Art cinema has taken plenty of hits lately—the recent deaths of Edward Yang and Ousmane Sembène, to name two—but Bergman and Antonioni will inevitably get the lion’s share of the attention for being so closely associated with the golden age of cinephilia, those years in the early ‘60s when auteurism bloomed and art-houses thrived. Cinema—and more exactly, European cinema—was seen as occupying a unique intersections of arts, culture, and politics. It was in this context that Bergman and Antonioni were treated like prophets rather than film directors, with films like The Seventh Seal, Persona, L’Avventura, and L’Eclisse assumed as essential texts of the modern age.

Both men produced films popular with the university set—all brooding intellect, preoccupation with “nothingness,” overt symbolism—though by the time I took up my undergraduate years, their respective oeuvres had taken on distinctly musty air. Accordingly, I put off watching the films as long as possible. Of Antonioni, I saw Blow-Up first—a mistake—and was put off by the straining stylishness which, decades later, seemed quaint and faintly embarrassing. With Bergman, it was Persona, a movie of such howling anomie that it left my throat dry, at no point more than the famous moments when the film’s stock dissolves into fireworks of burning nitrate. And yet, the film hardly left me filled with the desire to gobble up the entire Bergman filmography as I had with Sam Fuller, Stanley Kubrick, John Ford, and other members of the species cinema colossus.

I did eventually take the plunge with Antonioni. The Passenger’s magnificent obsession cast a dark spell over me, and L’Avventura sealed the conversion—swelling landscapes, exhausted dialog, and Monica Vitti’s hair touched off my emotional register as only the most streamlined melodrama can. Of course, “Antoniennui” always risks bloated inanity, and no one threw darts better than critic Manny Farber:

“Antonioni gets his odd, clarity-is-all effects from his taste for chic mannerist art that results in a screen that is glassy, has a side-sliding motion, the feeling of people plastered against stripes or divided by verticals and horizontals; his incapacity with interpersonal relationships turns crowds into stiff waves, lovers into lonely appendages, hanging stiffly from each other, occasionally coming together like clanking sheets of metal but seldom giving the effect of being in communion…Antonioni’s aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.”

I find nothing to disagree with in Farber’s barrage, though it still takes nothing away from my absolute pleasure in something like Red Desert, a film in which all elements—color, score, composition—align to bring Vitti’s lost woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown.

In her review of L’Avventura, Pauline Kael wrote that, “The characters are active only in trying to discharge their anxiety: sex is their sole means of contact.” Add suffering to sex, and you have a pretty good starting place for Bergman too, though with his films there is always a vital resistance to the overwhelming absence of God and love, whereas with Antonioni there is only that “glassy” remove. It is certainly difficult to think of a more personal filmography—every Bergman film was nothing less than a plunging of the man’s soul, overstatement and all. Longtime muse and sometimes lover Liv Ullman tenderly joked in an interview with Terry Gross that when she lived with Bergman, he would sometimes sit at the breakfast table and tell her about nightmares which would inevitably figure into his next film. The auteurists were always suspicious of Bergman’s emphasis of themes over craft (there was a category for this type of thing in Andrew Sarris’ foundational text The American Cinema: “strained seriousness”), though in hindsight it was his sustained commitment to these philosophical problems which won his legions of admirers. And while Bergman was certainly guilty of many “wet towels,” films like Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Fanny & Alexander exhibit the light touch of great intuition.

I think that in the end Antonioni’s work has probably had the greater impact on film culture, not so much for its meanings as for its scale—the impressively composed, museum-friendly art cinema spectacle has become a mainstay of film festivals (e.g. the films of Tsai Ming-Liang) and high-culture spaces (e.g. those of Matthew Barney). Such comparisons ultimately seem a fool’s errand, though, not least of all because both Antonioni and Bergman were monumentalized long ago. More than anything, their deaths make one wonder if the pantheon itself is passing in today’s increasingly fragmented film culture.