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 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.

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,”...