Ted Holmes

'Blowup' director dies aged 94. A good innings for a great director.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6923785.stm

Torquemada

I love Blow Up and I still can't get my head round the fact that David Hemmings is no longer with us either.

Zabriskie Point is another favourite of mine too - if ever a film captured the post-flower power air of alienation, disappointment and confusion it's that one.

julian_craster

BBC News



Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, renowned for his 1966 release Blow-Up, has died aged 94.
He gained two Oscar nominations for the iconic release, and was awarded an honorary Academy Award for his life's work in 1995.
He was also nominated for the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d'Or, five times between 1960 and 1982.
The director died peacefully at home on Monday night, his wife, actress Enrica Fico, told La Repubblica newspaper.
Richard Mowe, a film writer and co-director of the Italian Film Festival UK, said Antonioni made productions "that were out of the conventional modes of expression".
It's the last link with the great days of European art cinema


Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Antonioni author

"He invented his own language of cinema - that's what made him very, very inventive," he said. "He didn't owe anything to anybody else. He was a total original."
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, the author of a book on Antonioni's film L'Avventura (The Adventure), described his works as being productions that "invite you to concentrate on them, like great music".
"It's extraordinary that he should die within a day of Ingmar Bergman - that's two greats in two days," said Mr Nowell-Smith, who also curated a season of his work at London's BFI Southbank.
Antonioni was married to Enrica Fico

"It's the last link with the great days of European art cinema."
Film critic Kim Newman paid tribute to the director, calling him an "important and fascinating film-maker".
Newman said Antonioni's best films were all concerned with "how awful Italian post-war society is, and how trivial and superficial everybody has become".
"But the films are so beautiful and the people in them are so gorgeous, you can't but feel, well, it would be really great to be alienated, lovelorn and miserable like that."
Fans will be able to pay their respects when Antonioni's body lies in state in the Sala della Protomoteca at Rome's city hall, the Campidoglio, on Wednesday morning.
The funeral will then take place in the director's home town of Ferrara, north-eastern Italy, on Thursday.
Antonioni was born in Ferrara in 1912 and released his debut feature, Story of A Love Affair, at the age of 38.


But he did not achieve international recognition until the mystery L'Avventura 10 years later in 1960.
In 1966, he signed a deal to make a trilogy of films for the English market with legendary Italian film producer Carlo Ponti.
The first was Blow-Up, in which a photographer appears to have uncovered a murder in his photos.
Shot in London, and starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave, it was his biggest international hit.
Antonioni captured the "flower power" era in 1970, filming Zabriskie Point in California, while Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson starred as a journalist in 1974 in Professione: Reporter (The Passenger). In 1985, the director suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed, but he continued to work behind the camera. "Filming for me is living," he said. His last cinematic release was 2004's The Dangerous Thread of Things, one part of a trilogy of short films released under the title Eros.

julian_craster

Incidentally BLOW UP was not Antonioni's only British film connection.
Peter Reynolds and other British actors appeared in the London scenes of THE VANQUISHED (It/Fr/UK, 1953), and scenes in THE PASSENGER [PROFESSIONE: REPORTER] (1975) were shot in London, with Ian Hendry and Jenny Runacre....

Wolfgang

There is no cooler film than Zabriskie Point. When are they are going to release it on DVD??

julian_craster

Obituary : Michelangelo Antonioni

Bold and fastidious Italian film director in whose haunting movies men and women explored the uncertainties between time and space
Penelope Houston

