2nd great director to die within 24 hours!!! omg dropping like flies

 

Michelangelo Antonioni

Director whose 'L'Avventura' set new parameters for modern cinema

Published: 01 August 2007 Independent

 

Michelangelo Antonioni, film director: born Ferrara, Italy 29 September 1912; married 1942 Letizia Balboni, 1986 Enrica Fico; died Rome 30 July 2007.

 

The now notorious premiere of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (The Adventure) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, where the film was jeeringly catcalled by the chic, philistine public, arguably constitutes - along with Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad - the last strictly aesthetic scandal that the cinema has provoked. There have since been isolated controversies, to be sure, but the issue in contention has invariably been extraneous to cinematic quality: for example, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.

 

L'Avventura scandalised the Cannes audience not because of what it was about, but because it did not seem to be about anything at all. Its narrative opacity, its relative absence of plot, its self-reflexivity and, perhaps above all, its unaccustomedly slow tempo (the neutral term "slow" has tended, for some as yet insufficiently analysed reason, to acquire an exclusively pejorative connotation for film critics) exasperated audiences of the period and soon inspired the waggishly dismissive epithet of "Antoniennui".

 

The real scandal was in fact, as is frequently the case, the fact that there had been a scandal at all. Re-examined today, L'Avventura is unquestionably a masterpiece, born (or conceived), like most of its kind, out of wedlock, a film that systematically subverted the filmic codes, practices and structures in currency at its time. Its theme, one that would be appropriated by numerous film-makers in the course of the following decade, was the social and psychic alienation of contemporary humankind (generally, affluent, middle-class, intellectual humankind) from an increasingly technological environment which the director filmed as neither hospitable nor particularly forbidding - Antonioni's industrial landscapes are often extremely beautiful - and for which even the adjective "indifferent" would still imply an emotional sensitisation of nature, by default, as it were, alien to its terrifyingly inanimate "thereness".

 

Through fluid long takes and a heroically rigorous sense of wide-screen composition, the director succeeded in conveying the leadenly oppressive, almost Chirico-esque burden of suspended time as well as the isolation - an isolation physical and, again in the manner of Chirico's paintings, "metaphysical" - of his protagonists.

 

Like Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour, which emerged simultaneously with Antonioni's film, on the cusp of the Sixties, L'Avventura defined what were to become the crucial parameters of the modern cinema; and its influence can be detected in works as diverse as Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day and even Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.

 

Antonioni's involvement with the cinema started precociously, with a cluster of experimental 16mm shorts which he filmed in his teens and criticism which he wrote first for a local newspaper (in Ferrara), then for Cinema, the official Fascist film journal. He entered the industry as scenarist, most notably for Roberto Rossellini, as assistant director and, in 1942, as the Italian representative of Marcel Carné's Les Visiteurs du soir, a Franco-Italian co-production. And, having meanwhile made a documentary short, Gente del Po ("People of the Po", 1943), he eventually succeeded at the relatively late age of 38 in directing his own début feature, Cronaca di un amore (Chronicle of a Love, 1950), an enigmatic melodrama whose cool, austere near-abstraction and preoccupation with "real time" prefigured the strategies which he would later explore more fully.

 

Though currently rather obscured by the radical leap into the void that L'Avventura represented, each of the four films that he completed during the Fifties was in its fashion almost equally remarkable: I Vinti (The Vanquished, 1953); the wittily titled La Signora senza Camelie (The Lady Without Camelias, made the same year), an exquisite proto-feminist drama set in and around the Cinecittà film studio; Le Amiche (The Girl Friends, 1955), a subtly modulated and tightly scripted study of four very different young women; and Il Grido (The Cry, 1957), the account of a father-child relationship unusual for the director in seeming faintly infused with a neo-realist sensibility and, for some, sentimentality.

 

Needless to say, the initial hysteria surrounding L'Avventura established Antonioni's international reputation, and each of his films since that date was greeted as something of an "event". Though the first two, La Notte (The Night, 1961) and L'Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962), were at once yoked with L'Avventura, slightly tendentiously, as a "trilogy" - or even, if one includes Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert, 1964,) in which Antonioni first tentatively experimented with colour, as a tetralogy - what most intensely unified them was the presence of the actress Monica Vitti, who with Anna Karina and Jeanne Moreau was to become one of the great iconic heroines of the European cinema of the Sixties.

 

La Notte is unquestionably the weakest of the trilogy, its brittle dissection of the narcissistic angst of the well-heeled not entirely uncontaminated by the type of jet-set "slumming in reverse", so to speak, by which practically every serious film-maker has been tempted at some stage of his or her career. L'Eclisse, however, is as superbly mysterious an exploration of an urban landscape as may be found in the finest of Ozu's films.

 

In 1966, under the problematic aegis of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Antonioni made a film which, though establishing him for the first and, as it would turn out, last time as a "bankable" director, also instigated the gradual erosion of a critical reputation which had hitherto seemed secure. Blow-Up, about a fashionable young photographer, played by David Hemmings, who may or may not have stumbled upon a murder, was either championed as a multi-layered philosophical enquiry into the basic instability and inscrutability of the photographic image or else denounced as a complacently exploitative indictment of Swinging London. It seems likely that the jury will be forever out.

 

The same is perhaps true of the six feature films he managed to make in the three following decades.

 

Zabriskie Point (1970), his sole American film, was a panoramic, bleakly detached post-mortem of counter-culture idealism. The Passenger (1975), was a strange and gripping crypto-Hitchcockian thriller about a journalist (Jack Nicholson) who trades in his identity for that of a dead man - its climactic shot, all seven minutes of it, is one of the most virtuosically executed in the entire history of the cinema. Il Mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1980) was his most improbable project, an adaptation of Jean Cocteau's florid Ruritarian melodrama, L'Aigle à deux têtes, shot on video then transferred to 35mm film stock. Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982), though still distinctively Antonionian was a very Sixties drama not quite salvaged by the pyrotechnical brilliance and unsurpassed beauty of its visual style.

 

Then, having suffered a massive stroke which left him wheelchair-bound and incapable of speech, he somehow contrived in 1995, with the aid of Wim Wenders (without whose permanent presence on the set the film would have remained uninsured), to shoot Beyond the Clouds, an almost self-parodic "art movie" which was rendered ultimately moving by the poignant irony that this so-called "master of non-communication" had nevertheless overcome his own physical incapacity to communicate with his cast and crew and completed a final film as personal as any in his filmography.

 

Gilbert Adair

Mate, I am totally confused as to why you're posting these in "Retro" and not in the Cinema Forum..... :huh:

He directed BlowUp possibly the most influencial retro film of all time. ALL the 'red bus' loungecore music of the 90's is directly influence by the film. The bit with The Yardbirds is one of the great pop moments in cinema.

Mate, I am totally confused as to why you're posting these in "Retro" and not in the Cinema Forum..... :huh:

He directed BlowUp possibly the most influencial retro film of all time.

 

yeah thats why. blow-up is retro, thats the focus. and also to do with demographics and target auds of each forum area, thought this area might have more suitable 'consumers'. it could be said the area we mod has more to do with 'movies' rather than 'cinema' or in fact 'the cinematic arts', its to do with the blockbusters, the genre pics, the type of stuff churned out by fox atomic, rogue pics, dimension, , keeping the fanboys happy with various the laffers and slashers etc etc.

 

tbh was thinking the british film thread in here as well but thought some of the weeks might inc. things like notting hill.

 

its also because this area is to do with anything retro not just music

 

Retro

A forum dedicated to old acts like Blondie, The Police, Led Zeppelin, to anything Retro, from Games, TV, Sport etc. This is the forum for you