The strange coincidence of two of post-war Europe’s great film makers, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, dying within 24 hours of each other appears to have instantly inspired a wave of revisionism of their relative importance to cinema history by the critical mass. In particular, New York Times critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a particularly scathing assessment of the great Swede’s legacy, entitled “Scenes from an Overrated Career”, arguing that Bergman’s body of work is no longer relevant or indeed loved by audiences any more, in comparison to the enduringly popular likes of Hitchcock, Godard and Welles.

I would argue that Rosenbaum’s aim is a little shy of the mark; if the legacy of any filmmaker is on the wane, then surely it is Antonioni’s? While his films may still be considered masterpieces by an oligarchy of critical opinion, who actually watches the likes of L’Avventura or L’Eclisse these days apart from film students? Notably, flicking through the obituaries of the two filmmakers, Bergman’s oeuvre is always described in more hushed, reverent tones, while Antonioni seems to be more frequently described as merely ‘the director of Blowup‘. No-one would ever dare reduce the Swede to simply ‘the director of The Seventh Seal‘.

Of all of his great films, I find the most rewarding to be Smultronstället, roughly translated into English as Wild Strawberries. In many ways it is one of this more straightforward films, but the elegance with which it presents us with its themes and subject matter render it also one of his most profound, and most deeply moving. For a director accused of being morbid, even by many of his admirers, here is a film about the fear of death, but from which a man can reclaim his love of life. At the centre of the film is the elderly Dr. Isak Borg, a highly regarded professor who is about to travel across Sweden to accept an honorary degree from Lund University. The night before he travels, he has a strange, vivid dream full of Jungian symbolism: clocks with no hands, a strange man-like dummy, a driverless horse-drawn carriage containing his own coffin. The nightmare troubles the waking Borg, surely a reminder to him of the ever-nearing inevitability of his own death, given his advancing years. Regardless, he is in good spirits on embarking on his journey, and we see glimpses of him as a charming, avuncular old man.

Accompanying him on the journey is his daughter-in-law Marianne, who initially seems a little cold towards him. As they set off, we begin to see why; Borg, while a distinguished man of intellect has a rather brusque, unfriendly manner about him. The confines of the car prove to be too much, Marianne finally has enough and admits she doesn’t particularly like him. This proves a surprise to the old man, clearly too contained in his own academically smug bubble to realise how emotionally distant he is from others. As the film and the journey progress, further characters join and then leave our travelling party, and Borg has a further series of dreams which hark back to his youth which force him to confront the emotional and personal failures in his life, and attempt to find some kind of reconciliation with them.

Bergman made Wild Strawberries on the back of the extraordinary success of both Smiles of a Summers Night (1955) and The Seventh Seal (1957). The success of these films in a sense allowed Bergman the creative and artistic freedom to explore more personal issues, and there is no denying that the film is intensely so. Borg’s emotional failings and his lack of interpersonal skills are autobiographical of the director himself, and many have interpreted the film as an attempt to apologise and to an extent justify himself to his parents. There is a clear thread of generational conflict throughout the film; Borg’s son casually disregards his father, implicitly as a result of years of the same reversed. Yet Borg himself also has a strained relationship with one of his parents, his cold, emotionless mother who appears to treat all with the same disdain. This contextualisation, midway through the film, allows us more sympathy with the ageing professor, as much sinned against as sinner.

Wild Strawberries is one of only a handful of films that movingly portrays a man’s reflections on his own life, in particular his youth, both with a melancholy wistfulness but also a determination to try to atone for his misguided ways. The obvious parallel is Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), in which an ageing bureaucrat conforonted with death comes to realise how he has lived his life so unthinkingly, and tries to find some meaning in his final months. More recently, Theo Angelopoulos has broached the subject in the wonderful Eternity and a Day (1998), starring the incomparable Bruno Ganz. But there is something unique about what Bergman does in Wild Strawberries. It almost seems a cousin of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), particularly with its overtones of redemption, rebirth almost. The central idea of both films is that life is best appreciated when shared with others, not solely for one’s self.

