Clash of the Titans

My Dad is 100 Years Old Directed by Guy Maddin

Bergman Island Directed by Marie Nyrerod

Film Forum is currently presenting two movies to repair the damaged state of cinephilia—Bergman Island about Ingmar Bergman and My Dad is 100 Years Old, celebrating the centenary of Roberto Rossellini. Of the two, it’s the latter experimental, 16-minute short that rings the alarm. Instead of Bergman’s chronological introspective-retrospective career history, the Rossellini flick is a flouncy, cutesy, yet rigid manifestation of the criteria now used to judge film art. Seeing this film lets you know we’re in trouble.

My Dad is 100 Years Old was made as a collaboration between the Canadian Guy Maddin and international film actress Isabella Rossellini eulogizing her father who died in 1977. Its fairytale premise, in which Isabella remembers her father’s huge belly and rests her head on a wide, heaving, navelized mound, also features a smug insider quality that is part of what has ruined film culture today. In Bergman Island, director/interviewer Marie Nyrerod lets 88-year-old Bergman—now living on Faro Island, the isolated spot where he shot six of his most famous late features—speak for himself. Bergman, as always, is to be taken on the terms of his films and his personal life. We are persuaded toward the sensible, conventional way of responding to an artist, rather than joining a privileged coterie.

Maddin’s film perpetuates “Smart About Movies” elitism. The substance of Rossellini’s movies (which came through even in wide-ranging retrospectives like Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema series, as well as Martin Scorsese’s My Journey Through Italian Cinema) takes second place to Maddin’s self-importance. Maddin, who has used Isabella Rossellini as a draw in some of his recent esoteric travesties of cinema’s silent and avant-garde heritage, encourages a campy attitude of highfalutin’ haughtiness. Maddin uses Isabella to promote his cineaste agenda with its weird mixture of camp and solemnity, oddball narrative conceits and obsessiveness. Instead of clearly presenting Rossellini’s part in the Italian Neo-Realist movement and his progress toward spiritual exploration and “simplicity,” Maddin prompts Isabella into doing circus-like impersonations, donning costumes and guises of several famous film figures (Chaplin, Fellini).

Playfulness stops as the short film takes on the snide tone of those film pieces Maddin used to write for the Village Voice. In an inexplicable and inexcusable colloquy, Isabella plays the pot-bellied silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock critiquing the entombed Rossellini.

Hitchcock: For God’s sake, Roberto, you should have been a priest, not a filmmaker.

Roberto Rossellini: And you should have been a magician. Your films might be fun but nothing more. Your films manipulate people’s emotions. Masturbating instead of making love. My films deal with morality.

Isabella is credited with writing the script, but her voice-over narration and didactic explanations are the stuff of a mingy-minded film expert: Maddin-in-drag. It recalls the peculiar animus of Maddin’s anti-Spielberg writings. Is this truly Isabella’s perception of cinema aesthetics—fun versus morality? Isabella even impersonates Hitchcock calling Rossellini’s films “Slow, boring, poorly made.” Surely Hitchcock, cinema’s finest poet-aesthete would know better. Hitchcock and Rossellini were directors of different styles but, at their best, were on the same level artistically. It diminishes film culture to suggest that one was necessarily superior to the other. (Besides, whose films are more like masturbation—Maddin’s or Spielberg’s?)

How dare Maddin pimp his influence this way, tricking Isabella into several kinds of betrayal. This includes Isabella posing as her mother Ingrid Bergman and testifying for the historical record: “ No, Rossellini did not destroy my career. I destroyed his.” Considering that Rossellini’s art peaked with the Bergman trilogy (Stromboli, Europa 51, Voyage to Italy), this is either some sick Oedipal stuff or else more Maddin-influence, anti-Hollywood diatribe.

Ingmar Bergman confesses a tiny bit of anti-Hollywood biases in Bergman Island when recounting his unrooted wanderings in ’70s Los Angeles. He finally came to his senses when Barbra Streisand invited him to a pool party. The world never saw the movie version of The Merry Widow that got sunk, but that story confirms Bergman’s snobbery. Ironically, Bergman’s This-Artist-Is-An-Island commitment to cinema was based in the idea of culture that spoke to a vast audience in powerful, universal terms. Nyrerod deserves credit for catching Bergman at his most confessional—about his impressive career and his shockingly indifferent fatherhood.

Both these movies are exhibited as specialty items: long after Bergman and Rossellini were past their vogue. They are fascinating because the culture no longer connects moviemaking to the same humanistic purposes (exploring the psyche, exploring man’s relationship to man and to God) that inspired Bergman, Rossellini and most filmmakers of the 20th century. Nyrerod’s film holds on to that principle of movie art. Maddin tries to submerge it in fashionable glibness.