Michelangelo Antonioni R.I.P.

self correction: he was 94.
the master of alienation in cinema.

This is getting ridiculous.

FUCK.

RIP big man

It's all happenin, innit? RIP.

(The Pinefox and I once re-created the mimes' tennis match in Maryon Park, SE7. Can't remember who won.)

(From Blow Up, I mean)

the coincidence is amazing, there's lot in common to anotonioni and bergman.along with fellini,they were the breakthrough directors of cinema,pre-new wave, true modernists of their kind,classics.
antonini stands out a bit,cause his work,during the 60's and 70's was considerd be some as self indulgement,but i think his influence in the 90's and 2000's art cinema is bigger than bergman and fellini, and in perspective of time,his work looks much better,at least to myself.

Now this is really depressing as I didn't know all that much of Bergman!! RIP Antonioni :(

bergman and fellini were the main dudes of the '50s, they practically built what we think of as 'art cinema'. antonioni is known now more for his '60s stuff -- his late '50s films are little-seen. all of them had an 'international' phase. i think antonioni came out of that the best -- you can't front on 'the passenger' and 'blow up'. he has a more modern sensibility than those other dudes, imo.

As I bumped on the other Antonioni thread, this one really depresses me. Not to take away from Bergman, but Antonioni's films (the ones I've seen, anyway) rest about as high in my pantheon as anything.

yeah i agree.
blow up and the passenger are the best,hisearly 60's stuff are the problematic ones,(especially the trilogy with monica viti) but as i said,with the rise of the arty asian cinema especially, you can see them in different perspective.

This is a bit like Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd going on the same day in 1992, or Marc Bolan and Maria Callas in 1977. A little bit.

thread connection:"bergman and antonioni R.I.P" - "i hate wednsdays"

only thats it's tuesday,yeah

"WOODY ALLEN: `AM I NEXT?'"

replace with Godard

Aaagh, another one. Similarity with Bergman to me is the kind of icy, detached gaze on humanity. Neither of them (in their best work anyway) would rely on sentimentality as a cop-out. I still think Zabriskie Point was a bit of a misfire though, to say the least.

damn

"Similarity with Bergman to me is the kind of icy, detached gaze on humanity"

not always, with Bergman at least.
Bergman i think was more complicated than antonioni, and his work more varied.
antonioni,sometimes,made the same movie again and again, and he had this motivs that you can find in all of his movies (long shots,surroundings as metaphores,silence etc..).
bergman,used lots of elements,and he wasnt always abstract.

"WOODY ALLEN: `AM I NEXT?'"

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, July 31, 2007 10:59 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

cute, but one of these names is not like the other..

lol otm

one of these names just doesn't belong,
can you tell which name is not like the others
by the time I finish my song?

bergman, antonioni, reid, all the greats.

BUMMERZ

With the excepton of L'Avventura I found most of his films laughable, but then I finally saw The Passenger last year, and was suitably awed. When the same thing happend after screening Eclipse a few months ago, I changed my mind about the old man.

This is a bit like Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd going on the same day in 1992, or Marc Bolan and Maria Callas in 1977. A little bit.

What about Jim Henson and Sammy Davis Jr. in 1990? Or Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev in 1993?

that final long shot in The Passenger still boggles my mind. was shown as part of that alex cox Cinerama series a decade or two ago, haven't seen it since. (whither bbc2 film seasons like Cinerama?)

Moviedrome, not Cinerama.

RIP. my god. what a strange coincidence.

wtf?? i was thinking yesterday after i heard bergman died, "y'know, antonioni's not getting any younger, either..."

RIP :(

Fucking hell, it'll be brilliant wartime engineer Sir George Macfarlane next!

OMG

ugh. RIP.

RIP

(Passenger was never one of the moviedrome films (http://www.geocities.com/kurtodrome/drome.html) despite me being certain that alex cox introduced the showing i saw.)

Aw, I rented The Passenger a few months ago and never got around to watching it. I should probably see it again.

I once watched Blow Up (with Italian subtitles) at a fantastic small cinema in Florence.

