Filmmakers on Filmmakers

Today's Sunday Times (New York) has a feast of articles on the great filmmakers who died last week.

On Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen writes "The Man Who Asked Hard Questions".

On Michelangelo Antonioni, Martin Scorsese writes "The Man Who Set Film Free".

Both articles of course are more about Allen & Scorsese; however, Scorsese's writing here on his compulsive multiple viewings of "L'Avventura" while he was a film student explain better how Antonioni's work was expanding the scope of what film can achieve.

For me, it's Antonioni's "Blowup" that I can't seem to stop watching: it captures the swinging King's Road, London of my youth (1966) in a dark, compelling & sexy mystery. (Rent this movie to see both Sarah Miles and Vanessa Redgrave in their Royal Shakespeare Co. primes and also for a snippet of the Yardbirds playing live during the short few weeks when all three greats of the London blues guitar axis -- Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck & Jimmy Page -- were in the band at the same time.)

Adding a lagniappe today is the A.O. Scott piece on how Warren Beatty's "Bonnie & Clyde" (1967, with Faye Dunaway) changed the portrayal of violence in film: "Two Outlaws Blasting Holes in the Screen".