The harsh Swedish winters meant Bergman had only limited time to shoot exterior shots for his films during the year, and often worked on theatre productions during the off-season with his ‘Bergman’ troupe of actors, which numbered the likes of Max Von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, and Ingrid Thulin, all of whom feature in Wild Strawberries. Being regular collaborators allowed Bergman to extract the best out of this group; Thulin, in particular, puts in a wonderfully elegant performance as Borg’s thoughtful but rather haunted daughter-in-law Marianne. Von Sydow, off the back of his career-defining performance as Block in The Seventh Seal, is confined to a cameo here, but Bibi Andersson stands out in her unusual double role as Sara both in the past and in a new incarnation in the present.

But the film belongs to ageing Swedish actor Victor Sjöström. Once considered the most handsome man in all of Sweden, he was practically a living legend, having been one of the most significant European directors of the silent era, most famously making the Lon Chaney classic He Who Gets Slapped. Bergman had to coax the great man out of semi-retirement in order to get him onboard the project, but what a reward! One can watch the film examining just his range of facial expressions alone, and one can still feel the depth of the character completely; at first self-satisfied and content in his self-constructed bubble, then a complex mixture of horror and melancholy as he reflects on his failures in life, before finally achieving a kind of peace with himself in the films final scenes. Astonishing. As much as this is Bergman’s film, it is unimaginable without Sjöström’s central performance.

Although this is primarily a spiritual journey, there is also the road movie dimension to proceedings offering a backdrop for the existential angst on display. The beautiful Swedish countryside is constantly present, almost a character in itself, serenely observing the problems of men. As mentioned above, Wild Strawberries is an elegant but not exact translation of the original title, Smultronstället, which actually refers to the patch where said strawberries are found growing. And this presents a neat metaphor for the film, and indeed life itself; one of Borg’s early flashbacks shows him in his youth observing as his brother courts a girl whom Borg himself has taken a fancy to, as her to him. As he watches in dismay as his more suave, if rather over-the-top brother succeeds in having his wicked way with her, a liason which later leads to their marriage, Borg remembers the intense smell of the fruits he is surrounded by. His recall of this, years later, is initiated by the same smell, by the same patch of strawberries, still there after all of the intervening years. The field has seen life come and go every year just the same, observing with the same knowledge that life is brief; beautiful yet transitory.

At the core of Citizen Kane is a mystery, but it is not that within the film’s plot, the identity of Rosebud, now the worst-kept secret in cinema. The real mystery is just how did a 25-year-old first-time director, an alcoholic screenwriter and a group of untried actors come to make what is commonly regarded as the greatest 119 minutes in film history? And does it live up to this tag?

Like any highly regarded work of art, whether it be the Raphael Stanze, Ulysses, Revolver or The Waste Land, it is impossible for a newcomer to appreciate Citizen Kane for the first time without some prior knowledge of the high regard it is held in. Indeed, like The Rules of the Game, The Seventh Seal or The Third Man, it is likely to disappoint the casual viewer coming to the film on the back of its reputation. I note that, although it has regularly topped the Sight and Sound decennial greatest film poll, it lingers in a lowly 23rd place on the IMDB chart, behind the populist likes of The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, and even The Usual Suspects.

This may be a result of the very technical nature of the film’s aesthetic perfection, which the untrained eye is unlikely to pick up on on a first viewing. The technical innovation employed in the film has been a subject worthy of entire books, so it is rather foolish to scantily sketch the details about what Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland managed to achieve here; just watch and marvel at the incredible deep focus shots, the odd camera positionings, and the quite frankly iconoclastic use of lighting and shade in some scenes. Similarly notice the interesting experiments with sound, diegetic and non-diegetic music, and the mastery of spatial positioning, camerawork, and some truly astonishing dissolves between scenes. All of this is purely technical, and demands a certain knowledge of the methods and processes of film production. If we could disregard all of this, would Citizen Kane still be a great film?

This, in a sense, is like trying to look at a Rembrandt and trying to assess its artistic value beyond the artists’ mastery of brushstoke: almost an irrelevance. Nevertheless, if one extracts the films other constituent parts, there are certainly other noteworthy aspects. The acting is terrific, not least by Welles himself, but also from Dorothy Comingore, Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane, the latter two previously untried on the big screen. Welles had previously worked with this troupe of actors as part of his Mercury Theatre company, but it is to his great credit that he extracts screen-worthy performances from all of them; never do we feel that their acting is stagey, or overly dramatic. Many would go on to great Hollywood careers, most notably Cotten who later would star in the likes of The Third Man, Shadow of a Doubt and Welles’ later masterpiece, Touch of Evil.

