The death of within 24 hours of each other marks the end of modernism, argues Mohamed El-Assyouti Since the Lumière brothers brought cinema into being in 1895 -- so is the accepted belief -- it has come to be seen as an all but dead art form: the ultimately short-lived predecessor of digital video. A thoroughly different medium, the latter, at least in one sense: for just under 112 years, it was the privilege of a few hundred artists with access to the funds, equipment and movie theatres that defined cinema; now anyone can make a "personal" film, "releasing" it on the internet. It is thus with particular poignancy that one responds to the death of two of the genre's greatest auteurs -- this notion of "film author" was but the aesthetic extension of the idea of privilege -- who took the form to magnificent modern extremes. Both Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman passed away on Monday 30 July 2007, apparently coincidentally. But both had created audiovisual forms in which to explore the position of man in the grander scheme of things and pursue unanswerable philosophical questions about identity, being and time. Their innovations were unparalleled. There were certain things they shared but each approached them in a unique way. They eschewed both narrative causality and character-driven plot. They concentrated on giving form to their vision as existential individuals, but they did so with as much immersion in ontological questions as in film itself, with the result that the film came to occupy a central position in their visions of human existence: film became both means and end in the business of expressing an individual sense of meaning. That is why their protagonists are often artists questioning their life and art; stand-ins for the film authors themselves. But they were not "experimentalists" in the methodical, often mechanical way that "experimental film" tends to espouse. Both were obsessed with the reality- illusion dilemma: how much of our reality do we create, and how much does our reality create us? For Antonioni, this meant that underneath the reality we perceive, there lies another; and underneath that, another still, ad infinitum. For Bergman, it meant rather a set of masks with which we replace our faces depending on who we happen to be dealing with at a given moment; and in the process, he constantly implied, we lose touch with our own identity. The artist's obsession is with unwrapping reality, a notion expressed in both Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), based on Julio Cortazar's short story -- in which a glamour photographer, while enlarging an image he has casually taken, uncovers a murder -- and Bergman's unmasking of persona, whether in the case of magician Emanuel Vogler ( The Magician or The Face, 1958), the actress Elizabeth Vogler ( Persona, 1966) or the actress Charlotte ( Fanny and Alexander, 1983). Antonioni's artist-protagonists, while they confront the bareness of modern life, feel purposeless and insignificant. Bergman's have rather more quasi-divine power -- some trace thereof, at any rate -- but their quest for truth is doomed because contagious doubt and mauvé fois surround them. Hence the architect Sandro in L'Avventura (The Adventure, 1959), the writer Giovanni Pontano in La Notte (The Night, 1961), the photographer in Blow-Up, the documentary journalist Locke in The Passenger (1975): all are failed, their sincerity compromised a priori, oblivious to the possibility that their work should have any weight or consequence, and shocked by evidence to the contrary. With Bergman's artist-protagonists, by contrast, futility leads to self-effacement ( Persona ), dementia ( Hour of the Wolf, 1967), even murder ( Shame, 1969 and The Ritual, 1970) and suicide (the actor in The Face ). Typically they isolate themselves in a remote place to confront their solitude and find their way back to truth. Bergman's favourite residence was the small island of Faro, the background in some of his most personal films. His father being a pastor, Bergman's religious upbringing played a significant part in his sense of being, but it was the theatre, first and foremost, that informed his art. Bergman started working in theatre in his teens and did not stop until two years before his death at 89. He thought of theatre as his wife, cinema his mistress. Which is why he was the actor's director par excellence; and he worked consistently with Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ulmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Erland Josephson and Eva Dahlbeck, who have some of the most remarkable screen performances in the history of cinema in his films. He also favoured the close-up, reflecting the belief that the actors' facial expressions were the most important aspect of his films. After Gunnar Fischer, he worked with cinematographer Sven Nykvist -- "like an old marriage", he once described their relationship -- whose chiaroscuro was both minimalist and naturalist. For his part Antonioni consciously rejected the notion of being a philosopher, though he was practically a phenomenologist of film. His occupation consisted of simply looking, he said; and true enough, his work is demanding both visually and in other ways. There are no ready answers, no explanations, even though everything is there. No other director could use composition like Antonioni to place the viewer in the character's subjective state: ennui, alienation and despair. The effect was mesmeric. His approach was like a painter's or an architect's, emphasising composition so much he challenged his actors with the sense of being mere physical forms in an abstract, lifeless space. Overwhelmed by existence to the point of being reduced to a nothingness in which choices are inconsequential and striving implies loss of direction, Antonioni's characters embodied the "erotic