Wednesday August 1, 2007
The Guardian

Forty-seven years ago, in May 1960, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura was the sensation of the Cannes film festival. The screening was one of the noisiest and most uncomfortable on record. The second half played to an angry accompaniment of shouts and catcalls from sections of the audience. Affronted critics leapt to the director's defence. In 1962, the work was runner-up in Sight and Sound's poll of the Top 10 films, coming closer than anything else in four runnings of the event to toppling Citizen Kane from its decennial perch. In 1972 it held fifth place, in 1982 it was seventh and by 1992 and 2002 it was out of the money.
This seemed a fair enough reflection of altered attitudes, the eclipse of the European art-house cinema that Antonioni exemplified. In the 1960s, a handful of directors looked to be taking films across new frontiers of expression. A cinema dominated by Hollywood special effects - dinosaurs and aliens in space - no longer expects to deliver that kind of adventure, though in 1995 Tinseltown itself made amends by awarding Antonioni an Oscar for lifetime achievement. He was among the risk-takers of cinema, at a time when the risks were there to be taken.
Antonioni, who has died in Rome aged 94, was born in Ferrara, northern Italy. He read economics at the University of Bologna, then sidled his way rather gradually towards his eventual career. In the 1930s, he wrote film reviews for the local newspaper, Il Corriere Padano, did some theatre work and played tennis. In 1940 he moved to Rome and began writing for Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine directed by Mussolini's son Vittorio. He briefly attended the Centro Sperimentale, the film school in Rome, and was given the odd assignment of working with Marcel Carné on Les Visiteurs du Soir - he never dared tell the French master, he later recorded, that his official status was that of co-director.
In 1943, he made the first of several documentaries, Gente del Po. Before this, there had been an abortive effort to shoot in an asylum. The reaction of the inmates to the assault by lights and camera so horrified the novice film-maker that it was left to the asylum director to switch off the lights.
It was 1950 before Antonioni found "a man from Turin" who was willing to finance a feature film for him. The result was Cronaca di un Amore, a cool, elegant study in betrayal and regrets, not at all an apprentice work. As with several films of the time, it seemed to carry echoes of the American The Postman Always Rings Twice, though here the inconvenient husband died without help from the lovers.
Antonioni's films of the 1950s included I Vinti (1952), a study of juvenile crime in which Fay Compton was improbably done to death on Banstead common; La Signore Senza Camelie (1953), about an unhappy actress; and the morose, fatalistic Il Grido (1957), about a factory worker's journey away from home, through various liaisons and back again, with Steve Cochran.
His outstanding movie of the decade, however, was Le Amiche (1955), based on a novel by Cesare Pavese, in which a gaggle of airlessly gossiping women, their husbands and lovers, were watched from the viewpoint of a young woman of more independent spirit. Already the elements of this fastidious craftsman's style were locked in place: the awareness of landscapes, usually melancholy, the sense of people drifting through time and space, but held always under the tightest control, the persistence of vision. "I need to follow my characters beyond the moments conventionally considered important," Antonioni explained, "to show them even when everything appears to have been said."
This was part of what so annoyed the Cannes audience, along with that moral lethargy which seemed to overpower his characters, blocking even the possibility of decisive action. With L'Avventura, he had found his leading lady, Monica Vitti, and a setting, the Aeolian Islands and Sicily, to which even his north Italians came as foreigners. He was back in the north for La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962), completing a loose trilogy of immensely influential films. For a while, the Antonioni look, with his increasing interest in the abstraction of space, seemed to be creeping up on us, in other films, in fashion photographs, even in life. The final sequence of L'Eclisse, in which dusk comes to a street corner in Rome, had a tantalising, ominous sense of finality. Antonioni had perhaps gone as far as he could with the bruised sensibilities of people in stalemate situations.
He found his change of direction with colour: first the neurotic, overpainted The Red Desert (1964), in which Vitti still sought salvation, and then Blowup (1967), which brought the director to London in its swinging days. Colour is integral to this film about displacement and uncertainty, in which the photographer hero (David Hemmings) begins to doubt himself and his confident mastery of his world when his camera spots something he himself had missed - evidence, perhaps, of a murder among the green leaves of a London park. Blowup remains a key text of the 1960s, the decade which felt experience was for snatching.
