R.I.P. Michelangelo Antonioni

[Reza]

NY Times

August 12, 2007

The Man Who Set Film Free
By MARTIN SCORSESE

NINETEEN-SIXTY-ONE ... a long time ago. Almost 50 years. But the sensation of seeing “L’Avventura” for the first time is still with me, as if it had been yesterday.

Where did I see it? Was it at the Art Theater on Eighth Street? Or was it the Beekman? I don’t remember, but I do remember the charge that ran through me the first time I heard that opening musical theme ? ominous, staccato, plucked out onn strings, so simple, so stark, like the horns that announce the next tercio during a bullfight. And then, the movie. A Mediterranean cruise, bright sunshine, in black and white widescreen images unlike anything I’d ever seen ­ so precisely composed, accentuating and expressing ... what? A very strange type of discomfort. The characters were rich, beautiful in one way but, you might say, spiritually ugly. Who were they to me? Who would I be to them?

They arrived on an island. They split up, spread out, sunned themselves, bickered. And then, suddenly, the woman played by Lea Massari, who seemed to be the heroine, disappeared. From the lives of her fellow characters, and from the movie itself. Another great director did almost exactly the same thing around that time, in a very different kind of movie. But while Hitchcock showed us what happened to Janet Leigh in “Psycho,” Michelangelo Antonioni never explained what had happened to Massari’s Anna. Had she drowned? Had she fallen on the rocks? Had she escaped from her friends and begun a new life? We never found out.

Instead the film’s attention shifted to Anna’s friend Claudia, played by Monica Vitti, and her boyfriend Sandro, played by Gabriele Ferzetti. They started to search for Anna, and the picture seemed to become a kind of detective story. But right away our attention was drawn away from the mechanics of the search, by the camera and the way it moved. You never knew where it was going to go, who or what it was going to follow. In the same way the attentions of the characters drifted: toward the light, the heat, the sense of place. And then toward one another.

So it became a love story. But that dissolved too. Antonioni made us aware of something quite strange and uncomfortable, something that had never been seen in movies. His characters floated through life, from impulse to impulse, and everything was eventually revealed as a pretext: the search was a pretext for being together, and being together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their lives and gave them a kind of meaning.

The more I saw “L’Avventura” ? and I went back many times ? the more I realized that Antonioni’s visual language was keeping us focused on the rhythm of the world: the visual rhythms of light and dark, of architectural forms, of people positioned as figures in a landscape that always seemed terrifyingly vast. And there was also the tempo, which seemed to be in sync with the rhythm of time, moving slowly, inexorably, allowing what I eventually realized were the emotional shortcomings of the characters ? Sandro’s frustrattion, Claudia’s self-deprecation ? quietly to overwhelm them and push them into anotther “adventure,” and then another and another. Just like that opening theme, which kept climaxing and dissipating, climaxing and dissipating. Endlessly.

Where almost every other movie I’d seen wound things up, “L’Avventura” wound them down. The characters lacked either the will or the capacity for real self-awareness. They only had what passed for self-awareness, cloaking a flightiness and lethargy that was both childish and very real. And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realized something extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.

“L’Avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than “Breathless” or “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (made by two other modern masters, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, both of them still alive and working). Or “La Dolce Vita.” At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked “L’Avventura.” I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired “La Dolce Vita,” but I was challenged by “L’Avventura.” Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. (It was two years later when I caught up with Fellini again, and had the same kind of epiphany with “8 ½.”)

The people Antonioni was dealing with, quite similar to the people in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels (of which I later discovered that Antonioni was very fond), were about as foreign to my own life as it was possible to be. But in the end that seemed unimportant. I was mesmerized by “L’Avventura” and by Antonioni’s subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries ? or rather the mystery, of who we are, wwhat we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul. That’s why I kept going back. I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures, wandering through them. I still do.