There is also the daring screenplay; for this, Welles enlisted Herman J. Mankiewicz, an experienced screenwriter who had previously worked on, amongst other films, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Wizard of Oz, as well as acting as a producer on the Marx Brothers films Duck Soup and Horse Feathers. He was also, however, a persistent alcoholic and gambler, and had been fired from a succession of jobs before striking up with Welles’ Mercury Theatre company. Despite Welles’ later protestations, Citizen Kane would not have been possible without Mankiewitz; he was a friend of both William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, the clear inspiration for Charles Foster Kane and Susan Alexander, close enough to be avle to satirise the corruption and bitterness underlying their existences. He was also the clear inspiration for Cotten’s character Jedediah Leland, the alcoholic theatre critic who feels both his friendship with Kane, and Kane’s moral fibre, have been betrayed by power: Mankiewicz was a theatre critic before turning to screenwriting. For years, his important contribution to the film’s core was neglected, but in recent decades this has been revised.

The film unfolds like Shakespearian tragedy; here we have a man thrust unwillingly into a world of wealth and status, and whose ideals are ultimately eroded by power and love. Everybody knows that the film is an attack on megalomaniacal newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, not least Hearst himself, who after hearing of the film’s subject tried to buy and destroy all of the prints of the picture. But there is also the subtext of the corruption at the heart of the American Dream at work, and this is for me the true genius of the film; as Kane is dazzled and eventually ruined by money, we can see the young United States of America too slowly lose its ideals and morals in favour of material gain, at the cost of increasing emotional isolation. That Kane ends up solely desiring his ‘Rosebud’ – a time of innocence and simple pleasures – but can only spend his final years filling his house with Rennaisance statues – culturally valuable in their own context, but ultimately worthless to a nouveau riche like himself – underlines this level of meaning. There has perhaps been no more elegant illustration of the need for Americans to plunder other histories to invent their own than in Citizen Kane.

It is impossible to detail every aspect of Citizen Kane that makes it such a rich and deeply meaningful film, one simply has to watch it over and over again, absorbing every image, every moment, every smooth gliding dissolve and let one’s self become engrossed in its world all over again. I think that only then can the viewer separate ‘Citizen Kane the greatest film ever made’, and Citizen Kane the great film.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that there are three key ingredients to make a great film: “The script, the script and the script”. This reflects his notoriously low opinion of the role of actors as agents in the creation of a film, and it is certainly not always the case. But there is something to be said about the importance of the screenplay to the end product of the filmmaking process. To my mind, there is no greater demonstration of this than Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which, despite the great performances and tight direction, owes its brilliance to Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond’s razor-sharp screenplay.

The film is essentially a satire on office sexual politics; central character C.C. Baxter works on the 19th floor at insurance firm Consolidated Life, one of 31,259 employees – more people than the population of Natchez, Mississippi as Baxter’s overly-informative opening narration tells us. Accompanying this rather frightening statistic is a wide-angle shot of the office floor, with its seemingly endless rows of desks and clerks, immediately telling us that Baxter is an insignificant cog in the company’s machine. He does, however, have a plan to rise up from his lowly position the 19th floor; he had been letting his colleagues use his uptown apartment to have illicit liasons with women other than their wives, in exchange for favours allowing him to work his way up the metaphorical greasy pole.

The film then immediately presents us with a rather morally questionable central character; he is perfectly happy to accept these promotions and favours from his co-workers, and seems to laugh off any doubts he may have about what he is facilitating. Yet Baxter seems very likeable, affable character, a typically nice Jack Lemmon everyman. He does not appear to be a Machiavellian shark, doing anything he can to rise to the top of the pile; at times he seems stuck in the position he has created for himself, unable to stop for fear of sliding back down the company hierachy. He appears resigned to his fate, reluctant to continue bending over backwards for his colleagues, but still forced to spend cold nights freezing outside on benches while they use his facilities.

Baxter is clearly a loner, emphasised in the film by the times when he does actually get to live in his apartment; TV dinners and TV films appear to be the order of the day. He does have eyes for one lady: one of Consolidated Life’s lift operators, Fran Kubelik, with whom he regularly shares idle chit-chat, but she apparently never reciprocates any flirtation from her many admirers in the building. This is because, as we find out, she is secretly having an affair with Sheldrake, the ‘happily married’ boss of the company, though this has been off the boil for several months now. She, too, is morally ambiguous; we later find out that she has had such affairs before with higher-ups in businesses: is she a gold-digger, or trapped in a destructive cycle just like Baxter?