By "see it again," I mean "rent it again." I never saw it the first time.

A huge loss. I read "My Time With Antonioni" earlier this year and it is obvious that he could still make a difference even in his advanced years. The Passenger is quite possibly my favourite film, but they're all brilliant, IMO. Watch his eloquent rant in Wim Wender's Cannes hotel room film to see why he is possibly the greatest genius to ever work in cinema.

Wenders'
Wenderses

i just watched the passenger again two or three weeks ago

RIP

Aw, I rented The Passenger a few months ago and never got around to watching it. I should probably see it again.

I'm not sure that it's worth it on DVD.

RIP

So, this year took Antonioni, Bergman, Yang and Altman.

Worst year ever for auteurism.

xpost

yeah maybe. though i would rent it, jaymc, coz how often do things like 'the passenger' even get theatrical play? he is possibly the only director where i've paid cashmoney to see his films on the big screen when i've already seen them at home.

:(

though i would rent it, jaymc, coz how often do things like 'the passenger' even get theatrical play?

Haha, it's playing in Chicago on Thursday. I won't be around, though. :(

wow! :-(

I'm going to go spray paint some grass green in homage.

Jack Nicholson owns the rights to The Passenger, and so far it's the only film he's ever recorded a commentary for - a pretty gd one, too

where is it playing, jaymc?

so far it's the only film he's ever recorded a commentary for - a pretty gd one, too

Yup, one of the best, period. He sounds like he's got strep throat too. What a trooper!

Kenan, it's at the Siskel Film Center as part of their monthlong Antonioni retrospective.

So ... Eric Rohmer tomorrow, then?

Actually, Resnais is alive, too, isn't he?

jaymc... you want to see The Passenger Thursday night? Save you a rental, anyway.

Haha, it's playing in Chicago on Thursday. I won't be around, though. :(

Must learn read.

Resnais is indeed alive.

wtf?? i was thinking yesterday after i heard bergman died, "y'know, antonioni's not getting any younger, either..."

Me too! RIP

Film directors be droppin'. Sembene and Yang too...

Guys, don't worry- Carl Dreyer is planning on bringing them all back, himself included.

My favorite.

Been kinda dazed today ... just rewatched 'Beyond The Clouds' in the theater last night. He's been in my mind constantly over the last month, rewatching a bunch of his films at the Siskel center. After 'Beyond the Clouds' last night, they showed the documentary that Enrica made about Michaelangelo and Wim Wenders working together on the film, when MA was 82. There's a great interview clip with his longtime co-writer / right-hand man Tonino Guerra says something like "Michaelangelo will always fight to make another film, drink another glass of wine, take another breath." I was thinking to myself wondering what he was up to right that second, when in actuality he was either dying or already dead, and none of us in the theater knew.

His films been a big part of my mindspace for so long. It'll be weird to think that he's not around. just feels like he was always lurking in the shadows, to pop-up releasing things like 'Beyond The Clouds' or 'Eros', flawed as they were. Or to even surprise with a beautiful little treasure like 'Michaelangelo Eye to Eye'.

Just in the last two weeks saw two films I've been waiting 15 years (since the *last* Antonioni retrospective at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago) to see -- his China documentary 'Chung Kuo China' and 'Identification of a Woman'. A friend of mine gave me the Facets vhs of 'Identification' about a decade ago, but I never watched it .. always held out to see it on the screen. It's great!! So is the China doc ... I was always a little scared of it -- a near four-hour documentary?? -- but it's so beautiful. it flows by. and it's filled with his unmistakable love of images, faces, architecture.

