ons stival . - California Film Institute

In Memoriam
Great Masters, PassinG
Earlier this year, I went to Fespaco, the west African film festival. The
hotel where I stay is always the center of activity for the festival, and there
are lots of filmmakers around. Particularly, there’s a shaded table outside
by the pool where Ousmane Sembene always sits, smoking his pipe; the
great wise one of African cinema. He wasn’t there this year. Someone
said he had been ill; then, a few months later, in June, his passing was
announced. This man, who had worked in the dockyards of Marseilles
and returned to his native Senegal to speak his truths as a novelist and
filmmaker, was revered as the father of African cinema.
And then, the news that Ingmar Bergman had died. Another of the great
masters. My first encounter with Bergman was as a drama student in
London, going to the Everyman in Hampstead one night—completely
innocent of any expectations—to see Persona. I was blown away by it,
online | mvff.com
and returned there, religiously, to see the rest of the Bergman series they
were showing.
The same day I heard news about Bergman, news arrived of the death of
Michelangelo Antonioni—whose eye on the ’60s, whether Mod London or
the L.A. desert, shifted people’s ways of seeing. How curious it was that
within a 24-hour period in July, Bergman and Antonioni both were gone.
Sembene, Bergman, Antonioni: each a great master of cinema, capturing
something particular about their time, their place and their culture, and in
doing so, changed the way we perceive ourselves and our world. These
are people whose sensibilities, whose intense connection with their
creative spirit, have embodied and articulated the essence of the time we
live in. —Zoë Elton, MVFF programming director
INGMAR BERGMAN OUSMANE SEMBENE MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI
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