Antonioni's A to Z of that era ended with Zabriskie Point (1970), a gallant attempt by this middle-aged European intellectual to penetrate the dreams and despairs of America's Vietnam generation. He filmed part of it in Death Valley, California, and ended it with an explosion which sent the trophies of the consumer society flying into space. The film was perhaps a failure, but of a kind that has certainly not become less interesting with the years.
Curiosity, always a strong characteristic, took him to film in China, before, in 1975, he made his last major film, The Passenger. Antonioni had always left his characters open to the influence of chance encounters and unfamiliar places, like the deserted village in L'Avventura. In The Passenger, his hero (Jack Nicholson) allows chance to take him into another man's life - and to his death in a hotel room while the camera prowls the car park outside. This single shot, lasting seven minutes, rates as one of the most remarkable in film history.
The Oberwald Mystery (1980) and Identification of a Woman (1982) were less distinguished. There were other projects, too, which failed to materialise; Antonioni wrote short stories and painted. "If I hadn't become a director,"he once said, "I would have been an architect, or maybe a painter. In other words, I think I'm someone who has things to show rather than things to say." A stroke which left him almost literally speechless, dependent on his wife Enrica, 41 years his junior, as interpreter, seemed to rule out any possibility of another film.
And then, in 1995, came Beyond the Clouds, made in collaboration with Wim Wenders. With an international cast - John Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, Irene Jacob and Fanny Ardant - the movie wove together three episodes based on Antonioni's book of short stories, Bowling on the Tiber, to explore the usual Antonioni themes. A study of meetings and partings and impossible relationships, it flickered with tenuous, appropriately cloudy insights into the authority of images. Stunning to look at, it deployed all the unforgotten skill for placing characters in landscapes, making the scene and the camera work for its director. Its very existence, against the odds and after so long a silence, seemed a testimony to Antonioni's exemplary and enduring artistic courage.
Presenting him with the Academy award in Hollywood that same year, Nicholson said: "In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places in our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting."
The Oscar was stolen from Antonioni's home a few months later, together with several other film prizes. Previously, he was nominated for best director and best screenplay for Blowup. His wife survives him.
John Francis Lane writes: In the years following his stroke, though impaired in speech and with a paralysed right arm, Antonioni enjoyed travelling and accepted most of the invitations that poured in, attending festivals and cultural events in Italy and around the world, with Enrica always at his side. At the Oscars ceremony in March 1995, Nicholson asked him if there was a young American director of today he liked (it was the year of Pulp Fiction, which was to lose out that night to Forrest Gump). Antonioni mumbled a "No", pointed to Jack as maybe his choice, and everyone laughed.
At the Venice festival in 1998, he presented the Golden Lion for the career of Sophia Loren, who had just had a stroke herself, to her husband Carlo Ponti (obituary, January 11) and sons. At the time, Loren was scheduled to star in Destination Verna, a film directed by Antonioni and produced by Ponti, from a story by Jack Finney. When the project fell through, there were rumours - denied by the Pontis - that the American insurance guarantors had refused to accept as the Wim Wenders of the situation, Loren's aspiring director son, Edoardo Ponti. A pity, because Wenders had said after Beyond the Clouds that "My presence on the set was a formality. Michelangelo didn't need anyone to 'help' him."
Among Antonioni's nostalgic trips, the most moving was to the Taormina film festival in 2000. He stayed at the San Domenico hotel, where he had shot the last scenes of L'Avventura (in which I had a cameo role). During that same hot summer, he braved travel discomforts to go back to Panarea, one of the Aeolian islands that had been his base while making that film. The truly adventurous economic and metereological conditions under which the film was made 40 years earlier are recounted in a book called L'Avventura, Ovvero L'Isola Che C'e (The Adventure, Or Rather an Island That There Is).


