Michelangelo Antonioni Is Dead

Still from 'Blow-Up' (1966)

7/30/07 is going to go down as a black day for cineastes everywhere. On the same day that Ingmar Bergman passed into history, another legendary director, Michelangelo Antonioni, died in Rome at the age of 94. Antonioni was part of a generation of pioneers including Rossellini, Pasolini, Visconti, and Fellini that elevated Italian film-making to the forefront of global cinema during the 1950s and '60s. His two landmark films 1960's L'Avventura (The Adventure) and 1966's Blow-Up pushed the medium into more expressionistic territory, exploiting the uniquely visual nature of cinema to loose himself from the strict demands of narrative storytelling. Antonioni, along with Jean-Luc Godard and (again) Federico Fellini, realized the hallucinogenic possibilities posited by critic Alexandre Astruc when he advanced his theory of the camera-stylo (camera-as-pen), developing a signature style that remains the lingua franca of the cinematic avant-garde (e.g. David Lynch, Guy Maddin, David Gordon Green).

Mr. Antonioni's obituary in the New York Times may be accessed here.

Update: In observance of Mr. Antonioni's death, the Village Voice has re-published on its website an outstanding survey of the his career penned by critic J. Hoberman in anticipation of last year's retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.