Well . . once you label a film "pretentious," there's an implied guilt-by-association factor, so while you may not be directly or intentionally labeling Bergman fans, you kinda are. I avoid tossing that term around because, frankly, it's cliché, it's lazy, and it doesn't say anything worth saying. It's a soft jab from someone who arrives at a vague notion that a certain film seems too ponderous, too self-consciously "important", too ambitious, or (my favorite) too "artsy," yet isn't really interested in specifics or analysis.
Doesn't the term basically refer to someone whose reach exceeded their grasp? In other words, a director/writer etc was trying to make something that wasn't primarily driven by the need to entertain? Honestly, give me pretentiousness any day over whatever its opposite would be. Modest? Pandering?
A pretentious bent may mean an artist misses the mark and alienates potential audience members from time to time, but he/she may also create something mind-blowing on occasion. "The Seventh Seal" isn't my favorite Bergman film, but to me it is the most Bergman-y one. That either works for you or it doesn't. I've become more tuned into his films as I've gotten older (I'm 43).
If there's one current director who would be comfortable labeling "pretentious" it would be Terence Malick. I've seen a few of his films, and I just don't get what the big deal is. They're . . nice, I suppose. "The Thin Red Line" was a mess. Then you've got the fact that he pulls in all-star casts, shoots 10 hours of film and discards most of it -- insulting actors by cutting their entire roles in the process -- and you've got a dude who clearly believes every frame he shoots is a grand statement of some sort. I don't get that from Bergman, who I feel made the only type of movies he possibly could.
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I have meddled with the primal forces of nature and I will atone.
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