Michelangelo Antonioni, film director, born September 29 1912; died July 30 2007

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Michelangelo Antonioni
Director whose 'L'Avventura' set new parameters for modern cinema

THE INDEPENDENT
Published: 01 August 2007

Michelangelo Antonioni, film director: born Ferrara, Italy 29 September 1912; married 1942 Letizia Balboni, 1986 Enrica Fico; died Rome 30 July 2007.


The now notorious premiere of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (The Adventure) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, where the film was jeeringly catcalled by the chic, philistine public, arguably constitutes - along with Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad - the last strictly aesthetic scandal that the cinema has provoked. There have since been isolated controversies, to be sure, but the issue in contention has invariably been extraneous to cinematic quality: for example, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.
L'Avventura scandalised the Cannes audience not because of what it was about, but because it did not seem to be about anything at all. Its narrative opacity, its relative absence of plot, its self-reflexivity and, perhaps above all, its unaccustomedly slow tempo (the neutral term "slow" has tended, for some as yet insufficiently analysed reason, to acquire an exclusively pejorative connotation for film critics) exasperated audiences of the period and soon inspired the waggishly dismissive epithet of "Antoniennui".
The real scandal was in fact, as is frequently the case, the fact that there had been a scandal at all. Re-examined today, L'Avventura is unquestionably a masterpiece, born (or conceived), like most of its kind, out of wedlock, a film that systematically subverted the filmic codes, practices and structures in currency at its time. Its theme, one that would be appropriated by numerous film-makers in the course of the following decade, was the social and psychic alienation of contemporary humankind (generally, affluent, middle-class, intellectual humankind) from an increasingly technological environment which the director filmed as neither hospitable nor particularly forbidding - Antonioni's industrial landscapes are often extremely beautiful - and for which even the adjective "indifferent" would still imply an emotional sensitisation of nature, by default, as it were, alien to its terrifyingly inanimate "thereness".
Through fluid long takes and a heroically rigorous sense of wide-screen composition, the director succeeded in conveying the leadenly oppressive, almost Chirico-esque burden of suspended time as well as the isolation - an isolation physical and, again in the manner of Chirico's paintings, "metaphysical" - of his protagonists.
Like Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour, which emerged simultaneously with Antonioni's film, on the cusp of the Sixties, L'Avventura defined what were to become the crucial parameters of the modern cinema; and its influence can be detected in works as diverse as Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day and even Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.
Antonioni's involvement with the cinema started precociously, with a cluster of experimental 16mm shorts which he filmed in his teens and criticism which he wrote first for a local newspaper (in Ferrara), then for Cinema, the official Fascist film journal. He entered the industry as scenarist, most notably for Roberto Rossellini, as assistant director and, in 1942, as the Italian representative of Marcel Carné's Les Visiteurs du soir, a Franco-Italian co-production. And, having meanwhile made a documentary short, Gente del Po ("People of the Po", 1943), he eventually succeeded at the relatively late age of 38 in directing his own début feature, Cronaca di un amore (Chronicle of a Love, 1950), an enigmatic melodrama whose cool, austere near-abstraction and preoccupation with "real time" prefigured the strategies which he would later explore more fully.
Though currently rather obscured by the radical leap into the void that L'Avventura represented, each of the four films that he completed during the Fifties was in its fashion almost equally remarkable: I Vinti (The Vanquished, 1953); the wittily titled La Signora senza Camelie (The Lady Without Camelias, made the same year), an exquisite proto-feminist drama set in and around the Cinecittà film studio; Le Amiche (The Girl Friends, 1955), a subtly modulated and tightly scripted study of four very different young women; and Il Grido (The Cry, 1957), the account of a father-child relationship unusual for the director in seeming faintly infused with a neo-realist sensibility and, for some, sentimentality.
Needless to say, the initial hysteria surrounding L'Avventura established Antonioni's international reputation, and each of his films since that date was greeted as something of an "event". Though the first two, La Notte (The Night, 1961) and L'Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962), were at once yoked with L'Avventura, slightly tendentiously, as a "trilogy" - or even, if one includes Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert, 1964,) in which Antonioni first tentatively experimented with colour, as a tetralogy - what most intensely unified them was the presence of the actress Monica Vitti, who with Anna Karina and Jeanne Moreau was to become one of the great iconic heroines of the European cinema of the Sixties.
La Notte is unquestionably the weakest of the trilogy, its brittle dissection of the narcissistic angst of the well-heeled not entirely uncontaminated by the type of jet-set "slumming in reverse", so to speak, by which practically every serious film-maker has been tempted at some stage of his or her career. L'Eclisse, however, is as superbly mysterious an exploration of an urban landscape as may be found in the finest of Ozu's films.
In 1966, under the problematic aegis of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Antonioni made a film which, though establishing him for the first and, as it would turn out, last time as a "bankable" director, also instigated the gradual erosion of a critical reputation which had hitherto seemed secure. Blow-Up, about a fashionable young photographer, played by David Hemmings, who may or may not have stumbled upon a murder, was either championed as a multi-layered philosophical enquiry into the basic instability and inscrutability of the photographic image or else denounced as a complacently exploitative indictment of Swinging London. It seems likely that the jury will be forever out.
The same is perhaps true of the six feature films he managed to make in the three following decades.
Zabriskie Point (1970), his sole American film, was a panoramic, bleakly detached post-mortem of counter-culture idealism. The Passenger (1975), was a strange and gripping crypto-Hitchcockian thriller about a journalist (Jack Nicholson) who trades in his identity for that of a dead man - its climactic shot, all seven minutes of it, is one of the most virtuosically executed in the entire history of the cinema. Il Mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1980) was his most improbable project, an adaptation of Jean Cocteau's florid Ruritarian melodrama, L'Aigle à deux têtes, shot on video then transferred to 35mm film stock. Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982), though still distinctively Antonionian was a very Sixties drama not quite salvaged by the pyrotechnical brilliance and unsurpassed beauty of its visual style.
Then, having suffered a massive stroke which left him wheelchair-bound and incapable of speech, he somehow contrived in 1995, with the aid of Wim Wenders (without whose permanent presence on the set the film would have remained uninsured), to shoot Beyond the Clouds, an almost self-parodic "art movie" which was rendered ultimately moving by the poignant irony that this so-called "master of non-communication" had nevertheless overcome his own physical incapacity to communicate with his cast and crew and completed a final film as personal as any in his filmography.

