[NYTr] Director Antonioni Dies at 94; Same Day as Ingmar Bergman

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Jul 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/movies/31cnd-antonio.html

Michelangelo Antonioni, Director, Dies at 94

By RICK LYMAN

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly depictions of
alienation were cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s,
inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion,
died on Monday at his home in Rome, Italian news media reported today.
He was 94. He died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish
filmmaker who died at his home in Sweden earlier Monday..

“With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been
lost, but also a master of the modern screen,” said the mayor of Rome,
Walter Veltroni. His office said it was making plans for Mr.
Antonioni’s body to lie in state on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a
time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an
intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously
difficult films spurred long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk
cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais
and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by
camera-wielding cinephiles demanding to know what on earth they meant
by their latest outrage.

Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blowup,” a 1966 drama set in
Swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that
a photograph he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, hidden
in the background, evidence of a murder. But his true, lasting
contribution to cinema resides in an earlier trilogy — “L’Avventura” in
1959, “La Notte” in 1960 and “L’Eclisse” in 1962 — which explores the
filmmaker’s tormented central vision that people had become emotionally
unglued from one another.

This vision of the apartness of people was expressed near the end of
“La Notte,” when his star Monica Vitti observes, “Each time I have
tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

In a generation of rule-breakers, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most
subversive and venerated. He challenged moviegoers with an intense
focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for such
mainstream conventions as plot, pacing and clarity. He would raise
questions and never answer them, have his characters act in
self-destructive ways and fail to explain why, and hold his shots so
long that the actors sometimes slipped out of character.

It was all part of the director’s design. As Mr. Antonioni explained,
“The after-effects of an emotion scene, it had occurred to me, might
have meaning, too, both on the actor and on the psychological
advancement of the character.”

Mr. Antonioni broke other conventions, too. Many of his cuts, scene
lengths and camera movements were highly idiosyncratic, and he
frequently posed his characters in a highly formalized way. He employed
point-of-view shots only rarely, a practice that helped erect an
emotional shield between the audience and his puzzling characters.

“What is impressive about Antonioni’s films is not that they are good,”
the film scholar Seymour Chatman wrote. “But that they have been made
at all.”

Perhaps the defining moment in Mr. Antonioni’s career came on the night
“LAvventura” was screened at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Many in the
audience walked out and there were numerous boos, catcalls and
whistles. The director and Monica Vitti thought their careers were over.

But later that night, Roberto Rossellini and a group of other
influential filmmakers and critics drafted a statement which they
released the following morning. “Aware of the exceptional importance of
Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, ‘L’Avventura,’ and appalled by the
displays of hostility it has aroused, the undersigned critics and
members of the profession are anxious to express their admiration for
the maker of this film,” they wrote.

One of the great legends of iconoclastic filmmaking — how being booed
at Cannes could become a badge of honor — was born.

“L’Avventura” went on to win the festival’s Special Jury Prize and
become an international box-office hit, spurring furious debate. Some
found the film pointless; others read reams of meaning into its languid
predicaments. Mr. Antonioni’s international reputation was made.

The next year, Sight and Sound, the influential British film magazine,
polled 70 leading critics from around the world and they not only
endorsed “L’Avventura,” but they also chose it as the second-greatest
film ever made, just behind “Citizen Kane.’

After burnishing his reputation in the early 1960s, Mr. Antonioni
surprised many by trying to make movies with Hollywood’s backing. More
surprising, perhaps, was that he then had his greatest commercial
success with “Blowup” in 1966.

“My subjects are, in a very general sense, autobiographical,” he once
wrote. “The story is first built through discussions with a
collaborator. In the case of “L’Eclisse,” the discussions went on for
four months. The writing was then done, by myself, taking perhaps
fifteen days. My scripts are not formal screenplays, but rather
dialogue for the actors and a series of notes to the director. When
shooting begins, there is invariably a great amount of changing. When I
go on the set of a scene, I insist on remaining alone for at least
twenty minutes. I have no preconceived ideas of how the scene should be
done, but wait instead for the ideas to come that will tell me how to
begin.”

The world of an Antonioni film “is a world of people alienated from one
another,” wrote Andrew Turner in his book “World Film
Directors” (1968). “Their actions have no meaning or coherence, and
even the most fundamental of emotions, love, seems unsustainable.’