Saw 'Il Grido' for the fifth or sixth time, and of all the films, that one has definitely gained the most stature in my own mind. It was like seeing it anew. The sad thing was that I missed 'I Vinti' because that night I had to have dinner with work colleagues from out of town. Now the only film of his I have not seen, I hope I don't have to wait another 15 years for the opportunity to see it again.

anyway, I'm sad and gonna go bury myself in the Seymour Chatman book. ciao Maestro!

also *spoiler alert* but there are links to his two most lauded sequences, over at the 'Tube (that'd be the ending to 'L'Eclisse' and that breathtaking long take from 'The Passenger'.) I would never recommend watching them without seeing the preceding two hours leading up to both of them, but hey, they are there (..just turn down the sound on the dude who added music to 'L'Eclisse'..)

couple of months back, there was actually a link to one of his super rare early shorts -- the one about the textile factory -- but it looks like it's been taken down :(

I love Prokofiev's Sonata No. 7, but I have no idea what it's doing in that video of L'eclisse.

yeah.

on the other hand, there is also this over there ... (and you don't need to see the precedeing 100 minutes first)(although they are good! f the haters):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f8DbODGsUM

they are dedicating a street to him in Ferrara:

http://www.cronacacomune.it/index.phtml?id=2411

man, it's awesome to see Stormy Davis.

omg someone needs to do an emo remix of the ending to 'l'eclisse'.

i was about to curse out stormy but then saw the last part:

(and you don't need to see the precedeing 100 minutes first)(although they are good! f the haters)

also last night i wanted to do a frame capture of the house exploding and make a zabriskie point blingee with added myspace explosions, but i figured i had better things to do.

Yardbirds in Blow-Up

replace with Godard

-- Zeno, Tuesday, July 31, 2007 11:03 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Link

Actually, Laszlo Kovacs, a cinematographer who worked closely with Godard died this week too.

Fucked up few days for filmmakers. . ..

Did Laszlo Kovacs actually work with Godard or was his name just used as an alias by Belmondo in Breathless?

I've read it was a coincidence, Godard didn't even know Kovacs!

I love that Stephen Holden's thinkpiece in the time calls 'Blowup' the "shallow" hit. MA was better when he was shallow.

Frankly, I don't share enough of Antonioni's worldview to find him great, but 'L'Eclisse' and 'The Passenger' come closest to justifying his reputation. P Kael was onto something when she dissed "Come Dressed as the Sick Soul of Europe" films.

I think Laszlo Kovacs is a very common Hungarian name, like John Smith.

Re:Kovacs/Breathless- Jean-Paul Belmondo played a character named "Laszlo Kovacs" in Claude Chabrol's A Double Tour, which was filmed in the spring/summer of 1959. Belmondo's very next film was Breathless, and the name was revived as in-joke for Belmondo's alias. As an footnote, I'd like to point out that the name was revived again by Godard for Pierrot le Fou. That time it belonged to one of the characters who introduces themself to the camera before Belmondo and Anna Karina tell them a story.

Double RIP.

probably my favorite moment in cinema happens right after Alain Delon and Monica Vitti's seductive (but unfulfilled) romp around an abandoned apartment in L'eclisse. he's a financier, so he's taken the several phones in his house off the hook for her visit. when she leaves, he walks through the rooms of the house, placing each one back on its receiver. they start ringing one by one, and he just sort of stands there in silence as the cacophony builds, underscoring his ambivalence or whatever. sigh.

my dad, not at all a cineaste, actually introduced me to both of these filmmakers when i was young. growing up, we had a VHS copy of The Seventh Seal in the house, and he joked about not telling my catholic school teachers about it. that might have been the first movie i saw with subtitles. i actually haven't seen it since (whoa!), but the image that i recall most vividly (not in the sense of accuracy) is when von Sydow bumps the chess board and tries to get out of the game, saying he can't remember where the pieces were. Death says: "But I do..." i loved Bergman's comment in the Times obit about his feelings towards 'Fanny and Alexander,' relating it to a college crush and her Egyptian Prince.. I had no idea he made 60+ films. I'm sure not all of them are mandatory viewing, but of his more well-known films I still need to see: Hour of the Wolf, Smiles of a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage, Cries and Whispers, Shame, Saraband, and that Early Bergman collection that Criterion collection