Gilbert Adair
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From The Times
July 31, 2007

Michelangelo Antonioni
Compelling director whose sparse, moodily elegant films lingered on the anguish and alienation in contemporary society

Michelangelo Antonioni was dubbed the poet of ennui

In his heyday in the 1960s, after the appearance of his masterpiece L’Avventura, the film director Michelangelo Antonioni was for some years as fashionable and influential as any film-maker in the world.
With a poet’s intuition, his work sensitively mirrored a certain spiritual malaise that was especially to be found among the class of wealthy Italian that he knew so well. In film after film he conveyed his uncompromisingly bleak view of human relationships, believing that solitude and emotional paralysis were inevitable in an age of dehumanising technology.
Yet the gloom of this “poet of ennui”, as he was nicknamed by some, was relieved by a translucent beauty, notable in his depiction of the melancholy poetry of urban landscapes. His philosophy may have been facile, but as a visual stylist he was highly original, one of modern cinema’s great innovators and truest poets. This was admitted even by those critics who found his rich, bored, self-centred characters to be tiresome and trivial. So potent was his vision that he influenced his age almost as much as he was influenced by it.
In recent years, as Italy has become both more aware of its need to change and less sure of itself, his work had gained renewed lustre, and Antonioni was regarded as one of the few commentators of the Sixties whose films retained much of their charge today.