Interviewers also found Mr. Antonioni to be a cool, combative subject.
“Even when he is telling stories about himself, Antonioni’s face
remains set in its habitually serious expression,” Melton S. Davis
wrote in a 1964 profile for The New York Times Magazine. “Precise in
manner, conservative in dress and quiet in speech, he could be taken
for a banker or art dealer recounting an unfortunate business deal.”

But Mr. Antonioni could also be graciously charming. Sometimes,
interviewers said, the director’s shrewd green eyes would soften and
his lips would curl into a smile that some described as ironic, others
as chilly.

Michaelangelo Antonioni was born on September 29,1912 into a well-to-do
family of landowners in Ferrara, in northern Italy, a town that he
described as a “marvelous little city on the Paduan plain, antique and
silent.” Around the age of ten, his family remembered, Michelangelo
began to design puppets and to build model sets for them. Later, as a
teenager, he became interested in oil painting, favoring portraits to
landscapes.

He attended the University of Bologna and earned a degree in economics
and commerce in 1935. But it was at the university that he also began
to write stories and plays and to direct some of them. He was a founder
of the university’s theatrical troupe and one of the its leading tennis
champions. He also wrote scathing reviews of both American and Italian
genre films for the local paper, and decided to try his own hand at
filmmaking.

Mr. Antonioni wanted to make a realistic documentary about the local
insane asylum. The patients helped him set up the equipment. Then, he
turned on the bright floodlights.

The patients went berserk, he later wrote, “and their faces — which
before had been calm — became convulsed and devastated. And then it was
our turn to be petrified. The cameraman did not even have the strength
to stop his machine, nor was I capable of giving any orders whatever.
It was the director of the asylum who finally cried, “Stop! Lights
out!” And in the half-darkened room we could see a swarm of bodies
twisting as if in the last throes of a death agony.”

Mr. Antonioni decided to give up filmmaking.

In 1940, at the age of 27, he moved to Rome to work as a secretary to
Count Vittori Cini. The job didn’t last long. He worked as a bank
teller and joined the staff of Cinema magazine, edited by Benito
Mussolini’s son, Vittorio. During this period, Mr. Antonioni dropped
his aversion to filmmaking and took classes at the Institute of
Experimental Filmmaking. His wrote some screenplays, including “Un
Pilota Ritorna” (The Return of the Pilot) in 1942 in collaboration with
another budding director, Roberto Rossellini.

In 1943, Mr. Antonioni returned to Ferrara and found a local merchant
willing to bankroll his first film, a documentary called “Gente del
Po” (People of the Po Valley), about the wretched lives of local
fishermen. The German occupying forces destroyed much of the footage,
though a few scraps survived and became a nine-minute curtain-raiser at
the 1947 Venice Film Festival for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.”

After the war, Mr. Antonioni wrote more film criticism and continued
making short documentaries. All the while he became increasingly
skeptical about the neo-realist movement, which dominated Italian
filmmaking, and its relentless focus on substandard social conditions.
He yearned to look beyond such things and into the hearts of
individuals. “His films were about street sweepers, not street
sweeping,” is the way the film critic Robert Haller put it. But no one
would let him make the kind of films he wanted to make.

“For ten years, the movies forced me not to use ideas but empty words,
cleverness, business sense, patience, stratagems,” Mr. Antonioni wrote
in an introduction to a 1963 collection of his screenplays. “I am so
scantily blessed with such gifts that I recall that period as being the
most painful one in my life.’

At age 38, Mr. Antonioni found backing for his most ambitious,
non-documentary project, “Cronaca di un Amore” (Story of a Love).
Ostensibly about a man and woman plotting to kill her husband, it
turned out to be the earliest example of Mr. Antonioni’s approach. In
the film, the husband dies, but it is unclear whether he was murdered,
committed suicide or died by accident. This whole plot line vanishes
and the film, instead, focuses on the lover’s emotions.

As with later Antonioni films, the settings were stark, the scenes
fussily composed, the shots held a few beats longer than necessary. The
film won the Grand Prix International at the Festival of Punta del Este
in 1951.

In 1954, his 12-year marriage to the former Letizia Balboni fell apart.
She later told interviewers that the director had become increasingly
remote. “We lived in silence,” she said. “We reached the point where we
communicated with each other only through the characters he created and
about whom he wanted my advice. He has only one way of expressing
himself: His work. What he does is have his actors live out emotional
crises in his films, by proxy living out the crises in his own life.’

Mr. Antonioni sank into a deep depression. His insomnia worsened. Often
he spent the early morning hours writing screenplays.

