RIP: film director Michelangelo Antonioni

By at 7:43 am Tuesday, Jul 31


The 94-year-old director died in Rome on the same day as Ingmar Bergman:

Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cineastes demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.
Link to NYT obituary.

Image: Still from Blow-up (1966), my favorite Antonioni movie (with Vanessa Redgrave, David Hemmings, and Jimmy Page/Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds). IMDB, Wikipedia, Amazon.

A video search at Google turns up lots of clips from the film, and the original trailer.

Xeni Jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.