In Memoriam Ronald Bergan
Ronald Bergan was always something of a mystery to me. And appropriately it was only when I read his own obituary that I realised the full range of his interests, which made him a uniquely qualified writer of obituaries. Month after month, as a regular Guardian reader, film historian and occasional obituarist, I was impressed by Bergan’s ability to deal with such diverse film personalities. He was astonishingly accurate, mostly fair-minded, but also able to convey negative views of some of his subjects with unusual subtlety. Just reading his posthumously published obituary of Alan Parker, a controversial figure among British cineastes, you could sense the disapproval in some quarters, amid the recognition of Parker’s achievements.
My only experience of Ronald at close quarters was when he decided to write a biography of Sergei Eisenstein, to coincide with the Russian director’s centenary in 1998. I had been deeply involved with Eisenstein since the 1980s, working on a big touring exhibition of his drawings in 1988, which was accompanied by a conference and television films, and followed by a series of new translations overseen by Richard Taylor. Richard’s work as a translator and editor culminated in a superb edition of Eisenstein’s memoirs, titled Beyond the Stars, which appeared in 1995. Ronald was thus the first biographer of Eisenstein to be able to make use of this extraordinarily intimate and provocative source, and it became the most cited source in his own 1997 biography Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict.
Eisensteinians can be a snobbish lot, and there were certainly some who considered Ronald’s book an outsider’s view of this complex figure. But I think there’s no doubt it is the equal of its two predecessors, by Marie Seton in 1952 and Yon Barna two decades later. Ronald was able to benefit from the torrent of new scholarship that accompanied glasnost and perestroika in the last decade of the Soviet Union; and he was assiduous in contacting everyone who had some light to shed on Eisenstein. I suspect it may have been the book that Ronald was proudest of, and it can stand as a remarkable achievement: highly readable, nuanced in its judgements, and extremely well supported by diligent scholarship that doesn’t flaunt its credentials. The very qualities, in fact, that made Ronald such a fine film writer and obituarist. In the age of instant internet fact-checking, I doubt we will see these qualities so well deployed again.
Ian Christie