One of the many joys of The Apartment is the use of dramatic irony; none of the characters know the entirity of what is going on between the others, and frequently they know nothing. Baxter doesn’t know Kubelik is seeing Sheldrake, Kubelik doesn’t know Sheldrake is using Baxter’s apartment, Sheldrake doesn’t know Baxter asked out Kubelik on a date, all until the various pennies drop and they realise how their lives are all intertwined. This seems like a rather artificial construct, but during the course of the film, this all unfolds perfectly naturally, Billy Wilder’s unobtrusive direction allowing the viewer to see the characters’ discoveries.

That almost all of the relationships between the characters are based on some form of lie or deception only adds to the film’s satirical bite; but great satire must not only be funny, but also have an element of danger. Certainly The Apartment is a very funny film, but there is also a great deal of darkness there too. Marital infidelity, while at first shown in a rather comedic light in the earlier scenes, is shown to also be destructive; Sheldrake phones Baxter’s apartment from his home on Christmas Day, a seemingly happy home where his children are playing with their newly-opened presents, but one which he betraying with his continued affair with Kubelik. Suicide is also a recurring motif, somewhat reflective of the despair and loneliness of the characters. The film occurs over the Christmas period, and the contrast between Sheldrake’s festively-decked home and Baxter’s sparse, empty apartment underline his isolation. He does not even appear to have family to be with at this time of year.

Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter is a complex character, certainly not the straighforward everyman role he is usually associated with; it would have been easy for him to rest on his laurels after the success of his previous Wilder collaboration, Some Like it Hot, but The Apartment marked an important career transition for him, a move into darker roles explemplified by his next film Days of Wine and Roses. The film was also a landmark for Shirley MacLaine, her tough-but-fragile performance as Fran Kubelik propelling her to Hollywood superstardom. I had always thought Fred MacMurray was ill cast and too wooden as Jeff Sheldrake, but after several watches I now feel he is perfect: slippery, slimy, ungainly, almost the antithesis of Lemmon’s Baxter, which is important in making us sympathise with the latter.

Ultimately, the film is a miracle of construction, and deservedly won Wilder and Diamond a screenwriting Oscar in 1960. But aside from this rather technical perfection, the film is a richly comic yet surprisingly dark satire about the deceptions and game-playing involved in the world of big business and office sexual politics. And despite Billy Wilder’s trademark cynicism, it is a reminder that there are more important things in life than money making, and success at work: in the famous advice to Baxter by Jack Kruschen’s Dr. Dreyfuss, “Be a mensch!”.

It is said that Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov’s book Lolita had made Lolita famous, and not he. This seem to suggest that, as the phrase began to enter the popular consciousness, the actual artistry and intent behind the book was increasingly ignored, and instead the novel’s object of desire began to take on a life of its own, with its own connotations and meanings. La Dolce Vita is undeniably Federico Fellini’s most famous film, and possibly the most well-known Italian-made film ever, but it seems to me that over the years, like Lolita, its name and the idea of the film have become more well-known than the actual film itself. The word ‘paparazzi’ is used all over the world to signify over-zealous press photographers, but i would hazard that few users of the word know its derivation.

This seems to be a consequence of the reaction to the film when it was first released. This is no better illustrated than in the famous sequence in Pietro Germi’s wonderful Divorzio all’italiana (1961), when a screening of the Fellini film causes both outrage and wonderment in the Sicilian small-town audience. For the Catholic Church, the film was sacrilegeous, and subsequently banned for many years in certain areas. Fellini had had brushes with the Church before: La Strada had been warmly received, but both Il Bidone and Le Notti Di Cabiria had contained sufficiently edgy material to irk some at the Vatican.

Controversy can often lead to legend; the notoriety of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange owes as much to its hasty withdrawal from release after a series of ‘copycat’ killings as it does to the actual content of the film itself. So, with the widespread debate and controversy over La Dolce Vita, its legend was born. It was a massive commercial success, becoming both a domestic and worldwide box-office hit, and making international stars of Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimee and Anita Ekberg, as well as encouraging people to jump into the Fontana di Trevi.