Antonioni seemed to open up new possibilities with every movie. The last seven minutes of “L’Eclisse,” the third film in a loose trilogy he began with “L’Avventura” (the middle film was “La Notte”), were even more terrifying and eloquent than the final moments of the earlier picture. Alain Delon and Ms. Vitti make a date to meet, and neither of them show up. We start to see things ­ the lines of a crosswalk, a piece of wood floating in a barrel ? and we begin to realize that we’re seeing the places they’ve been, empty of their presence. Gradually Antonioni brings us face to face with time and space, nothing more, nothing less. And they stare right back at us. It was frightening, and it was freeing. The possibilities of cinema were suddenly limitless.

We all witnessed wonders in Antonioni’s films ? those that came after, and thhe extraordinary work he did before “L’Avventura,” pictures like “La Signora Senza Camelie,” “Le Amiche,” “Il Grido” and “Cronaca di un Amore,” which I discovered later. So many marvels ? the painted landscapes (literally painted, long before CGI) of “Red Desert” and “Blowup,” and the photographic detective story in that later film, which ultimately led further and further away from the truth; the mind-expanding ending of “Zabriskie Point,” so reviled when it came out, in which the heroine imagines an explosion that sends the detritus of the Western world cascading across the screen in super slow motion and vivid color (for me Antonioni and Godard were, among other things, truly great modern painters); and the remarkable last shot of “The Passenger,” where the camera moves slowly out the window and into a courtyard, away from the drama of Jack Nicholson’s character and into the greater drama of wind, heat, light, the world unfolding in time.

I crossed paths with Antonioni a number of times over the years. Once we spent Thanksgiving together, after a very difficult period in my life, and I did my best to tell him how much it meant to me to have him with us. Later, after he’d had a stroke and lost the power of speech, I tried to help him get his project “The Crew” off the ground ? a wonderful script written with his frequent collaborator Mark Peploe, unlike anything else he’d ever done, and I’m sorry it never happened.

But it was his images that I knew, much better than the man himself. Images that continue to haunt me, inspire me. To expand my sense of what it is to be alive in the world.

[Precious Doll]

Back then you had children being encouraged to explore international films (and a number of them played our local small-town movie house -- I saw The Shop On Main Street, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, That Man From Rio among others there). Today you have adults treating children's films/goddamn cartoons as if they were worthy of serious discussion. Sad.

I couldn't agree more, but then pre-1980 even children's films were of a higher level. Now aside from an occasional remake of a Secret Garden or Little Princess or Bridge to Terabithia, what are today's film-makers providign children with?

Merchandise that ties in with overpriced junk food.

[Big Magilla]

Back then you had children being encouraged to explore international films (and a number of them played our local small-town movie house -- I saw The Shop On Main Street, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, That Man From Rio among others there). Today you have adults treating children's films/goddamn cartoons as if they were worthy of serious discussion. Sad.

I couldn't agree more, but then pre-1980 even children's films were of a higher level. Now aside from an occasional remake of a Secret Garden or Little Princess or Bridge to Terabithia, what are today's film-makers providign children with?

[Damien]

This paragraph from the NY Times Antonioni obit made me very wistful:

"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."

I was too young to be there when these directors were first hitting but I can remember my parents and their friends (in a small fairly rural town in Connecticut) going to and discussing 8 1/2, Last Year At Marienbad, Dear John, Divorce Italian Style, Women In The Dunes. And I recall my 5th grade teacher (at a Catholic parochial school) saying, "I saw a very interesting movie yesterday called "Juliet Of The Spirits." I think some of you children would really like it."

Back then you had children being encouraged to explore international films (and a number of them played our local small-town movie house -- I saw The Shop On Main Street, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, That Man From Rio among others there). Today you have adults treating children's films/goddamn cartoons as if they were worthy of serious discussion. Sad.

[Damien]

J. Hoberman of the Village Voice on Bergman and Antonioni (since he's much more favorably disposed towards the latter, I'm putting it in this thread rather than Bergman's):

SAYING GOODBYE TO TWO GIANTS OF CINEMA
Ingmar Bergman, 1918–2007; Michelangelo Antonioni, 1913–2007

By J. HOBERMAN

Ingmar Bergman Ingmar Bergman directed over 50 features, but he was a significant figure in 20th-century culture in part because he was so obviously significant. Last week’s inch-above-the-fold front-page New York Times obituary cites Woody Allen’s pledge of allegiance: The Swedish director was nothing less than “the greatest film artist... since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

