The legendary Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni expired on July 30th 2007, just a few hours after the death of another living legend in the history of world cinema - the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman.
Antonioni died at the age of 94. He suffered a devastating stroke in 1985, which thoroughly restricted his capacity of speech. According to the ANSA news agency of Italy, he died at his home in Rome on Monday evening. His body has been preserved in Rome’s city hall. A funeral is programmed for today in his resident town Ferrara.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, while commenting on the news of Antonioni’s death, said that Italy had ‘lost one of cinema’s greatest protagonists and one of the greatest explorers of expression in the 20th century.’
According to Jack Nicholson, a famous Italian actor who had worked with Antonioni in one of his films, Antonioni was in a ‘ranking by himself’ as a director. Nicholson, who saw Antonioni as a ‘father figure’, said on his death, ‘I don’t know how to put this: He’s just a maestro, and everybody loved him.’
Antonioni was not only a renowned Italian film director, but also a very significant name across the globe. He portrayed the poignant isolation of the postwar generation of Italy in films like “L’Avventura” and “La Notte”. He was known for taking stylistic, procedural and thematic risks in his films.
He had a decade of feature filmmaking experience behind him as a former film reviewer and documentary maker. At the time he attained worldwide recognition in 1960 with ‘L’Avventura’ (The Adventure), he was already a master of his art. Many believe ‘L’Avventura’ to be his excellent film. It is the first of a trilogy of highly praised films that established director-screenwriter Antonioni as one of the world’s most dynamic and pioneering filmmakers.
His most important achievement came from his utmost popular success, ‘Blowup’ - an enigmatic saga in the wavering London of the 1960s. It was Antonioni’s first English-language film. The film earned Antonioni Oscar nominations for best director and screenplay.
Antonioni’s ‘Blowup’ (1966) is a film about a London-based fashion photographer who realizes that he may have involuntarily photographed a murder in a park while furtively shooting pictures of a rendezvous between a young woman and an older man. There is a make-believe tennis game played by white-faced mimes at the conclusion of the film. According to film critics, this game is a symbol of the distinction between illusion and reality. This particular scene in the film generates a question in the audience’s mind, whether or not the murder even took place. The scene has been depicted as ‘one of the defining moments of 1960s cinema’.
Antonioni’s latest film ‘Identification of a Woman’ was made in 1982. The film is about a film director in search of “the ideal woman” for a movie. It created unenthusiastic critical response and was unsuccessful in receiving U.S. distribution.
Instead of brooding on the aspects of his career or the implication of his work, Antonioni was willing to move on to his next film, because for him - ‘To direct is to live’, as he once said himself.
Antonioni’s death is indeed an incident of immense anguish for the world of cinema. Moreover, the event of his death, which followed the death of yet another legendary filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, gives us the feeling of almost an uncanny catastrophe, a predicament. Some are seeing it as a ’signal’ for an ‘arthouse apocalypse’.
The intellectual world across the globe, mesmerized by the two sudden deaths one after the other, is searching for comparable traits in Bergman and Antonioni, two men who are ordained to be allied in death eternally. One of the obvious similarities is that both of them were close contemporaries and they both embodied the sphere of foreign-language films during its artistic and commercial prime in the 1950s and 60s.
Image Credit: Senses of Cinema
Via: LA Times
