What you see with Godard...is that ten years later, after the movie, you see that he was telling the story. But because of his modern mise-en-scène, the story wasn’t exposed. It appears over time. And in that way he’s like Picasso, or Einstein. Because he’s searching, he’s searching and he finds...People walk out of Godard movies because they say there’s no story, there’s no logic. But there is a story. It’s just exposed differently. For instance, in a classic film you’ll have an actor who says, “I’m the President of the United States.” In a Godard film, you’ll have an actor saying nothing, and you’ll have a voice coming in from somewhere saying, “Mr. President, do you want a glass of water?” That’s his method of exposition. It’s hard to understand. And you need to understand that logic to be moved by the movie. But with time and maybe one sentence in the program, these movies can touch people. Slowly we’re catching up.
Jean-Luc Godard: The drama is no longer psychological, but plastic ...
Michelangelo Antonioni: It’s the same thing.
— Interview 1964, Cahiers du Cinema
When Andrei Tarkovsky, working from the nineteen-sixties through eighties, made films of a symbolically furious anguish, it seemed to make perfect sense; he lived and worked in the Soviet Union, where anguish was the grossest domestic product and more of it was produced than its people could ever consume — and where the abstrusely symbolic realm was the one openly covert way of expressing it. But Bergman lived and worked in Sweden — Sweden! — and still found a way to be miserable in the land of the safety net and political neutrality, and to be symbolic in a land of freedom. What’s more, he expressed that misery vehemently, even pugnaciously, making films that blended a tormented drive for guilty pleasure with a grim Lutheran sense of personal confrontation with the Almighty. In his films, the proximity of pleasure and death, of lust and destruction shifts quickly from the earthly to the cosmic. If it seemed peculiar for him to find the fires of Hell lurking within the permanent Scandinavian chill, it seemed even stranger when he inspired others to find them in their own air-conditioned nightmares, even on the Upper East Side.
