s have even seen a Bergman film. The Bergman art-house aesthetic of the ’50s and ’60s is about as far from the Tarantino film-geek attitude as you can get.” — Jeff Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

“Dozens of us [film critics] have the same story of teenage revelation: of seeing a Bergman movie, usually The Seventh Seal, and saying, “This is what I want to study, devote my life to.” Here, we saw, was no mere director, collaborating on scripts with other writers, but a full-service auteur.” — Richard Corliss, TIME

“Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films…God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires” — Mervyn Rothstein, New York Times

“His vision encompassed the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, its glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the Baltic islet of Faro, where the reclusive artist spent his last years.” — Louise Nordstrom, AP

“That says it all, really: Bergman offers the penis up, unannounced, but part of an incredible sequence; Fincher promises it, then never delivers.” — Brendan Connelly, Film Ick
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