In 1955, at the height of this crisis, Mr. Antonioni had his first
important artistic triumph. “Le Amiche” (The Girlfriends)” was about
the mundane, loveless lives of a group of middle-class women in Turin.
It won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Mr. Antonioni began experimenting more with improvisation on the set.
“It’s only when I press my eye against the camera and begin to move the
actors that I get an exact idea of the scene,” he wrote. He used this
technique extensively in “Il Grido (The Outcry)” in 1957, probably the
grimmest of his films.

It was while shooting “Il Grido” that Mr. Antonioni met a young stage
actress named Monica Vitti, who would become his greatest and most
enduring star, and his almost constant companion during much of the
“60s.

For two years, Mr. Antonioni could not find a producer to back him.
Finally, in 1959, he found someone and finished a screenplay that had
been burning in the back of his mind for a long time. But “L’Avventura”
almost died before it was born. Chronically short of money, his
producer eventually pulled out of the project just as Mr. Antonioni and
the actors were working on a craggy island near Sicily.

“It had gotten to the point where there was no food,” Mr. Antonioni
remembered. “One crew deserted us. We got hold of another crew and
they, too, left. I had 20,000 meters of film and the actors stayed, so
I carried the camera on my back and continued shooting.” Eventually, a
new producer appeared.

“L’Avventura” proved to be the turning point in his career and is
widely regarded as Mr. Antonioni’s masterpiece.

As with most of Mr. Antonioni’s films, it focuses on the comfortable,
enervated lives of well-to-do Italians, in this case a group of friends
on a yachting trip. Without warning, during a visit to a wave-thrashed
atoll, one of them, an emotionally distraught woman named Anna, simply
vanishes. Had she drowned herself because her lover, Sandro (Gabriele
Ferzetti), seemed in no hurry to marry her? Had she hurled herself off
a cliff in a fit of ennui? Had she been swallowed by the shark she
claimed to have seen? Or had she fled on another boat?

The small island is searched. It rains. Police arrive. Then, gradually,
Sandro develops an attraction to Anna’s best friend, Claudia (Ms.
Vitti). She resists, then warms to him. Eventually, they stop
mentioning Anna at all. The search is forgotten. Sandro betrays
Claudia, for no apparent reason. We never discover what happened to
Anna.

In “L’Avventura,” Mr. Antonioni’s singular technique can be seen in
full flower. “The overwhelming sense of estrangement conveyed by
“L’Avventura” is as much a product of the style of the movie as of its
events or dialogue,” Mr. Turner wrote.

The director rapidly found backing for his next two films, which
further explored the themes of alienation he introduced in
“L’Avventura” and which he later said were meant to be seen as a
trilogy.

In “La Notte” (The Night),” Marcello Mastroianni plays an author with
writer’s block suffering through his loveless marriage to Jeanne
Moreau. He meets a young woman at a party, played by Ms. Vitti, who he
believes personifies the creativity that has abandoned him. The film
won the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival.

“L’Eclisse” (The Eclipse)” most directly addressed the alienating
effects of material wealth, following the love affair of a young woman
of simple tastes, Ms. Vitti again, and a money-hungry stockbroker
(Alain Delon).

The film’s ending is much discussed. Abandoning the principal
characters, the film closes with a montage several minutes long
composed of 58 shots, most of them on or near a street corner where the
lovers used to meet. Water seeps from a barrel. The brakes on a bus
screech. A fountain is turned off. An airplane zooms overhead. Finally,
with the street corner dark and empty, the camera zooms in on the
white, annihilating glare of a streetlight. The end.

Mr. Antonioni said he intended the ending to show “the eclipse of all
feelings,” and saw it as a coda both to the film and to the entire
trilogy. But he also wanted different people to read different meanings
into his work. “There may be meanings, but they are different for all
of us,” he told an interviewer.

In 1964, Mr. Antonioni made his first color film, “Il Deserto Rosso
(Red Desert)” with Richard Harris. It, too, starred Ms. Vitti, as a
woman coming gradually unhinged. To mirror her mental state, the
director used color in very unusual ways, having houses and even trees
painted bright colors and then changing those colors from scene to
scene.

By the mid-’60s, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most famous and
controversial film directors in the world; his movies were screened
regularly on the global festival circuit and the auteur was the subject
of countless essays and magazine articles. Inevitably, a Hollywood
studio, in this case MGM, came calling. Not so inevitably, Mr.
Antonioni welcomed them, signing a three-picture deal.

