critical quackery: Camille Paglia's "Art movies: R.I.P."

Recommended Reading on Salon.Com ... The inimitable Camille Paglia waxes on about Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni (among other things):

"When Antonioni's plotless 'L'Avventura' was shown at Harpur, the entire theater emptied within a half-hour -- except for the front row of me and my friends, transfixed by the aquiline profile of a very anxious Monica Vitti, her blond locks tossed this way and that, as she searched a desolate Italian island for her capriciously absent friend. When I saw Bergman's 'Persona' at its first release in New York in 1967, I felt that it was the electrifying summation of everything I had ever pondered about Western gender and identity. The title of my doctoral dissertation and first book, 'Sexual Personae,' was an explicit homage to Bergman. On a British lecture tour for the National Film Theatre in 1999, I asked to sleep with 'Persona' -- whose five reels, like holy icons, rested in two silver cans next to my bed..."

For more, check out Paglia's "Art movies: R.I.P."

(Artwork: Caricature of Salon.com's Camille Paglia)

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Anyone interested in perusing some 2060 of my film reviews, dating back to 1994, can do so by simply going to RottenTomatoes.Com