Cinema Science

Apparently the same day Ingmar Bergman died, so too did Michelangelo Antonioni. Here is the story from (oddly enought) FinancialTimes.com.

Michelangelo Antonioni, who has died aged 94, was the least Italianate of great Italian filmmakers. A glacial anatomist of love, despair and the alienating tropes of modern life, he seemed to come from another country and culture than the one inhabited by Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini and Bertolucci.

Where they coloured their movies with human passion and extremes of style or emotional expression, Antonioni created a landscape and screen language where subtext, symbol and enigma reigned. His stories, from a girl disappearing on a volcanic island (L’Avventura) through a permissive age’s bequest of disillusionment (La Notte) to the semi-surreal blends of drama and mime in Blow Up and Zabriskie Point, were mysteries wrapped in mazy narratives. His protagonists, epitomised in the beautiful ‘blankness’ of his longtime leading lady and one-time wife Monica Vitti, were seekers who did not know quite what they were seeking.

Exactness in Antonioni was confined to the frame itself: precise, unsettling images of a world, natural or man-created, in which abstract forces declare their independence of, or hostility to, human beings. Trees sigh and sough outside a picture-window while Vitti curls foetus-like on a sofa (The Eclipse). Street stalls and their produce share the same colours of industrial-age decay as the earth and buildings. (In The Red Desert Antonioni painted each component of the screen image, including streets, houses, even vendors’ fruit). And in his late Identification of a Woman a foggy road closes in womb-like around a car-driver, to become a dream of annihilation at once beguiling and frightening.

In his most creative decade, the 1960s, Antonioni’s sensibility as an artist seemed closer to a northern European heritage – Camus, Sartre, existentialism – than to anything Mediterranean.

Born in Ferrara on September 29 1912, his interest in cinema began in the late 1930s when he came into possession of a 16mm camera and a part-time job as a film critic. After assisting directors such as Rossellini (Una Pilota Ritorna) and Marcel Carné (Les Visiteurs du Soir), he made his first film Gente del Po, a documentary about Po River fishermen, over a four-year period between 1943 and 1947. Six more documentaries followed, until his first feature Cronaca di un Amore (Love Story) in 1950.

Busy through the fifties – as well a directing four features he collaborated on the script of Fellini’s The White Skeikh – Antonioni became an international name at the decade’s end. His tale of a couple haunted by the emptiness left in their lives by a girl acquaintance’s disappearance – in an unforgettable opening sequence set on a lava-encrusted island – seemed to contemporary audiences so static and obscure that it was booed at its Cannes Film Festival premiere.

Antonioni never looked back, mainly because everyone else did in revisionist shame. L’Avventura was soon esteemed a masterpiece and voted one of the 10 best films ever in an international critics’ poll. And in the next two films of what became an informal trilogy, he forced audiences to look even deeper into cinema’s expressive possibilities.

La Notte was a slow, enthralling mourning-song for a marriage, starring Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni as a couple drifting apart while the sounds and sights of the hedonistic sixties - parties, partner-swapping - form a mocking backrop. And in L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) the love story between Monica Vitti and Alain Delon ‘freezes’ more than once as character interaction gives way to abstract collages of sound and picture, commenting on the theme of emotional impasse. The ending is the director’s greatest single sequence: 10 minutes of wordless imagery, from livid skies to the pitiless glare of a street lamp, as a world bows to a bleak new twilight.

Antonioni never quite found that perfect pitch of symbolic emotionalism again. Nor, after the 1960s, did time and fashion offer his compassionate scepticism about relationships such an ideal counter-harmony. He created haunting moments in Blow Up (the photographer hero’s snap-by-snap reconstruction of a murder incident providing a memento mori for Swinging London) and he pushed at the limits of visual vocabulary by surreally rearranging whole landscapes in The Red Desert, a co-production starring Richard Harris, and Zabriskie Point.

But his rapprochement with western mainstream cinema ended with Profession: Reporter (1975). The cryptic tale of switched identities, starring Jack Nicholson as a man drifting through Europe and North Africa, had notable scenes, including at the end a labrynthine and seemingly impossible camera movement. But the film ended in box-office limbo, its concessions to commercialism – star-casting, thriller plot elements – displeasing art audiences while its obscurities alienated entertainment-seekers

By the 1980s Antonioni began to seem like yesterday’s modernist in a world moving towards the lighter, more ludic postures of postmodernism. After a feature-length experiment with video (The Eagle Has Two Heads) and a couple of aborted projects, including a documentary on China, he collaborated with Wim Wenders in a strange, visually beautiful multi-episode film that again found few buyers: Beyond the Clouds.

By then he had been partially immobilised by a stroke, which left him powerless to speak, though in 1996 he travelled to Los Angeles to receive an Oscar for career achievement. His last work for the large screen, an episode in the three-story film Eros (2004, made with Wong Kar-Wai and Steven Soderbergh), was an enigma without heart or energy, though as ever with some beautiful pictures. His death sees the passing of the last survivor of his generation of Italian filmmakers.