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Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)

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moremojo:
Yesterday, on July 30, 2007 (the very day that saw the demise of another towering figure of world cinema, Ingmar Bergman), the great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died at his home in Rome. He was ninety-four years old.

Antonioni was the director of one of the greatest films ever made, the 1962 masterpiece L'eclisse. This and Il deserto rosso (another fine effort, from 1964) remain the only two of his works I have seen as films (as opposed to television transmissions, VHS transfers, etc). But they alone ensure his towering stature among the true artists of the cinematic medium.

Given his great age and his long poor state of health, his death now comes as no surprise. But we students of the human condition have still lost an invaluable friend and mentor.

Front-Ranger:
I understand his work was also an inspiration to Ang Lee.


Another movie of his that was excellent was The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson.

moremojo:

--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on July 31, 2007, 04:13:50 pm ---Another movie of his that was excellent was The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson.
--- End quote ---
That movie was showing the same night (Saturday, 18 February 2006) I first went to see Brokeback Mountain. It had been specially re-released many years after having been kept under wraps by Jack Nicholson. My first thought while standing in line, and noticing the poster for Antonioni's film, was: Oh man, I want to see that film! But I went into Brokeback Mountain (which I did want to see too), and after that, for a long while, no other film but Ang Lee's masterpiece could command my attention!

Jeff Wrangler:
Thanks for posting this, Scott. I'd heard of Bergman's passing but not of Antonioni's. Probably would have missed this news altogether if not for you!

Casey Cornelius:
Hi gang,

Definitely a sad week for all lovers of cinema with the passing of both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. 

Front-Ranger is absolutely correct - around the time that Brokeback was released one of the New York Times articles or another trustworthy source had Ang Lee state in an interview that Antonioni was a major influence on his own film-making.  There are so many places in Brokeback I can barely count all of them
 where Ang Lee uses precisely Antonioni's technique of creating a significant moment or imducing a psychological response merely by the way he frames a face, divides the screen to show opposing/conflicting moods, or comments on something else in the frame by juxtaposing it with another significant object or portion of a landscape.   The Antonioni film which for me triggers the most visual associations with Brokeback is L'Aventura.

TWO examples:
1] the way Ang Lee and Rodrigo Prieto [not to forget the magnificent eyes and lenses of Rodrigo !] reveal so much about Ennis and Jack in the opening 'meeting scene' at Aguirre's trailer.  Ennis is shot full on, centered in the frame,
surrounded and hemmed in by the stark, flat, motionless background of grey wooden panels of the trailer, alternating with Jack shot against the multi-dimensional depth of windswept green fields, rustling trees and the blue sky.  The iconic final image of the film is a recapitulation of this same juxtaposition, but this time in the same frame - Ennis's flat wooden cupboard encapsulating the shrine of the shirts in the left half of the frame juxtaposed with the multi-dimensional depth of the windswept fields of grass and blue sky seen through the window on the right side of the frame.
2] the wonderful morning scene, early on Brokeback, where Ennis and his calm, docile horse tethered to a tree are captured in the left half of the frame while Jack struggles gamely with his crow-hopping Cigar Butt in the right half.

Every scene in the film shows a master film-maker at work, using techniques of European film genii in every detailed shot, precisely aligned for maximum effect without resorting to extraneous camera movement - saving camera moves for those moments of incredible significance which we've discussed in other threads.

A propos Ang Lee, it is synchronistic that Ingmar Bergman died a day earlier than Antonioni, for it is Bergman more than any other film-maker that Ang Lee identifies in interviews as the major influence on himself.  Ang Lee was enormously affected by Bergman's Virgin Spring and Lee is in point of fact interviewed and comments on the film in supplementary material in its recent Criterion Edition.

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