A second blow to cinema: Antonioni dies at 94

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who depicted alienation in the modern world with movies like Blow-Up and L’Avventura, has died, the mayor of Rome said on Tuesday. He was 94.

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who depicted alienation in the modern world with movies like Blow-Up and L’Avventura, has died, the mayor of Rome said on Tuesday. He was 94.

Antonioni depicted alienation through sparse dialogue and long takes. Along with Federico Fellini, he helped turn post-war Italian film away from the Neorealist movement and toward a personal cinema of imagination. “With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,” Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said.

In 1995, Hollywood honoured his career work, about 25 films and several screenplays, with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement. By then, Antonioni was a physically frail but a mentally sharp 82, unable to speak more than a few words because of a stroke but still translating his vision into film.

The Oscar award was later stolen from Antonioni’s home in 1996, together with several other film prizes.

His slow-moving camera never became synonymous with box-office success, but some of his movies like Blow-Up, Red Desert and The Passenger reached enduring fame. Blow Up (1966), about London in the swinging ’60s and a photographer who accidentally captures a murder on film, was also a rare box-office success for Antonioni. Ketan Mehta’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron is said to be inspired from the film.

His exploration of such intellectual themes as alienation and existential malaise led Halliwell’s Film Guide to say that L’Avventura, Antonioni’s first critical success, made him a “a hero of the highbrows”.

“In the empty, silent spaces, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting,” Jack Nicholson said while presenting Antonioni with the career Oscar.

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Antonioni was born on September 29, 1912. He received a university degree in economics and soon began writing critiques for cinema magazines. When he was 30, he began work on his first film, a documentary about the tough life of river people, but by the time Gente del Po was done, it was 1947, and directors were working in a new and vigorous artistic movement called Neorealism. Films like Rome Open City by Roberto Rossellini were depicting with ground-breaking vividness, the rawness of Italian society in the aftermath of World War II.

But Antonioni was more interested in depicting his characters’ internal turmoil. This induced critics to call his cinema “internal” Neorealism. “If I hadn’t become a director,” Antonioni once said, “I would have been an architect, or maybe a painter. I think I’m someone who has things to show rather than things to say.”

‘Austere, Elegant, Enigmatic, Haunting’

• Graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in economics.

• In 1940, he moved to Rome, where he worked with Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Benito Mussolini’s son, Vittorio. He was fired a few months later.

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• His first real involvement in filmmaking came when he helped write the script of Roberto Rossellini’s Fascist-sponsored Una Pilota Ritorna in 1942.

• In 1972, at the invitation of the Chinese government in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Antonioni visited China and made the documentary Chung Kuo/Cina.

AWARDS

• 1995: Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement

• 1983: Golden Lion (Venice Film festival) for lifetime achievement

• 1982: 35th anniversary prize at Cannes for Identificazione di una donna

• 1967: Palme d’Or for Blow Up. The film is also said to be the inspiration for Ketan Mehta’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron

• 1961: Golden Bear (Berlin Film Festival) for La Notte

• 1962: Jury prize at Cannes for L’ Avventura