More than Fellini, Kurosawa, Resnais or Wajda, Bergman personified the art-house cinema of the 1950s and ’60s. He was a skillful filmmaker and an extraordinary director of actors, but mainly he was a sensibility whose quintessential image was Max von Sydow’s gaunt knight playing chess with the cowled figure of Death in The Seventh Seal (1957). Bergman’s high-middlebrow symbolism, evident metaphysical anguish and absence of challenging formal innovation made his movies safe for college English departments. Cinephiles were often less enthusiastic. Bergman’s work was memorably satirized in The Dove, the faux-Swedish short that opened the 1968 New York Film Festival; the same year, Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris joked that the obscure ending of 2001 qualified as “instant Ingmar.”

The son of a Lutheran minister, Bergman was born in rural Sweden and made his first movie in 1945. Still fresh and immediate, his early films — many of them lyrical invocations of the brief Nordic summer — were indifferently received at home but championed by the new French journal Cahiers du Cinema. Wider recognition began when Bergman won a prize at Cannes with his 16th film, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955); this was followed by The Seventh Seal, which won the Palme d’Or two years later and, along with the elegiac Wild Strawberries (1957), established his international reputation.

An allegory set during the period of the Black Death, The Seventh Seal was blatantly existentialist entertainment, a costume version of Camus’ The Plague; Bergman waxed even more philosophical in an early-’60s trilogy that addressed God’s indifference and his own spiritual crisis: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963). Gorgeously shot and unflinchingly downbeat, the latter was Bergman’s most sexually explicit movie. A trimmed version opened in New York at a theater that specialized in cheap horror and “nudie-cutie” films and set a house record.

The Silence signaled the filmmaker’s wary involvement in the social and aesthetic currents of the 1960s; it led directly to his enigmatic masterpiece Persona (1966) and Shame (1968), an impressive meditation on the fate of civilians during wartime. In the early ’70s, Bergman returned to melodrama and had a second period of critical success with “relationship films” like Cries and Whispers (1972) and Scenes From a Marriage (1973). He announced the end of his movie career in 1981 with the sumptuous Fanny and Alexander (although he made several more television films), while remaining active in the theater. A series of productions — mainly Strindberg and Ibsen — imported by the Brooklyn Academy of Music demonstrated his brilliance as a stage director.

I never reviewed Bergman, although I did write a brief essay on his “secret film” This Can’t Happen Here (1950), an exemplary anti-Communist thriller that he would later disown; I enjoyed describing Samuel Fuller as Bergman’s American analogue, precipitated a brief flurry (in Helsinki) by calling Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki Bergman’s postmodern successor, and have several times taught The Silence in the context of post–World War II poetic horror and pop existentialism (including Fuller’s Shock Corridor).

The Silence is morbid and despairing, but such consummate filmmaking cannot be depressing. Bergman himself saw The Silence as almost hopeful, telling one reporter that it suggests “Life only has as much meaning and importance as one attributes to it oneself.” Meaning and importance are things Bergman’s films never lacked and his oeuvre has in abundance.


Michelangelo Antonioni was not just a great movie director but also a major European artist — one of the very few filmmakers ever recognized as such. A more polarizing figure than Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni has also remained more current.

Antonioni was the maestro of impeccable angst and elegant alienation, the poet of sterile architecture and bad breakups. His noncommunicative characters did not have personalities so much as drives; his most substantive movies feature, as the embodiment of spiritual anguish, the stunning ’60s girl Monica Vitti. It was Antonioni who put the mod, as well as the modishness, in modernism. Alienation has never been more gorgeously indulged than in L’Avventura — a mystery that casually abandons its ostensible premise midway through and the stormy triumph of the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, which bestowed its Palme d’Or on Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Seven years later, Antonioni achieved an even greater renown; thanks to his English-language art-house blockbuster Blowup, he was Beckett in bell-bottoms.

