A second blow to cinema: Antonioni dies at 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.

“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.

Antonioni was born on September 29, 1912. He received a university degree in economics and soon began writing critiques for cinema magazines. When he was 30, he began work on his first film, a documentary about the tough life of river people, but by the time Gente del Po was done, it was 1947, and directors were working in a new and vigorous artistic movement called Neorealism. Films like Rome Open City by Roberto Rossellini were depicting with ground-breaking vividness, the rawness of Italian society in the aftermath of World War II.

But Antonioni was more interested in depicting his characters’ internal turmoil. This induced critics to call his cinema “internal” Neorealism. “If I hadn’t become a director,” Antonioni once said, “I would have been an architect, or maybe a painter. I think I’m someone who has things to show rather than things to say.”

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