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Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912-2007
July 31, 2007

Okay, a day after noting the passing of the renowned Ingmar Bergman, I’m back to pay a small tribute to another one of the greats of the international cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni, who died yesterday at the age of 94. Arguably too avant-garde and impenetrable to make his a major mainstream

filmmaker in the world cinema forum (that slot remains reserved for Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and India’s Satyajit Ray), Antonioni was nonetheless a highly respected filmmaker in all quarters. His films were carefully crafted affairs, meticulously shot and deliberately paced to put forth themes that he returned to over and over again—isolation, ennui and the nature of an ever-changing reality wherein there lies an infinite number of possibilities. So many, in fact, that one can attempt to take them all in without moving an inch or blinking an eye. “All one has to do is to keep one's eyes open: everything becomes full of meaning; everything cries out to be interpreted, reproduced,” Antonioni once said.

 

Cool.

 

For my money, and international cinema aficionados can fight about this one until the cinema’s digital images begin to fade away (is that possible?), Antonioni’s films of the Sixties were—and still are--among the coolest of arthouse theatrical experiences. Seeing his films in the theater --the movies in his highly regarded trilogy--L’Avventura, L’Eclisse and La Notte--or his first color entry Red Desert—is a genuinely heady old time. And we’re talking heady before the era of hallucinogens came into play. (A few years later, said hallucinogens did some nice aiding and abetting to the theatrical adventures that were Antonioni’s first English language film Blow-Up (https://www.videobusinesss.com/article/CA615157.html), the Pink Floyd-scored Zabriskie Point and The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson.) Now, you’re not going to hear me say that that these films shouldn’t be watched on DVD (hell, with today’s home theater systems, all your senses have a better chance of blooming then they probably did in the crumbling arthouses of the Sixties and Seventies), but the communal feeling of watching Antonioni’s elegantly elliptical films in a rep house wherein the lights come up and everyone starts to emerge from collective dream scratching there heads is quite a delightful experience. 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on July 31, 2007 | Comments (1)