Word: antonioni
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...last Monday, Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director who diagnosed and dramatized postwar alienation, died Monday, the same day as the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. In less than 24 hours, the emperors of angst were gone. Bergman, 89, and Antonioni, 94, were two of the three surviving auteurs who defined serious European movies in the 60s - when serious movies pretty much were European. Of the decade's transcendent film figures, only that perpetual iconoclast Jean-luc Godard, 76, is left standing. If I were he, I'd insist on round-the-clock medical attention...
...Antonioni - a slender, handsome fellow who in his prime, as Woody Allen will attest, was a killer ping-pong player - didn't enjoy the brand recognition that Bergman did. But in several ways his influence was even greater. His L'Avventura (1960), which sets up a mystery it never resolves, quickly became a rallying cry and furious debating point for serious film lovers. La Notte (1961), Eclipse (1962) and Red Desert (1964) cemented Antonioni's reputation as an anatomizer of malaise and a supreme picture-maker. Blowup (1966), his first full-length English-language film, was a sensation...
...Antonioni, if his name rings any bells today, is known for making long, slow films about the misery of Europe's leisure class. While his compatriot Federico Fellini sketched modern anomie and aimlessness with a cartoonist's quick, broad slashes, Antonioni brought Atomic Age anomie to a kind of life with delicate bush strokes; he was the fastidious, mandarin un-Fellini. For a time, he was unlike anyone, until many directors saw that trail he had blazed and started treading...
...glum, frozen characters were even father removed from Hollywood cinema. The traditional movie hero was an action figure; the Antonioni antihero is inactive, passive, empty. Rich and pretty, he shows how meaningless it is to be a man of means. He in incapacitated by wealth, status and the availability of sex with good-looking people of the opposite sex. The advantages that the world's poor could only dream of have paralyzed...
...presenting legendary�Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni with a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1995, Jack Nicholson said that in silence, the director "found metaphors that illuminate the silent places in our hearts." In films like Blow-Up, L'Avventura and La Notte, Antonioni captured inner lives of alienation and angst with long, lingering takes and a paucity of dialogue and action. Critics hailed him as the "hero of the highbrows." But average moviegoers were so confused they once reputedly chased him at the Cannes Film Festival, demanding plot explanations. Antonioni was content with his brainy reputation--and his lack of mass...