A double window at the shop in Carlton to commemorate the passing of two greats. Thoughts along the lines of 'the old way of making cinema has passed', but Bergman's 'old way' and Antonioni's 'old way' are quite different. Though they are not the new way of great bores like Tsai Ming-Liang or Sokorov.
When we say 'old' we are of course also talking about the 'old world', of the Fifties and Sixties when in Europe things were still very different, strange, quaint, and cinema of that time captured things, streetscapes, landscapes, ways of being lost to us now. 1957 was a very long time ago. 50 years ago. A man the age of Death when 'Seventh Seal' was made would have probably died of old age in 1982. Death certainly wouldn't be alive now. But the time when Death was alive and well and living on a beach in Sweden is preserved, conserved for us by the cinema of Bergman which is in turn conserved, at least for now, by the lovers of 'old' cinema.
What makes the 'old ways' fascinating and magical to us now is of course the era in which they were shot, the stock on which the films were made, the world they bring back to life for us. Now we must travel further to find the same oddness, to Kazakhstan or Kurdistan (Bhaman Ghobadi in 'Half Moon', Volker Schlondorff in 'Ulzhan') or to Turkey where old and new exist side by side. Nuri Bilge Ceylan has a character in 'Uzak' worry that photography may have been entirely superceded by cinema and now be a dead art. But cinema too is dead very soon after it is made. But our cinephilia is an absorbing fascination with the dead and how they live.