Michelangelo Antonioni

Started by (kelvin), April 12, 2003, 05:23:31 PM

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Pubrick

in the middle of exams. great.

under the paving stones.

children with angels

Okay, now this is just getting eerie and very, very sad...

Blow-Up director Antonioni dies 
Source: BBC

Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, renowned for his 1966 release Blow-Up, has died aged 94.
He gained two Oscar nominations for the iconic release, and was awarded an honorary Academy Award for his life's work in 1995.

He was also nominated for the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d'Or, five times between 1960 and 1982.

The director died peacefully at home on Monday night, his wife, actress Enrica Fico, told La Repubblica newspaper.

Richard Mowe, a film writer and co-director of the Italian Film Festival UK, said Antonioni made productions "that were out of the conventional modes of expression".

  It's the last link with the great days of European art cinema

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Antonioni author
"He invented his own language of cinema - that's what made him very, very inventive," he said. "He didn't owe anything to anybody else. He was a total original."

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, the author of a book on Antonioni's film L'Avventura (The Adventure), described his works as being productions that "invite you to concentrate on them, like great music".

"It's extraordinary that he should die within a day of Ingmar Bergman - that's two greats in two days," said Mr Nowell-Smith, who also curated a season of his work at London's BFI Southbank.


Antonioni was married to Enrica Fico
"It's the last link with the great days of European art cinema."

Film critic Kim Newman paid tribute to the director, calling him an "important and fascinating film-maker".

Newman said Antonioni's best films were all concerned with "how awful Italian post-war society is, and how trivial and superficial everybody has become".

"But the films are so beautiful and the people in them are so gorgeous, you can't but feel, well, it would be really great to be alienated, lovelorn and miserable like that."

Fans will be able to pay their respects when Antonioni's body lies in state in the Sala della Protomoteca at Rome's city hall, the Campidoglio, on Wednesday morning.

The funeral will then take place in the director's home town of Ferrara, north-eastern Italy, on Thursday.

Antonioni was born in Ferrara in 1912 and released his debut feature, Story of A Love Affair, at the age of 38.


Blow-Up starred Vanessa Redgrave and David Hemmings
But he did not achieve international recognition until the mystery L'Avventura 10 years later in 1960.

In 1966, he signed a deal to make a trilogy of films for the English market with legendary Italian film producer Carlo Ponti.

The first was Blow-Up, in which a photographer appears to have uncovered a murder in his photos.

Shot in London, and starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave, it was his biggest international hit.

Antonioni captured the "flower power" era in 1970, filming Zabriskie Point in California, while Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson starred as a journalist in 1974 in Professione: Reporter (The Passenger).

In 1985, the director suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed, but he continued to work behind the camera. "Filming for me is living," he said.

His last cinematic release was 2004's The Dangerous Thread of Things, one part of a trilogy of short films released under the title Eros.

"Should I bring my own chains?"
"We always do..."

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Just Withnail

Quote from: Just Withnail on July 30, 2007, 03:41:29 PM
Few have made a contribution to film that equals [Bergman's]

...but Antonioni was one of them.

grand theft sparrow

I'm afraid to even say this but Godard had better take his vitamins and rest up this week.

And just to be on the safe side, can we please rename this thread?

A Matter Of Chance

I think this is really terrible. Despite his age and partial paralysis, like GT said about Bergman, it was good to know he was alive. Antonioni, Bergman and later Godard were the first to get me thinking sergiously about pictures. Sometimes I even feel like they taught me what I know about American cinema, too.

I am usually torn between Bergman and Antonioni. Bergman, to his credit, is void of a particular kind of romanticism that makes Antonioni so appealing, but I clearly see Antonioni is more interesting to me thematically, not to mention visually. I think L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse and Il Deserto Rosso is probably the best sequence of films made by a director other than maybe John Ford. A few years ago a teacher of mine gave me a book by him, 'That Bowling Alley on the Tiber', which is a collection of film ideas and little bits and pieces of his thoughts. It's sparse but nice.

Anyhow, there's no reason for me to choose right now. Their contributions are both nigh innumerable.

The Red Vine

We all knew this was gonna happen sooner or later. I just didn't expect it to be back to back. Antonioni meant a lot to me, my favorite of his maybe being The Passenger. Bergman has done so many masterworks I can't even begin to name them all. But I grew up with Cries and Whispers.

They both did incredible, groundbreaking work while they were here and I'm grateful for them.
"No, really. Just do it. You have some kind of weird reasons that are okay.">

Pubrick

it's no kubrick.

but damn it's close.

94 is a grand old age, i always thought of Identification of a Woman as his swan song anyway.. all the subsequent shorts notwithstanding.
under the paving stones.

Fernando

Quote from: Pubrick on July 31, 2007, 10:47:05 AM
it's no kubrick.

but damn it's close.

94 is a grand old age, i always thought of Identification of a Woman as his swan song anyway.. all the subsequent shorts notwithstanding.

