Italian film giant Antonioni dies
Peter Popham

Milan, July 31
Michelangelo Antonioni whose work became identified with the vanity and delirium of the late 1960s, thanks to his two foreign films, Blow-up and Zabriskie Point, died on Tuesday. He had been in retirement since suffering a devastating stroke in 1982. He was 95.

Despite the long silence, broken in 1995 by “Beyond the Clouds,” made with Wim Wenders, Antonioni remained a treasured figure. He was awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1995.

“It’s curious that he should die the day after Bergman,” commented the contemporary director Paolo Virzi. “The two men followed the same path, both gave expression not only to the interior world but to the spirit of the feminine character. Antonioni was undoubtedly one of the most feminist directors who ever lived.”

Born to a middle class family in Ferrara, in the north east of Italy, in 1912, Antonioni was a slow starter, graduating in economics and working in a bank before gravitating to journalism, writing film criticism for the local paper. His first experiment in filming was a disaster, but prefigured the unsettling style and subject matter of his mature work: around 1940 he set out to make a documentary in a mental hospital, but whenthe powerful set lights were turned on they sent the patients into delirium and the effort had to be abandoned.

He graduated from writing criticism to screenplays, then during the war years made his first films, all documentaries. The first, set in his own backyard, was Gente del Po, People of the Po: made in 1943 but not shown until 1947 when Antonioni managed to complete it despite much of the footage having been lost or damaged - an experience that demonstrated the grit and determination which were to prove useful later on.

Antonioni was out of sympathy with the neo-realists who dominated Italian cinema in the 1950s. Nor was he particularly interested in plot and character. Instead, starting from his first, bleak feature film, Cronaca di un Amore, he was preoccupied with the helplessness of human beings before their compulsions and the circumstances that confine them, with repetitiveness, the menace of both interior and exterior landscapes, the dumbness of people before their destinies.

The director made tough and challenging films throughout the 50s then really hit his stride in the following decade with L’Avventura, still a favourite of his aficionados. Suddenly he was famous and celebrated. The culmination of his success, though today it looks rather dated and foolish-looking, was his only film set in Britain, Blow-Up, about the accidental involvement of a fashion photographer played by David Hemmings in what may or may not have been a murder. A classic of the Flower Power years, it features cameos by The Yardbirds (featuring both the group’s guitarists, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page) and a very young Janet Street-Porter, dancing in stripey loon pants.

(By arrangement with Independent)