Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who depicted alienation in the modern world with movies like Blow-Up and L’Avventura, has died, the mayor of Rome said on Tuesday. He was 94.

Antonioni depicted alienation through sparse dialogue and long takes. Along with Federico Fellini, he helped turn post-war Italian film away from the Neorealist movement and toward a personal cinema of imagination. “With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,” Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said.

In 1995, Hollywood honoured his career work, about 25 films and several screenplays, with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement. By then, Antonioni was a physically frail but a mentally sharp 82, unable to speak more than a few words because of a stroke but still translating his vision into film.

The Oscar award was later stolen from Antonioni’s home in 1996, together with several other film prizes.

His slow-moving camera never became synonymous with box-office success, but some of his movies like Blow-Up, Red Desert and The Passenger reached enduring fame. Blow Up (1966), about London in the swinging ’60s and a photographer who accidentally captures a murder on film, was also a rare box-office success for Antonioni. Ketan Mehta’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron is said to be inspired from the film.

His exploration of such intellectual themes as alienation and existential malaise led Halliwell’s Film Guide to say that L’Avventura, Antonioni’s first critical success, made him a “a hero of the highbrows”.

“In the empty, silent spaces, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting,” Jack Nicholson said while presenting Antonioni with the career Oscar.

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