Michelangelo Antonioni

[mixed]

First of all, what a cool name! I just saw blowup yesterday and thought it was a fascinating and mysterious multi faceted film. Can't wait to see it again in a while. So many interpretations, a film so sparse yet at the same time thought provoking with hidden depths.

Now I wanna see L'avventura

[kiddo]

I agree with you on everything here. Have only seen Blow-up myself, and I find it great. Wanna see more of Antonioni. And as you said: What a name!

[captainofbeef]

I have only seen Passenger. And it is one of my favorites!

[Nomansvally]

I just love L'Avventura, and for others who loves this film I suggest watching Martin Scorsese's documentary "My Voyage To Italy!" He has alot of interesting things to say about Antonioni and especially The L'Avventura-La Notte-L'Eclisse triology!

BLowup is also a classic film, It's one of those films that you must think abit after the credits starts to roll... It's layered and metaphorical! Higly recommended! ;D

[meshuggeth]

I've only seen L'Avventura, but it is one of the bets films ever. I wills see The Passenger, Blow-Up and the rest of the trilogy.

[criterionmaster]

Blowup was on last night at 4 a.m but my dad loves the film so he taped it for me! Thank God, I can't wait.

[agentknight]

I want to see all of his movies that star Marcello Mastroianni.

[dontdigonswine]

One of my favorite directors already, and I've only seen Blowup and L'Avventura. I really love how he explores the depth of love through the hopelessness of the human spirit. And his cinematographer is a genius (not for sure who it is). His movies are a photography lover's dream. My next dvd buy will most likely be L'Eclisse. Can't wait, because Alain Delon is in it, and Le Samourai is one of my favs!

[Nomansvally]

These are the Michelangelo Antonioni films I've seen so far, and how I rank them:

1. Il Deserto Rosso (1964)
2. L'Avventura (1960)
3. Blow-up (1966)
4. Professione: reporter (1975)
5. Al di là delle nuvole (1995)

I own L'Eclisse and La Notte but have not seen 'em yet...
Can't wait though, it's just a matter of time!

[kiddo]

I've only seen Blow-up

.. Which is a shame. But Blow-up is amazing. One of the greatest shot films ever, and a very interesting theme running through the whole picture.

[agentknight]

The first half hour of the Passenger showed such immense promise, but it failed to live up this imo. Still, it scores pretty highly in my books because from the opening shot to about a half hour in it was absolutely perfect - total reliance on mood and character over plot or dialogue. Awesome stuff.

[criterionmaster]

I just watched Blow-Up, my first Antonioni, and it was absolutely fantastic. Obviously the already mentioned cinematography is stunning, it captures the 60’s. Within the first seconds of the film I was just so excited, it was just so 60’s! Two amazing scenes were, obviously the fight between the two girls. It was just so playful and awesome. Shot so well and of course the girls were gorgeous. Also

SPOILER: Click to show

the ending with the mimes playing tennis was outstanding. Then that overhead shot just blew me away.

Oh wait, I can’t forget about the scene with The Yardbirds, that is an awesome scene as well.

This will not be my last Antonioni that’s for sure. Where should I go next?

[dontdigonswine]

The only other Antonioni I've seen is L'Avventura, which is one of the most beautiful and haunting films I've seen. I can't decide which is better though, Blowup or L'Avventura.

[wkw]

RIP Michelangelo Antonioni


Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, Italian Director, Dies
By RICK LYMAN
Published: July 31, 2007
The New York Times

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly canticles 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 cineastes demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.

Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blow-Up,” 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 editing cuts, angles and camera movements were intentionally odd, 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. He fumbled, saw his audience and his celebrity dissipate, and came to make fewer and fewer films.

“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.’

End of Article

Jesus Christ they are falling like flies. First Bergman, now Antonioni. Goddard and Resnais better watch out too. RIP to one of the great pioneers of cinema.

[Clark Nova]

i'd put a 24-hour watch on Sidney Lumet, too.

[dontdigonswine]

Damn. This is my favorite director of all time. RIP

[misterbalco]

Oh my, dropping like flies. Im keeping my eye on Scorcese. RIP

[captainofbeef]

Jesus, RIP. Yet another long and full life though...

[criterionmaster]

holy christ, i cant believe another amazing director died. i really need to see more of this guys work. he didn't die the SAME DAY as bergman did he??

[captainofbeef]

^Yep, same day...

[criterionmaster]

wow, that is insane. and sad.