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Before them, there were just films....

A. O Scott, film reviewer for the NY Times pays tribute to 2 great movie directors who died this past week. As Scott notes, before these 2 movie-makers came onto the scene, there were just films. They brought art to the cinema:

"By an awful and uncanny coincidence — the kind of occurrence that, in a movie, would have to be taken as symbolic lest it seem altogether preposterous — Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died on the same day. Since Mr. Bergman was 89 and Mr. Antonioni 94, neither man’s death came as much of a shock, but the simultaneity was startling. Not only because they were both great filmmakers, but more because, in their prime, Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Bergman were seen as the twin embodiments of the idea that a filmmaker could be, without qualification or compromise, a great artist.

Not that everyone agreed or saw them both in equally glowing light. There will always be those who scoff at the idea of cinema as a form of art. And those who do embrace the notion have always been notoriously prone to quarrel and dissension. In “Anticipation of ‘La Notte,’ ” for instance, his touching, self-aware memoir of youthful cinephilia, Philip Lopate recalls being part of an undergraduate claque of film buffs in the early 1960s who worshiped Mr. Antonioni and disdained Mr. Bergman."

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