Word: italian
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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...
...with great enthusiasm," Antonioni said of JFK. "He invited me to the White House to talk about this film." This was long before Blowup, when the filmmaker was still a caviar taste in the U.S. (I'll bet Jackie urged her husband to spend some time with the dapper Italian...
...Most actors did an Antonioni film as a solemn duty, not for the laughs. A sworn enemy of bombast, visual or behavioral, he made his performers reveal more with less. This was particularly tough on his compatriots. Italian actors, and Italians in general, speak with their bodies; each conversation is a performance using the most lavish and vigorous hand gestures. Antonioni stripped them of these flourishes - he either refined the natural tendencies of these actors or he straitjacketed them...
...chauffeured cars among European governments, the President's headquarters cost four times as much to maintain as Buckingham Palace, and there have even been indignant demands for better gelato at the Parliament cafeteria. Adding to the public's sense that politicians are not to be trusted, 16 of the Italian Parliament's 630 members are convicted felons. All this is feeding a mounting frustration with the institutional pillars of Italy's democracy: the parties and the system for electing representatives...
...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...