This much seems to be well known; so too, the phrases ‘la dolce vita’ and ‘paparazzi’. But Fellini’s filmmaking roots were in the Italian neo-realist movement; he had worked with Rossellini on the classics Roma, Città Aperta and Paisà, both profoundly moral films about the effect of the Second World War on the Italian people. His earlier films, whilst being distinctively ‘Fellinian’, still betrayed hints of the neorealist ideology and morality, using naturalistic environments, actors and settings. Had he now discarded this in favour of the Roman high life?

The answer, of course, is no. La Dolce Vita is a satire of the so-called ‘sweet life’ enjoyed by the capital’s wealthy and famous. In his earlier film, I Vitelloni, Fellini had looked at a group of young directionless men, unwilling to grow up or leave their sleepy seaside town. In that film, without a doubt autobiographical in nature, we can see the director as part of their milieu, but also unsettled, and to an extent morally detatched from the others. At the end, his character Moraldo leaves the town for the big city, reluctant to leave his comfort zone but feeling it necessary to move on, and grow up.

To an extent, there is similarity in La Dolce Vita; we see the decadent classes partying, dancing, cavorting up and down Rome’s Via Veneto, and engaging in orgies and debauchery. But this is all directionless, unrewarding fodder, not leading to anything except its own perpetuation. At the centre of this is Marcello, a reporter for a sensationalist newspaper, who is apparently meant to be covering these events. His lifestyle certainly appears glamourous; he has liasons with both a beautiful wealthy heiresses Maddalena and an improbably-proportioned film star Sylvia, as well as other encounters in clubs, bars and parties. In an early scene, he flies over the city in a helicopter, under the pretence of following the transit of a statue of Christ, but ends up trying to pick up some more girls.

Despite the glamour, the film is not glamourising his lifestyle. We may wish to be him, but he doesn’t seem to wish to be himself. He is constantly trying to find some kind of meaning to life, but ends up spiritually isolated, if not physically isolated. In one scene, we see Marcello in a restaurant attempting to write an article on his typewriter, but finding himself disturbed by a young girl working there, the almost angel-like Paola. She is the only truly beautiful character in the film, and part of Marcello realises this, but he cannot change his ways. In the film’s climactic scene, on a beach as so often Fellini would end his films, Marcello encounters the girl again; a grotesque fish has washed up on the shore, and the girl is trying to shout something to him from further along the beach, but he cannot hear her, in the end giving up and returning to join his partying friends. This should be his moment for redemption; the beauty of the girl and the ugliness of the creature exhibiting the rich variety of life, and living, and reality. But he chooses to ignore this, in favour of the falseness of his chosen existence.

This is the main thrust of the narrative, but the film is so richly dense of symbols and colour that any overly simplistic reading does it no justice. Much has been made of the so-called ‘magic number seven’ that seems to permeate the film: the film contains seven distinct episodes, and occurs over seven nights, supposedly a pointed reference to the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues, the seven days of creation, and so on. This is just one aspect of the heavy religious symbolism present in the film, which can be read any number of ways; Fellini is always rather ambiguous when it comes to his portrayal of religious matters, and this is no exception.

The time of the film’s production is also important. It was released in 1960, and we can see the seeds of the decade to come: at a party, a rock and roll band plays, a sign of the increasing Americanisation of popular culture, at the expense of national identity and tradition. Swinging Rome could still claim to be the centre of European culture, but its importance is lessening; post-Beatlemania, ‘Swinging London’ would soon have hegemony, reflected by Fellini’s contemporary Michelangelo Antonioni’s migration to there to make Blowup. There is also the invisible spectre of the threat of nuclear war, discussed at one point between two intellectuals. Does the hedonistic nihilism of the glitterati stem from the knowledge that the world could end within a few minutes of the nuclear button being pressed?

Ultimately, one’s reading of La Dolce Vita is, like any great work of art, dependent on what the viewer brings to it; those fixated by surface glamour will be entranced by the world Fellini conjures up, and want to be part of Marcello’s lifestyle. Pessimists may see the film as further signalling the death of Western civilization, in favour of a decadent, thrill-seeking throwaway culture. But for me, the film is all of these things, and much more. Fellini famously frequently filmed circuses, clowns, stage acts, and loved combining imagery of the beautiful along with the grotesque. In showing us these artifices, he illustrates the absurdity of living. But, as he showed with the adolescents of I Vitelloni, the strongman Zampanò in La Strada, the crook Augusto in Il Bidone, and our protagonist Marcello in La Dolce Vita, these artifices are no substitute for living itself.