Michelangelo
Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly depictions of alienation were
cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s, inspiring intense
measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home
in
His
death was announced yesterday by Walter Veltroni, the
mayor of
Earlier
on Monday, another great director of the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman,
died, at 89, at his home on a remote Swedish island.
Tall, cerebral
and serious, Mr. Antonioni, like Mr. Bergman, rose to prominence at a time, in midcentury, when filmgoing was an
intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult
films set off long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when
fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais
and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by
camera-wielding cinephiles demanding to know what on
earth they meant by their latest outrage.
Mr. Antonioni is
probably best known for "Blowup,"
a 1966 drama set in swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to
believe that a picture he took of two lovers in a public park also shows,
obscured in the background, evidence of a murder.
But Mr.
Antonionis lasting contribution to film came earlier, in "LAvventura"
(1960), "La Notte" (1961) and LEclisse"
(1962), a trilogy that explored his tormented central vision that people had
become emotionally unglued from one another.
It was a vision
expressed near the end of "La Notte", when
his frequent star Monica Vitti observes,"Each time I have tried to communicate with
someone, love has disappeared."
In a generation
of rule breakers, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most subversive and venerated.
He challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague
characters and a disdain for conventions like plot, pacing and clarity. He
raised questions and never answered them, had his characters act in self-destructive
ways and failed to explain why, and sometimes kept the camera rolling after a
take in the hope of catching the actors in an unscripted but revealing moment.
It was all part
of his design. As he explained, "The after-effects of an emotion scene, it
had occurred to me, might have meaning, too, both on the actor and on the
psychological advancement of the character."
Many of Mr.
Antonionis cuts, scene lengths and camera movements were idiosyncratic,
and he frequently posed his characters in a highly formalized way.
What is
impressive about Antonionis films is not that
they are good, the film scholar Seymour Chatman wrote. "But that they
have been made at all."
Boos and
Plaudits at
Perhaps the
defining moment in Mr. Antonionis career came the night "LAvventura" was screened at the 1960
But later that
night, Roberto Rossellini and a group of other influential filmmakers
and critics drafted a statement, which they released the next morning.
"Aware of the exceptional importance of Michelangelo Antonionis film,
LAvventura, "
they wrote, "and appalled by the displays of hostility it has
aroused, the undersigned critics and members of the profession are anxious to
express their admiration for the maker of this film."
Being booed at
LAvventura" went on to win the festivals special
jury prize and become an international box-office hit, establishing Mr.
Antonionis reputation. But the debate about it was furious. Some viewers
and critics found the film pointless; others read reams of meaning into its
languid predicaments. The next year, Sight and Sound, the influential British
film magazine, polled 70 critics from around the world. They not only endorsed
"LAvventura" but also chose it as the
second-greatest film ever made, behind "Citizen
Kane."
Interviewers
found Mr. Antonioni to be sometimes charming but mostly cool. "Even when
he is telling stories about himself, Antonionis aristocratic face remains
set in its habitually serious expression," Melton S. Davis wrote in a 1964
profile for The New York Times Magazine. "Precise in manner, conservative
in dress and quiet in speech, he could be taken for a banker or art dealer
recounting an unfortunate business deal."
After burnishing
his reputation in the early 1960s, Mr. Antonioni surprised many of his admirers
by making movies with
My subjects
are, in a very general sense, autobiographical, he once wrote. The story is
first built through discussions with a collaborator. In the case of LEclisse, the discussions went on for four months. The
writing was then done, by myself, taking perhaps 15
days.
My scripts
are not formal screenplays, but rather dialogue for the actors and a series of
notes to the director. When shooting begins, there is invariably a great amount
of changing. When I go on the set of a scene, I insist on remaining alone for
at least 20 minutes. I have no preconceived ideas of how the scene should be
done, but wait instead for the ideas to come that will tell me how to begin.