I think the main difference between the passing of SK vs. Antonioni and Bergman is that with Kubrick it felt so untimely because he had so much more to give (even if it was only one more flim) and let's be honest, because of the huge gaps between his films everytime SK did one felt like such a grand event, it is beside the point who you think was better, these three filmmakers are regarded in the highest level.


As for Antonioni, I've only seen Blow Up and L' Avventura and the latter is one of the best films I've seen, truly a work of art; which other films of his would you ppl recommend?

RegularKarate

Totally crazy... on the same day.

What if Wes Craven and Brian De Palma die next and on the same day?

Gold Trumpet

What the fuck! This is creepy. Michelangelo Antonioni was well within proper age to pass on, but another film giant passes on. Unlike Bergman, Antonioni dominated film for mainly the 50s and 60s only. His films in the 70s weren't even close to his heights. Bergman was a master and while I don't think that highly of Wild Strawberries or The Seventh Seal, the breath of his accomplishments was always something to be amazed at.

What I would like is for Criterion to release his small releases late in life. He was always a working filmmaker and did smaller projects, but most of them will never see the light of day unless Criterion (or Eclipse) steps in.

Stanley Kubrick did pass on too early. He had one more film in him and I believe that would have been A.I. (Artificial Intellgience), but all deaths are a general sadness. 

For other quality Antonioni, I'd recommend L'Eclisse, La Notte and hope to god that Red Desert sees the light of day sometime.

MacGuffin

Film maker Antonioni buried in home town

Italian film maker Michelangelo Antonioni was buried at a quiet ceremony in his beloved home town of Ferrara on Thursday, with fellow director Wim Wenders among those who turned out to pay tribute.

Antonioni, known for films like the Oscar-nominated "Blowup" and "L'Avventura," was laid to rest after a ceremony at St. George's Basilica -- the church he was baptised in 94 years ago -- with more family than stars in attendance.

"It is difficult to sum up what the 'Maestro' has left," said Wenders, who co-directed "Al di la delle nuvole" (Beyond the Clouds) with the Italian film maker in 1995. "He certainly created a new image of man in the 20th century."

Antonioni died on Monday after a career spanning six decades. He won an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1995.

His deliberately slow-moving and oblique movies were not always popular hits but he was hailed as a founding father of European avant-garde cinema for his portrayals of modern angst and alienation.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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tpfkabi

i'm just now seeing this. i was reading up on Kubrick on imdb and thought someone had mixed Bergman and Antonioni up sinced they're both highly regarded directors in film.

i saw articles in the local paper on Bergman - i guess this is because Woody Allen championed him (he is quoted in every article i've read about Bergman's passing) - but none on Antonioni.

i've seen 3 Antonioni films, as opposed to 2 of Bergman's, and Antonioni's work seems to resonate a lot more with me for whatever reason. i definitely need to see more of both of them though.
I am Torgo. I take care of the place while the Master is away.

MacGuffin

Goodbye Maestro
A poem for Michelangelo Antonioni by his friend and collaborator Wim Wenders
Source: The Guardian


As sad as I was to learn

that you are gone,

as happy I was to hear

that you went in peace,

the way you wanted to,

conscious and clear.

Awareness and clarity,

perception and rigour

were your strengths,

and you relied on them

all through your life

and up to your death.

Modernity for you

was not a fleeting trend

but to fully seize

contemporary life

while anticipating

its possible futures.

I am proud

that I had the privilege

to meet you,

and that I was allowed to see

your mind and your eyes

at work.

You left us a treasure:

your writing, your painting

and your way of looking

that all condensed into

the timeless architecture

of your films.

Your experiences

that you shared with us

have shed a lasting light

on ours,

not just in cinema.

Grazie, Michelangelo.

Wim Wenders,

Sicily, July 31 2007
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

The Man Who Set Film Free
By MARTIN SCORSESE; New York Times

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.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Antonioni's museum shut
Personal archives in jeopardy
Source: Variety

Just two weeks after his death, helmer Michelangelo Antonioni's personal archives -- comprising several of his short films and thousands of photographs he took on set -- are in jeopardy due to plans to shutter the Antonioni museum in his native Ferrara, northern Italy.

The Antonioni museum closed a year ago for refurbishment but will not reopen due to lack of coin, according to a statement from Ferrara's mayor, Gaetano Sateriale, posted on the city's website on Monday.

"We can instead consider establishing a film museum in remembrance not just of Antonioni, but of many other directors who chose Ferrara as a movie location," Sateriale proposed. The surprise announcement. made so soon after Antonioni passed away -- on July 31 at age 94 -- angered the helmer's family and fans, as well as the Italian media. "Ferrara 'evicts' Antonioni" was the headline in La Repubblica.

The Antonioni archives were donated to the city in 1995, the year the helmer was honored with a lifetime achievement Oscar. The Antonioni museum opened the same year.

"The donation to the city of Ferrara is of great value," the director's niece, Elisabetta Antonioni, said on Tuesday, adding that the donation's terms stated clearly that the material be used for a museum dedicated "exclusively" to her uncle.

The archives, which are in storage, also include Antonioni drawings, his books on film, original posters of his features plus other memorabilia.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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