In what is becoming a tragic week for the titans of world cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni has died, aged 94. A purely cinematic force, Antonioni blazed a trail of originality with classics like L’Avventura (1960), L’Eclisse (1962), The Red Desert (1964) and most famously Blow-Up (1966). His work often polarised critics but was impossible to ignore or forget.
Born into a middle-class family in Ferrara, Italy in 1912, Antonioni started his film career as a critic, where he became renowned for his blistering attacks on the national cinema. After enrolling at Italy’s national film school during the ‘40s , he became a screenwriter for Rossellini and Federico Fellini and made his directorial debut with Story Of A Love Affair in 1950.
L’Avventura became his international break-out hit. The story of a woman who goes missing on a Mediterranean boat trip set the template for the flicks that followed, a fragmented storyline told at a slow pace, often exploring the ennui of the bourgeois class. Blow-Up, his most famous film, perfectly captured the mood of swinging ‘60s London in a story of a photographer who captures a murder in a photo. It was a plot device later “borrowed” by Francis Coppola for The Conversation and Brian De Palma for Blow Out. Other American types who revered Antonioni included Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson — Antonioni later cast Nicholson in The Passenger (1975).
Out of fashion by the ‘80s, Antonioni continued to work with The Oberwald Mystery (1980) and Identification Of A Woman (1982) but suffered a stroke in 1985 that looked like it would put an end to his career. Still, in collaboration with Wim Wenders, he co-directed Beyond The Clouds (1995) and his last screen effort was 2004’s short The Dangerous Thread Of Things released as part of the Eros anthology.
It is perhaps fitting that Antonioni died within two days of Ingmar Bergman. Both men shared an obsession with the big themes — death, suicide, psychological agony, the impossibility of relationships, the oppression and emptiness of modern society — and visually exciting ways to convey them. Antonioni’s films, however tough to get through, are choc-ful of astonishing cinematic set-pieces; the end of Zabiriskie Point (1970) where a house explodes in multiple angles to the strains of Pink Floyd: The Red Desert, which saw Antonioni paint the natural landscape and Blow-Up as a group of mime artists play out an imaginary tennis match.
Awarded an honorary Oscar in 1995 — he gave the shortest acceptance speech in Academy history: “Grazie” — and a winner at all the major festivals (Venice, Berlin, Cannes), Antonioni is survived by his wife, actress Enrica Fico.