July 31, 2007
First, Bergman — Now, Antonioni
We’re still reeling over the death of Ingmar Bergman. Granted, both men were well up in years, but both on the same day…? It’s a lot for any true lover of film to take.
From the New York Times:
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly canticles of alienation were cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s, inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home in Rome, Italian news media reported today. He was 94. He died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died at his home in Sweden earlier Monday.
“With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen,” said the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. His office said it was making plans for Mr. Antonioni’s body to lie in state on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred 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 cineastes demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.
Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blow-Up,” a 1966 drama set in Swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that a photograph he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, hidden in the background, evidence of a murder. But his true, lasting contribution to cinema resides in an earlier trilogy — “L’Avventura” in 1959, “La Notte” in 1960 and “L’Eclisse” in 1962 — which explores the filmmaker’s tormented central vision that people had become emotionally unglued from one another.
. . .
One interviewer asked him to look back over his life. “In a world without film, what would you have made?” he was asked.
Mr. Antonioni replied: “Film.”
Lots more at the link, and well worth the read.
Also worth reading is this piece at The Guardian:
Ingmar Bergman left in the early hours of yesterday morning. Within a few hours, Michelangelo Antonioni had followed him through the exit door. It remains to be seen whether this signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse - some Biblical purge of revered European auteurs - but the omens are hardly encouraging. How are Godard, Resnais and Rohmer bearing up? Can we urge them to stay indoors, wrap up warm, and maybe put on some old DVDs. Anything to keep them out of circulation until the curse has run its course.
In the meantime I’m hunting parallels between Bergman and Antonioni, two men who are destined to be forever linked in death. Thankfully there are some obvious ones. Both were near contemporaries who came to epitomise the foreign-language film scene during its creative and commercial heyday in the 1950s and 60s. Both were regarded as rigorous, high-minded directors who typically chose to focus on modern man’s sense of alienation in a God-less universe. Both, to their detractors, could be aloof, portentous artists who made great demands of their viewer … and all in return for the revelation that we are all lost and lonely and doomed to die. Gee, thanks a bunch.
And yet these directors were very different too. If Bergman was the great high priest of the European art-house, then Antonioni was its puckish intellectual. His films were at once more playful and more spare than Bergman’s. L’Avventura and L’Eclisse are cerebral, teasing puzzle pictures. Blowup is a roguish, vogueish mystery play. Zabriskie Point offered a freewheeling, anthropological tour of an American counter-culture that - one suspects - never really existed outside of Antonioni’s head to begin with.
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