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BERGMAN’S DEATH TRIGGERS FILM-SNOB TEMPEST IN A TEACUP

Ingmar, we hardly knew ye. But we knew ye critics–among them Film Snob co-author Lawrence Levi, who, in his Looker blog, offered a contrarian if respectful take on Bergman’s oeuvre. This prompted a somewhat bitter riposte in Looker’s comments section from Glenn Kenny, a reviewer for the (now) Web-only magazine Premiere, using words pinched from the intro to The Film Snob’s Dictionary.

And then it all turned out to be a misunderstanding. Kenny’s ire had been raised by a post in Jeffrey Wells’s Hollywood Elsewhere blog, in which Wells attributed our summary of Snob attitudes towards Bergman to us, rather than to the Snobs we lampoon.* Kenny nobly retracted his riposte. And then Antonioni, in a shrewd comment on the absurdity of it all, croaked. Mime tennis, anyone?

* Wells, bizarrely, also calls Levi’s co-author Martin Kamp, rather than David Kamp.