"Blow-Up" is my dad's favorite film, I think because he used to be some swinging bachelor photographer (my older brother and I found a box of his old pictures stashed in his closet, and they were mainly of naked women covering their vaginas with water pitchers, or standing in front of a screen with a brick wall projected over them) and my dad rented it one night after we listened to some NPR segment about "The Sexiest Movies Ever Made," on which it had just placed first. (i don't know about that, but it might be the most fashionable movie ever made.) anyway, i think it bored me out of my young mind, but my dad got a huge kick out of the end tennis scene. my dad's always been encouraging in my theatre what-not, but i'm pretty sure this is how he perceives actors in general: a disingenuous bunch of assholes that come to the park to fuck with you. that seems about right.

my dad actually sent me the antonioni link. i was sitting next to my film student friend and we were both like, "NO WAY!"

then five seconds later i said, 'i really thought he died in, like, 1982,' and my friend said he though so, too haha

For what it's worth,here is the schedule for the Retrospective's tour stop in Houston. It starts on Thursday, August 30th--a day earlier than previously advertised--and runs through Sunday, October 7th. Thanks to the precedent set by last year's Fellinifest, multiple screenings for (some of) the more famous films have been arranged in advance this time.

Sarris, via GreenCine:

So when exactly did I tire of Antonioni to the point of Antonioniennui? I am not sure. It may have been about the time of The Red Desert (1964), which I disliked, and well before Blow-Up (1966), which I liked enormously, unlike the late Pauline Kael, who dismissed it with a yawn....

It suddenly strikes me that I have been writing two weeks about Bergman and Antonioni without ever using the word "eroticism." Antonioni himself once said, "Eroticism is the disease of our time." He may have meant that even sex was a casualty of the human failure to communicate with one another. Perhaps I have become too aware of all the gratuitous nudity and simulated copulation that masquerades as eroticism these days to embroil Bergman and Antonioni in the contemporary corruption of the term. Still, the men and women in their films crossed many frontiers of eroticism in their own time in search of love and identity and a more profound self-knowledge. They were never the hottest shows in town because of the cool intellects at work both behind and in front of the camera. Hence, the pain and poignancy of the soul was never lost sight of in even the steamiest carnal encounters.

http://www.nyobserver.com/2007/arrivederci-michelangelo-antonioni-adventure-winds

Cool intellectuals can't enjoy sex?

just not HOT sex.

Professor Marty:

The Man Who Set Film Free
By MARTIN SCORSESE

NINETEEN-SIXTY-ONE ... a long time ago. Almost 50 years. But the sensation of seeing “L’Avventura” for the first time is still with me, as if it had been yesterday.

Where did I see it? Was it at the Art Theater on Eighth Street? Or was it the Beekman? I don’t remember, but I do remember the charge that ran through me the first time I heard that opening musical theme — ominous, staccato, plucked out on strings, so simple, so stark, like the horns that announce the next tercio during a bullfight. And then, the movie. A Mediterranean cruise, bright sunshine, in black and white widescreen images unlike anything I’d ever seen — so precisely composed, accentuating and expressing ... what? A very strange type of discomfort. The characters were rich, beautiful in one way but, you might say, spiritually ugly. Who were they to me? Who would I be to them?

They arrived on an island. They split up, spread out, sunned themselves, bickered. And then, suddenly, the woman played by Lea Massari, who seemed to be the heroine, disappeared. From the lives of her fellow characters, and from the movie itself. Another great director did almost exactly the same thing around that time, in a very different kind of movie. But while Hitchcock showed us what happened to Janet Leigh in “Psycho,” Michelangelo Antonioni never explained what had happened to Massari’s Anna. Had she drowned? Had she fallen on the rocks? Had she escaped from her friends and begun a new life? We never found out.

Instead the film’s attention shifted to Anna’s friend Claudia, played by Monica Vitti, and her boyfriend Sandro, played by Gabriele Ferzetti. They started to search for Anna, and the picture seemed to become a kind of detective story. But right away our attention was drawn away from the mechanics of the search, by the camera and the way it moved. You never knew where it was going to go, who or what it was going to follow. In the same way the attentions of the characters drifted: toward the light, the heat, the sense of place. And then toward one another.