Can a serious director also be an unabashed fashionista? During the decade between L’Avventura (1960) and his gloriously foolish American debacle Zabriskie Point (1970), Antonioni’s name was the equivalent of a chic designer label or a certain soigné state of mind — what Andrew Sarris liked to call “Antoniennui.” Antonioni made industrial pollution ravishingly beautiful in Red Desert (1964) and did as much as anyone to elevate the fashion photographer to artist with Blowup. Il Grido (1957) was the first Antonioni film to use a specific location as the stylized stage set for a stripped-down existential drama. But it was the spectacular wide-screen L’Avventura, which — lavishing neo-realist attention on the rich and the bored — brought his style to maturity. L’Avventura was a landscape film that was also a landmark, changing forever the face of cinema. This use of film as a form of temporal sculpture would be among the most influential of ’60s movies (anticipating, in some respects, the more radical use of “real time” in Andy Warhol and structural film).

Less monumental in its purity and more subtle in its radicalism, Antonioni’s 1962 masterpiece L’Eclisse showcases Vitti as his moodiest, most evasive heroine, drifting out of one affair and into another with Alain Delon’s mercurial stockbroker, both of these beautiful creatures overshadowed by the blandly futuristic architecture of the film’s setting. As L’Eclisse anticipates Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 Alphaville in its use of a “found” Flash Gordon landscape, Antonioni’s first color film, Red Desert, is almost pure science fiction. Everything exudes a chemical glow. Nature has been supplanted.

The overrated Blowup and underrated Zabriskie Point form, with The Passenger (1975) — which stars Jack Nicholson as an international man of mystery — a loose trilogy, less enduring but more personal than the Vitti vehicles. In each of these laconic, ostentatiously with-it thrillers, an alienated male protagonist stumbles into some sort of social commitment, attempting the passage from witness to participant. All three were made in English at a time when Antonioni was the world’s most cosmopolitan filmmaker — an example of what German author Hans-Magnus Enzensberger unkindly termed a “tourist of the revolution.” Antonioni’s 1972 China documentary, Chung Kuo Cina, made the year before Enzensberger’s essay was published, might be considered a pendant on the “radical tourist” trilogy. Antonioni was a Now-ist.

“In this period they had what was called ‘the art film,’ ” Nicholson explains in the commentary that augments The Passenger’s DVD release, locating it in some irretrievable past. Fair enough. Antonioni’s trendiness was a factor of his desire to engage the history of his times. It’s suggestive that those contemporary directors who have made the most use of Antonioni’s example — Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, the late Edward Yang — are from nations once considered “Third World.”

[Reza]

BBC Online 8/2/07

Funeral held for Blow-Up director
Hundreds of mourners have attended the funeral of Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, who died on Monday at the age of 94.

The square outside Ferrara's San Giorgio cathedral in northern Italy was filled with local residents.

His widow Enrica Fico and film luminaries flanked the wooden casket during the service inside the building.

Antonioni - best known for the 1966 film Blow-Up - was laid to rest next to his parents in the town's cemetery.

German film-maker Wim Wenders said he had gone "beyond the clouds", referring to the 1995 film Al di la Delle Nuvole which he co-directed with the Italian director.

"Michelangelo introduced me to Ferrara," Wenders said. "I realised how much light came to his mind and to his eyes from this place.

"It's hard to summarise what the maestro left. Certainly, he created a new image of the 20th-century man," he added.

Many local residents attended the ceremony, which included eulogies by Fico and Italian poet and screenwriter Tonino Guerra.

On Wednesday, Antonioni's body laid in state at Rome's City Hall where fans queued up to pay their last respects.

"We have lost a great man, first of all, and a great artist," said former La Scala theatre ballerina, Carla Fracci. "We will miss him."

Actress Daniela Silvero, who starred in the director's 1982 film Identification of a Woman, brought flowers to lay by his coffin.

"He was a great friend," she said. "For cinema, especially Italian cinema, he represented everything."

Oscars

Antonioni's portrayal of modern angst and alienation won him a cult following among cinema-goers.

After winning favourable reviews at the Cannes Film Festival with 1957's The Cry, he scored his first real international success in 1960 with L'Avventura.

He gained two Oscar nominations for the iconic release, and was awarded an honorary Academy Award for his life's work in 1995.

The Oscar was presented by Hollywood star Jack Nicholson, who played the lead in his 1974 film The Passenger.

