R.I.P. Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni:

“My habit of shooting rather long scenes was born spontaneously on the first day of filming Ceonaca di un Amore. Having the camera fixed to its stand immediately caused me real discomfort. I felt paralysed, as if I were being prevented from following closely the one thing in the film that interested me: I mean, the characters. The next day, I called for a dolly, and I began to follow the characters till I felt the need to move on to another exercise. For me, this was the best way to be real, to be true … I have never succeeded in composing a scene without having the camera with me, nor have I ever been able to make my characters talk in accordance with a pre-established script … I needed to see the characters, to see even their simplest gestures.”

Excerpt from David Thomson’s film encyclopedia:

Antonioni’s world of sentimental and metaphysical dismay ought to include just such a figure as himself: a man of vast intellectual sensibility and artistic aspiration; a film director capable of stripping people down to fragile skins that can hardly brush against one another without pain; but a visionary of emotional alienation, so morbidly convinced of the apartness of people that he sometimes ends by photographing figures in a landscape. In short, within a brief time span he veered from psychological exactness to abstraction. For if his suspicions of human dissolution are sound, then films are only an absurd response to the fretful human instinct for self-expression. Even if one cannot always share Antonioni’s torment, it has been an engrossing, if humorless, prospect to see him gradually immolate himself with doubts. He is his own character, turned away from us, speechless at what has been lost. As Monica Vitti sighs near the end of La Notte: “Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

And this, too:

The enigmas in Antonioni’s work are as subject to time as monuments are to erosion, and the achievements of some films can offset or explain the apparent, or early, limits of others. For example, The Passenger helped us see the longing for escape and space in L’Avventura, and illumined the persistence of life at the end of L’Eclisse. I suspect that Antonioni’s best films will continue to grow and shift, like dunes in the centuries of desert. In that process, if there are eyes left to look, he will becomes a standard for beauty.

Rest in peace. Here’s the NY Times obit

More: Reverse Shot’s essay on Antonioni


blowup.jpg

That’s my favorite shot from Blow-up – a movie where every shot is great

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1 Response to R.I.P. Michelangelo Antonioni

  1. Half Moon; dir: Bahman Ghobadi

    Half Moon, an absolutely wonderful film directed by Bahman Ghobadi, and with a cameo appearance by Hedye Tehrani, is a story about borders. Borders between countries and borders between life and death. The entire film takes place on the borderlands…

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