So it became a love story. But that dissolved too. Antonioni made us aware of something quite strange and uncomfortable, something that had never been seen in movies. His characters floated through life, from impulse to impulse, and everything was eventually revealed as a pretext: the search was a pretext for being together, and being together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their lives and gave them a kind of meaning.

The more I saw “L’Avventura” — and I went back many times — the more I realized that Antonioni’s visual language was keeping us focused on the rhythm of the world: the visual rhythms of light and dark, of architectural forms, of people positioned as figures in a landscape that always seemed terrifyingly vast. And there was also the tempo, which seemed to be in sync with the rhythm of time, moving slowly, inexorably, allowing what I eventually realized were the emotional shortcomings of the characters — Sandro’s frustration, Claudia’s self-deprecation — quietly to overwhelm them and push them into another “adventure,” and then another and another. Just like that opening theme, which kept climaxing and dissipating, climaxing and dissipating. Endlessly.

Where almost every other movie I’d seen wound things up, “L’Avventura” wound them down. The characters lacked either the will or the capacity for real self-awareness. They only had what passed for self-awareness, cloaking a flightiness and lethargy that was both childish and very real. And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realized something extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.

“L’Avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than “Breathless” or “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (made by two other modern masters, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, both of them still alive and working). Or “La Dolce Vita.” At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked “L’Avventura.” I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired “La Dolce Vita,” but I was challenged by “L’Avventura.” Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. (It was two years later when I caught up with Fellini again, and had the same kind of epiphany with “8 ½.”)

The people Antonioni was dealing with, quite similar to the people in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels (of which I later discovered that Antonioni was very fond), were about as foreign to my own life as it was possible to be. But in the end that seemed unimportant. I was mesmerized by “L’Avventura” and by Antonioni’s subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries — or rather the mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul. That’s why I kept going back. I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures, wandering through them. I still do.

Antonioni seemed to open up new possibilities with every movie. The last seven minutes of “L’Eclisse,” the third film in a loose trilogy he began with “L’Avventura” (the middle film was “La Notte”), were even more terrifying and eloquent than the final moments of the earlier picture. Alain Delon and Ms. Vitti make a date to meet, and neither of them show up. We start to see things — the lines of a crosswalk, a piece of wood floating in a barrel — and we begin to realize that we’re seeing the places they’ve been, empty of their presence. Gradually Antonioni brings us face to face with time and space, nothing more, nothing less. And they stare right back at us. It was frightening, and it was freeing. The possibilities of cinema were suddenly limitless.

We all witnessed wonders in Antonioni’s films — those that came after, and the extraordinary work he did before “L’Avventura,” pictures like “La Signora Senza Camelie,” “Le Amiche,” “Il Grido” and “Cronaca di un Amore,” which I discovered later. So many marvels — the painted landscapes (literally painted, long before CGI) of “Red Desert” and “Blowup,” and the photographic detective story in that later film, which ultimately led further and further away from the truth; the mind-expanding ending of “Zabriskie Point,” so reviled when it came out, in which the heroine imagines an explosion that sends the detritus of the Western world cascading across the screen in super slow motion and vivid color (for me Antonioni and Godard were, among other things, truly great modern painters); and the remarkable last shot of “The Passenger,” where the camera moves slowly out the window and into a courtyard, away from the drama of Jack Nicholson’s character and into the greater drama of wind, heat, light, the world unfolding in time.

I crossed paths with Antonioni a number of times over the years. Once we spent Thanksgiving together, after a very difficult period in my life, and I did my best to tell him how much it meant to me to have him with us. Later, after he’d had a stroke and lost the power of speech, I tried to help him get his project “The Crew” off the ground — a wonderful script written with his frequent collaborator Mark Peploe, unlike anything else he’d ever done, and I’m sorry it never happened.

But it was his images that I knew, much better than the man himself. Images that continue to haunt me, inspire me. To expand my sense of what it is to be alive in the world.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times

wow that's just great.