"His look was very special, truly unique," his widow told reporters at the ceremony, where a large screen showed black and white footage of Antonioni around his film sets and backstage.

Antonioni's death so shortly after that of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman leaves European cinema without two of its most significant personalities.
Story from BBC NEWS:

[ITALIANO]

Lucia Bosé, who is a startling screen presence

She had - and still has, though she lives in semi retirement in Spain - a face made for the movies, and a reluctant attitude about acting which made her seem even more interesting, more enigmatic (Silvana Mangano had this, too: you could feel that these actresses didn't want to give all, that they were keeping something for themselves). Her best performance in an Italian movie is probably in Francesco Maselli's Gli Sbandati (and Maselli himself is a director who deserves to be discovered), but her most famous role is in Spanish director Bardem's justly celebrated, psychologically insightful Death of a Cyclist, as the woman tormented by guilt after unintentionally killing a man in a hit-and-run car accident.

I think Cronaca di un amore is interesting, and for the reasons that you pointed out, but not a masterpiece. Bose' is one of the best things about it, though it's interesting to think how the movie would be had Antonioni's first choice for the role - American star Gene Tierney - accepted it. Sounds intriguing - Gene Tierney in an Antonioni movie...

[Franz Ferdinand]

I'd pick anything. I have only seen "Scenes From a Marriage" and "The Seventh Seal" from the both, so I'll look here for a consensus. What a terrible two days for European cinema, but it will enable a celebration of their full lives and timeless contributions, not to mention giving the uninitiated an opportunity to discover them.

[kooyah]

So who's thinking of doing a Bergman/Antonioni home viewing double feature this week? Anyone? What would be your choices?

I'd pick Wild Strawberries and L'Eclisse (which I own but haven't actually gotten around to watching).

[Johnny Guitar]

In Antonioni's honor I just watched Cronaca di un amore--which is a good film, and it's easy to spot some of the touches that would later become the hallmarks of Antonioni's style. I can't totally put my finger on it (and I could be victim of my own hazy memory) but the film it actually reminded me of most was Rossellini's (very great) Europa '51: the struggles of conscience amidst custom & avarice in the upper class, the consequences of human behaviors that almost suggest cosmic importance without ever traveling down those lines ...

And Italiano is right about Lucia Bosé, who is a startling screen presence--I must now be sure to see The Lady Without Camellias very very soon; to revisit Satyricon; and there is now added incentive to track down certain films by Bardem, Bolognoni, and De Santis. She's got the most fascinating face & body, but her movement and behavior onscreen assure one that she's not "just" a pretty face and an attactive body.

I also just found out that Isidore Isou, the Lettrist artist, filmmaker, and poet, died over the weekend, too. He may not have been as well-known as Bergman and Antonioni, but his importance in the French avant-garde of last century is secure. RIP.

[Big Magilla]

Jefferson and Adams not only died on the same day, they died July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the declaration of independence.

[Sonic Youth]

I saw this on the front page and the immediate reaction was, You've GOT to be kidding. Truly eerie, Sonic.

Jimmy Stewart and Robert Mitchum died within 24 hours of one another, but this is of a higher order. The only appropriate comparison I can come up with is is Jefferson and John Adams dying on, I believe, virtually the same day. (And Adams said something nasty about Jefferson, much as Sonic imagines Bergman/Antonioni might)

Someone on Gold Derby (which is astonishing in and of itself) made an excellent comparison. Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hawks died on the same day.

[Eric]

respect for the dead compels me to withhold my feelings on L'Aventurra.

Though you didn't really, I guess it's the thought that counts.

[Mister Tee]

I saw this on the front page and the immediate reaction was, You've GOT to be kidding. Truly eerie, Sonic.

Jimmy Stewart and Robert Mitchum died within 24 hours of one another, but this is of a higher order. The only appropriate comparison I can come up with is is Jefferson and John Adams dying on, I believe, virtually the same day. (And Adams said something nasty about Jefferson, much as Sonic imagines Bergman/Antonioni might) Throw in Godard, Fellini and Truffaut and you have almost the entirety of art cinema in the 50s and 60s.

[Hustler]

I would like to see this doble feature:The Seventh Seal and Blow Up.