Italian film legend Antonioni dies aged 94
Film legend Michelangelo Antonioni, director of the 1960s hit "Blow Up" and one of the last figures of Italy`s golden age of cinema, has died at age 94, his family said Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT
Antonioni, who made only about 20 films, died at his home in Rome on Monday night with his wife Enrica Fico by his side, the ANSA news agency reported.
His body is to lie in state in the elegant Sala della Protomoteca at Rome`s city hall, the Campidoglio, on Wednesday morning to allow friends and colleagues to pay their last respects.
Antonioni will be buried at his home town, in the affluent northern city of Ferrara on Thursday, the town hall there said in a statement.
Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni was among the first to pay tribute to Antonioni, saying that he was "not only one of the greatest living directors, but also a master of modern cinema.
"Thanks to Antonioni`s cinema, we had another view of reality, another way to look at the face of a woman, the design of a car, even a cloud was not the same thing after having seen his films."
Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli hailed Antonioni as a "lucid and very sensitive intellectual (who) was an acute observer of the ills of the 20th century... His disappearance closes a historical cycle of Italian cinema."
France`s former culture minister Jack Lang hailed Antonioni as a "giant of world cinema." The late director "revolutionised the language of cinema by reintroducing literary intelligence to it," Lang told ANSA in an interview.
As culture minister, Lang made Antonioni a commander of arts and letters in 1993.
Director Paolo Virzi said Antonioni was "an important reference for cinema and culture, and especially an innovator of language," and made cinema "more adult."
French cinema expert Aldo Tassone told AFP that both Antonioni and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who also died Monday, interpreted "contemporary anguish (and) emotional alienation in the post-war world."
In addition to "Blow Up", made in England in 1966, Antonioni`s major films included "L`Avventura" ("The Adventure") in 1960, and his 1975 work "The Passenger," starring Jack Nicholson.
"Blow Up" won Antonioni the Palme d`Or at the Cannes film festival in 1967, while the Venice film festival honoured him with the Golden Lion for "Il Deserto Rosso" (The Red Desert) in 1964 and a career Golden Lion in 1983, followed two years later by a career Oscar.
His "Zabriskie Point" -- a 1969 drama about a young man who steals a plane and flies it with his girlfriend into the desert of Death Valley in California against a sound track including numbers by Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones -- was panned by critics but seen at the time as a classic statement of counter-culture values.
Born in Ferrara on September 29, 1912, into a well-to-do family, Antonioni excelled in economics at the University of Bologna.
He started out as a film critic for a local magazine before moving to Rome to study at the Experimental Cinema Centre and to work for Cinema magazine, both considered centres of resistance to fascism.
By 1942 he was in Paris, where he assisted Marcel Carne in the making of "Les Visiteurs du Soir" before becoming the co-screenwriter of Roberto Rossellini`s "Un Pilota Ritorna" (A Pilot Returns).
The following year Antonioni made his first documentary, "The People of the Po" and went on to make his first full-length film, "Cronaca di un Amore" (Chronicle of a Love) in 1950.
It was with "Blow Up," the story of a fashion photographer who realises that he was the witness to a murder in London, that Antonioni achieved his greatest commercial and critical success.
Partially paralysed by a stroke in 1985, Antonioni was feted by the Italian cinema world when he turned 90 in 2002.
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