“Blow-Up” was his first effort for the studio. Filmed in English, with
the British stars David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave in the hip milieu
of the swinging London fashion scene, “Blow-Up” became the director’s
biggest hit. It was also, stylistically, different from his previous
films, more conventionally plotted and faster-paced, though still
fundamentally ambiguous.

Following its commercial and critical success, Mr. Antonioni came to
America to make his first big-budget film, and chose the student
protest movement as his subject. “Zabriskie Point” (1970) was the
result and it was a disaster.

Though some foreign critics praised the film, it was almost universally
panned in the United States. “To many critics, it seemed as if the
director, who had begun the decade in absolute control of his medium,
was ending it in something approaching total confusion,” Mr. Turner
wrote.

“Zabriskie Point” was a box-office flop for MGM, one of the biggest
financial failures of its day. Mr. Antonioni was devastated and, in
many ways, his career never recovered. Certainly, his most fertile
creative period was over. He had made six films in the 1960s, many of
them regarded as masterpieces, but would make only three more films in
the ensuing quarter-century.

But Mr. Antonioni recaptured some of his previous critical respect with
1975’s “The Passenger,” starring Jack Nicholson as a reporter in North
Africa who assumes the identity of a gun-runner. The film closes with a
famous, 10-minute continuous tracking shot in which Mr. Nicholson is
seen in his hotel room, waiting to be killed. The camera pulls out of
the room and meanders through the courtyard. People and objects move in
and out of the seamless shot before the camera comes full circle and
re-enters the hotel room to find Mr. Nicholson dead. “ ‘The Passenger’
leaves no doubt about Antonioni’s mastery,” wrote the film critic David
Thomson, who called it “one of the great films of the ‘70s.”

Following “The Passenger,” Mr. Antonioni announced he wanted to take
some time to study new technologies and spent five years doing so,
before Ms. Vitti asked him to return to directing with a 1980 Italian
television film called “Il Mistery di Oberwald” (The Mystery of
Oberwald).” Shot on videotape and transferred to film, it was
substantially lighter than his previous works. This, he said, allowed
him to “escape from the difficulty of moral and esthetic commitment,
from the obsessive desire to express oneself.” It was awarded a silver
ribbon for visual effects at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, but made
little international impact.

Mr. Antonioni made his final commercial film, “Identificazione di una
donna” (Identification of a Woman) in 1982, about a man who has affairs
with two women following the death of his wife. It won a Grand Prix at
the Cannes festival that year.

In 1985, while working on a film adaptation of a short story he had
written in 1976, Mr. Antonioni suffered a stroke and the project was
put aside. He married the next year for the second time, to the former
Enrica Fico, and they lived quietly in an apartment in Rome. She was at
his side when he died, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. He had no
children, The Associated Press reported.

After the stroke, Mr. Antonioni worked on an Italian television
documentary built around the 1990 World Cup soccer championship, but
did not work on a feature film again until 1995 when Italian producers
lured him out of retirement to make “Beyond the Clouds,” based on a
book of his stories. Because of Mr. Antonioni’s infirmity, though,
German director Wim Wenders was brought in to help and is listed as its
co-director.

Since his stroke, Mr. Antonioni had difficulty speaking more than a few
words at a time, so much of the work was done by his wife, Enrica, who
energetically interpreted the director’s demands. The film starred
Jeanne Moreau and John Malkovich. The reemergence of Mr. Antonioni
spurred the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to present him
with a Lifetime Achievment Award in 1995.

Mr. Antonioni began directing again in his 90s. He collaborated with
Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director, on a
trilogy about love and sexuality called Eros, which was released in
2004. He also made a short film called Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo. To
his champions, like David Thomson, “the predicament of the world’s
greatest living filmmaker unable to work is a fit subject for one of
his mediations.”

For Mr. Thomson, “The enigmas in Antonioni’s work are as subject to
time as monuments are to erosion, and the achievements of some films
can offset or explain the apparent, or early, limits of others. For
example, ‘The Passenger’ helped us to see the longing for escape and
space in ‘L’Avventura’ and illuminated the persistence of life at the
end of ‘L’EcLisse.’ I suspect that Antonioni’s best films will continue
to grow and shift, like dunes in the centuries of desert. In that
process, if there are eyes left to look, he will become a standard for
beauty.”

But for others Mr. Antonioni remained not only enigmatic, but also
unreachable to the end.

One interviewer asked him to look back over his life. “In a world
without film, what would you have made?” he was asked.

Mr. Antonioni replied: “Film.”

[Christine Hauser and Graham Bowley contributed reporting for this
article.]