Michelangelo Antonioni was born into a wealthy family in Ferrara in 1912. At Bologna University he took a degree in economics, but his early interests were art and theatre, and he often said that he would have been a painter or architect, had he not turned to cinema. He was briefly a film critic, then studied as a film technician, worked as assistant to Rossellini, Visconti and (in wartime France) Marcel Carné and fought in the Left-wing Resistance in Italy.
His early “shorts”, Gente del Po (1943, People of the Po, about fishermen on the River Po) and Nettezza urbana (1948, about Rome street-cleaners), showed real social concern. He was a life-long Marxist. But his full-length documentary I Vinti (1953, The Vanquished), a three-part study of modern youth in Rome, Paris and London, was a poor film. Despite his sincere leftism, Antonioni was always less at ease with social subjects than when exploring his characters’ inner lives — as in his first feature, Cronaca di un amore (1950, Chronicle of a Love) a baleful love-story that prefigured his later themes.
He matured relatively late. His first important film was Le Amiche (1955, The Girlfriends), adapted from Cesare Pavese’s poignant novel Tra donne sole, about the empty lives of a group of rich people in Turin. This was fertile ground for Antonioni who made of it a superbly moody film. Il Grido (1957, The Cry) told of a manual worker in the Po valley whose inner desolation leads to suicide — a typical Antonioni subject, beautifully executed, and oddly enough the only occasion that he portrayed spiritual anguish in a working-class, rather than wealthy, milieu.
Neither of these two fine films won box-office success or wide acclaim for their maker. However, L’Avventura (1960, The Adventure) caused wonder and amazement — and some consternation — at the 1961 Cannes Festival and turned Antonioni into a cult figure. To this day, in polls of international critics’ preferences, it is still generally rated as one of the ten greatest films ever made, to be mentioned in the same breath as Citizen Kane and La Règle du jeu. Its almost plotless story concerns some wealthy Romans on holiday in Sicily. A girl disappears on a boat trip to an island — was it an accident, or suicide in face of her fiancé’s bleak incapacity for love? The brooding landscape harmonised magically with the characters’ inner desolation to yield a work of great intensity of feeling, as subtle as a novel.
In Antonioni’s oeuvre, L’Avventura forms a kind of trilogy with his next two films, La Notte (1960, The Night) and L’Eclisse (1962, The Eclipse), all studies in despair among the Italian beau monde. La Notte, probably his second finest film, with Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, told of the spiritual void of a successful Milanese novelist and the breakdown of communication in his marriage; the concrete jungle of modern Milan was effectively used to heighten the sense of alienation. L’Eclisse was also about the eclipse of feeling in modern society. Its central role went to Monica Vitti, for many years Antonioni’s common-law wife and an important inspiration in his work (she acted in five of his films). Deserto rosso (1964, The Red Desert), set in an industrial landscape near Ravenna, was his first film in colour, and in it he used colours — somewhat artfully — to express the varying moods and neuroses of his characters.
After this Antonioni entered a new phase. He turned to making films abroad and in English, for big companies such as MGM — films now concerned less with people’s emotional lives than with the barrenness of their social environment. His work became less subjective, more clinical, less intense. Blowup (1966) used the backdrop of the “swinging London” of the mid-1960s to examine the shifting frontier between illusion and reality, as witnessed by a cynical fashion photographer. Zabriskie Point (1970) was an apocalyptic assault on materialism in California, allied to the modish theme of youth protest.
His later work was sparse and its inspiration intermittent. A long documentary shot in China in 1972 was denounced by Peking for its distortions, though in truth it was quite sympathetic. The Passenger (1975), marking a return to Antonioni’s earlier introspective themes, followed a TV reporter (Jack Nicholson) on a grim odyssey across Spain and North Africa in a vain search for a new identity. Il Mistero di Oberwald (1981) was an ill-judged version of Cocteau’s L’Aigle à deux têtes (1948).
Antonioni suffered a stroke in 1985, which left him partially paralysed and unable to speak. Nevertheless, he continued to work, and despite a delay of a decade, in 1995 he completed Beyond the Clouds with the help of the German director Wim Wenders. That same year he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime’s achievement. A decade later, when in his nineties, he directed Il filo pericoloso delle cose (2004), an episode in a portmanteau film about love, though most critics considered the music by Caetano Veloso to be rather better than the picture itself.
Antonioni’s personality had some of the same austerity as his work. He was tall and thin, with a nervous, reserved manner, and when working he could be arrogant and difficult, flying into a rage with anyone who crossed him. Often he would clear the set for up to 20 minutes before a take, in order to brood alone. He was a fastidious perfectionist, as is clear from his mise-en-scène at its best. He was a master of the slow panning shot and the long uneasy silence; or he would allow the camera to linger motionless on a building or hillside long after the actors had moved out of frame. Landscape, especially urban, was crucial to him: he said that he first chose the visual setting for a film, then let this dictate its theme, rather than the other way round.
Indeed, some critics found his landscapes more real and memorable that the sad figures projected against them. In 1963 The Times film critic called him a “shallow bore”. He had many such detractors, but his admirers saw him as a true humanist in his own fashion, patently sincere in his belief that man’s emotional and moral being had been stifled by the new world of science. Maybe this bleak view of life sprang in part from his Jansenist background with its stress on guilt and retribution; certainly his films were personally felt.
Antonioni’s philosophy may well have been less original than his manner of expressing it, and it is true he was weak on intellectual analysis. But essentially his was a poet’s intuitive and emotional response to life, and this was his strength. His four best films, from Le Amiche to L’Eclisse, are likely to stand the test of time for their searing poetic vision and for a beauty that is no mere decoration but — as with Keats or Van Gogh — is integral to the melancholy outcry of an anguished soul.

Antonioni is survived by his wife, Enrica Fico.

Michelangelo Antonioni, film director, was born on September 39, 1912. He died on July 30, 2007, aged 94

D Cairns

This line that with Antonioni and Bergman gone, the last of the sixties arthouse giants have perished -- I fell for it too. Then someone reminded me of Godard, who's still alive and more active than either Ingmar or Michaelangelo were. I don't go a bundle on Godard's stuff, but he's obviously up in the premier leage too.

Cheeky Bob

Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette are still alive and active, and all have produced important work in the last decade. I've never been as keen on Claude Chabrol as many, but he's still around.

We're also getting some comebacks from Fifties and Sixties greats this year, with new films from Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds) and Jiri Menzel (Closely Observed Trains). They've been creatively off the boil for a good couple of decades, but I'll happily give them the benefit of the doubt - both Katyn (Wajda's depiction of the massacre that killed his father) and I Served the King of England (Menzel returning to source material by the writer Bohumil Hrabal, who scripted most of his best films) are unusually personal projects for them.