The Virgin Spring

Ingmar Bergman died yesterday. All the retrosepctives and obits reminded me of the first movie of his that I saw, The Virgin Spring. Here was a film like none that had gone before--a toad in the sandwich, heralding disaster-- and in those days, at the little art houses in Denver and Houston, I saw La Strada, and even And God Created Woman (Brigitte Bardot) and later Fellini, and Antonioni and A Knife in the Water. It was as if someone opened the window and Doris Day and Rock Hudson and Charleton Heston and tired old Biblical epics and kitchy romantic comedies flew out and the Europeans drifted in, quietly, one at a time, not like gangbusters. We already had gangbusters. Sub-titles made you rush to the theater for a sublime experience. Wild Strawberries. Persona. Those were heady days of cinema, long gone. A treasury of American movies followed, (anything by Robert Altman) and then mediocrity landed on the window sill again. Of course there is Little Miss Sunshine, a movie with a Proust scholar. How cool is that? There are good films now, but you must hunt to find them, and probably drive to a theater 30 miles away. Where are the art houses of yesteryear? We had to trek to Cambridge to see Lives of Others, a riviting German film, best foreign film.

Lift your glass to Ingmar Bergman and his contemporay directors. We shan't see so many great ones again.
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