Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the masters of world cinema, died in Rome on Monday, aged 94, in less than 24 hours after Ingmar Bergman, another of our last links with the great days of European art-house film, passed away.
Antonioni?s films thematically explored the ?alienation? of the bourgeoisie in post-war Italy in contrast to the working-class homilies of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. In the galaxy of Italian film-makers, he stood apart as the least Italianate; the ethos of his films had little to do with the world of Fellini, De Sica, Pasolini or Bertolucci.
Antonioni made only 20 movies. He made his first feature Cronaca di un amore at the age of 38 but it was not until L?Avventura in 1960 he became an icon for film-makers like Martin Scorsese. In India, ?We see an echo of Antonioni in Kumar Sahni?s Tarang,? film theorist Amrit Gangar told FE. Antonioni made his English language debut with his 1966 drama Blow-Up which brought two Oscar nominations. Yet, it was only as late as 1995 that he travelled paralysed to Los Angeles to receive an Academy Award for his life’s work. Pooh-poohed and whistled away on the night L’Avventura was screened at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, with many in the audience walking out, he was nominated for the Palme d’Or five times between 1960 and 1982. L?Avventura (1959), La Notte (1960) and L?Eclisse (1962) formed an informal trilogy that explored people alienated from oneself and one another. In his heydays, Antonioni?s themes came closest to the northern European intellectual moorings that portrayed a fractured human existence in the works of, say, Camu and Sartre. ?Antonioni was a modernist to the core,? says Gangar. By 1980s, he was nonetheless yesteryear?s modernist.
Just as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Charles Chaplin, he later moved to America to shoot the counter-culture romp Zabriskie Point. Antonioni would later present Jack Nicholson in Europe in his existential odyssey The Passenger.
The Italian director suffered a severe stroke in 1985 that left him unable to speak. Mounted on a wheelchair and assisted by director Wim Wenders, Antonioni directed his last film, the 1995 classic Beyond the Clouds.
The following year, he received a lifetime achievement Oscar. His last release was the 2004 The Dangerous Thread of Things, one part of a trilogy of short films released under the title Eros.
Fans will 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. He will be buried in Ferrara, his birthplace in northern Italy, on Thursday. Antonioni was born in 1912 in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. If Antonioni is to be remembered tomorrow, it will be for only one thing: Film. Asked what he would have made in a world without film, Antonioni once said, ?Film.?