malady" of modern times -- whereby man falls in and out of love to escape his ennui -- for which, though he was critical of it, he said he had no remedy. Rather than resolve an issue, he captures and analyses an always fleeting state, which he conveys with incredible power. And true to form, he was not an actor's director, offering only minimal guidance. Chief among his collaborators were actress Monica Vitti and poet-cum-screenwriter Tonino Guerra. In both auteurs' most important works, the central characters are women. Bergman's Christ-like female figures -- Karin in Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Agnes in Cries and Whispers (1972), both played by Harriet Andersson, and Esther in The Silence (1963), played by Ingrid Thulin -- are sick and dying. But their suffering potentially or actually transforms the lives of other characters. Elsewhere it is the artist, whether male or female, who bears the heaviest cross: tormented by inner demons, living in a threatening environment, he must walk a tightrope to preserve his sanity while remaining true to his art. He must become a beacon, a torch-light, rather than give in to the temptation to explode the unbearable reality surrounding him. For Bergman, surviving with integrity is all about mastering your own violence. You can trap it all in, succumb to illness and perish, like Esther in The Silence ; you can redirect it outside of you and turn into a killer, like Jan in Shame ; or you can learn to use it imaginatively, like Alexander in Fanny and Alexander. Art becomes the highest, most noble channel for violence. Bergman's art was like his film The Seventh Seal (1957), where Death is impersonated and pursues the main characters until he reaps their lives, in the vein of Thanatos. And this is one way in which he differs from Antonioni. Death is more common and more pertinent shaper of events in Bergman's works than love. Antonioni's work is more in the vein of Eros (after which he named his last film, produced in 2004). Most of his characters are searching for love, or else using it to run away from the sheer tedium of existence. In these games Claudia and Anna in L'Avventura, Valentina and Lidia in La Notte, Piero and Riccardo in L'Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) and Corrado and Ugo in Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert, 1964) become interchangeable romantic partners for the protagonist. In the first two of these four films, Antonioni's male protagonist (Sandro and Giovanni) seems capable of substituting one woman for another, something beautifully reflected in visual effects of doubling and mirroring, with Monica Vitti playing one of the two women involved in each film. In the second two, the female protagonist (Vittoria and Giuliana), played by Vitti both times, tries to replace one man with another, again with hopeless results. But in her suffering she is not Christ-like, rather a feather in the wind, a ship perpetually out at sea. With no illusions about the existence of a God, they try to find a means of coping with their existential dilemmas in this life. Actually there is hardly any reference to Christianity in Antonioni's cinema -- the exception being L'Avventura, in which Anna's father refers to her having a Bible in her possession, which to him is enough proof that she has not killed herself. Also in L'Avventura, Claudia and Sandro come across deserted churches on their journey. Here as elsewhere Antonioni's characters make no attempt at sublimating their experience; and their author does not push their suffering to extremes. A protagonist may try to kill himself -- as in Il Deserto Rosso or Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) -- but it is the secondary character which dies, prompting both protagonist and audience to reflect on the worth of human life: Tommasso Garani in La Notte, the stock broker in L'Eclisse, the unknown victim in Blow-Up... The death of the protagonist Locke at the end of The Passenger is rather a kind of euthanasia with which to conclude a pointless odyssey in search of identity. Critics accused both Bergman and Antonioni of lack of engagement. Eschewing politics, they were said to abandon the required left-wing position. But in both cases careful viewing should furnish evidence for pleading not guilty on the first charge. Commentaries on violence and war are recurrent motifs in Bergman's films: there is a war in the nameless country of The Silence and there are photographic and TV coverage of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War in Persona. A major plot point in Bergman's Shame -- a pacifist film if ever there was one, showing the mindlessness of war and how it is the antithesis of art -- is when the protagonist Eva and her husband Jan are interviewed on film camera; the resulting "documentary" footage is doctored to serve different ends by the warring factions. Similarly, the documentary filmmaker John Locke, the protagonist of Antonioni's The Passenger who is covering a war in an African country, is forced to question the ability of the medium to give objective information. Both directors held the Olympian position of the artist who condemns violence in any form. Still, the number of bullets fired in their combined oeuvres can be counted on the fingers of one hand: the bullet Jan is forced to fire to kill his adversary Jacob seen in a distant shot in Shame, or the bullet heard but not seen killing Locke in The Passenger. And they faltered the most when they stepped out of their respective homelands, with graphic violence (closer to the glorification spectacle à-la Hollywood) characterising both Antonioni's The Zabriski Point (1969) and Bergman's The Serpent's Egg (1978), the former shot in the US and the latter in Germany, both of which constitute a brief departure from the two filmmakers' more level-headed visual style.
