Film director best known for 'Blowup'

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director who depicted the emotional alienation of Italy’s postwar generation in films such as L’Avventura and La Notte but achieved his greatest popular success with Blowup, an enigmatic tale set in “swinging” London of the 1960s, has died. He was 94.

Antonioni, who suffered a debilitating stroke in 1985 that severely limited his ability to speak, died at his home in Rome on Monday evening, according to Italy’s ANSA news agency.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said Tuesday that Italy had “lost one of cinema’s greatest protagonists and one of the greatest explorers of expression in the 20th century.”

For many American filmgoers, Antonioni might be best remembered for his English-language films Blowup, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, which starred Jack Nicholson.

As a director, Antonioni was in a ranking “by himself,” Nicholson said Tuesday. “I don’t know how to put this. He’s just a maestro, and everybody loved him.”

Describing Antonioni as “a father figure to me as a few other people I’ve worked with somehow became,” Nicholson said they had great affection for one another. “He was a man of joy and impeccable taste,” he said. “His whole life was dedicated to modestly being a brilliant artist.”

Blowup, Antonioni’s 1966 film about a London fashion photographer (David Hemmings) who discovers he inadvertently might have captured a murder in a park while surreptitiously shooting pictures of a tryst between a young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and an older man, was the director’s first English-language film.

An imaginary tennis game played by white-faced mimes at the end of the film, which film scholars say symbolizes the difference between illusion and reality and whether a murder even occurred, has been described as “one of the defining moments of 1960s cinema.”

The film earned Antonioni Oscar nominations for best director and screenplay.

The Passenger, his 1975 suspense drama starring Jack Nicholson as a disillusioned TV journalist in Africa to cover a civil war and who assumes the identity of a dead man in his hotel who turns out to have been a gunrunner, has been called one of the great films of the 1970s.

A former film critic and documentarian, Antonioni had a decade of feature filmmaking behind him when he achieved international renown in 1960 with L’Avventura (The Adventure). It is the first in a loose trilogy of acclaimed films that established the director-screenwriter as one of the world’s most enigmatic and innovative movie makers: one known for his stylistic, technical and thematic risk-taking.

In L’Avventura, a young woman (Lea Massari), disappears on a yachting trip to a volcanic Sicilian island, and her lover and best friend (Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti) are among the group of friends who join in the search.

But Antonioni defies movie narrative conventions and leaves the woman’s disappearance unresolved: It remains a mystery, and she is virtually forgotten after the search is abandoned and her lover and best friend begin a relationship of their own.

Antonioni’s three cinematic parables of alienation — L’Avventura, La Notte (The Night, 1961) and L’Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) — marked what film historian Andrew Turner has called the discovery of a “new cinematic language” and are “among the truly extraordinary achievements of postwar cinema.”

Antonioni’s 1964 film Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert), his first in color, had a similar style and themes, which he called the “spiritual aridity” and “moral coldness” of Italian society after World War II. The Red Desert, also starring Vitti, was notable for Antonioni’s use of color: Rooms, streets, trees and even apples were painted and repainted different colors to reflect the neurotic main character’s unbalanced emotional state.

But his work was not everyone’s cup of espresso.

L’Avventura was famously booed and hissed at when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 — members of the audience reportedly even yelled ”cut!“ when they thought shots lasted too long — although the film won the Special Jury Prize and went on to become a worldwide box office hit. But many moviegoers complained that Antonioni’s films were too slow, too intellectual and too vague, thus prompting the term “Antonioniennui.”

In 1982, the director’s drama Identification of a Woman, about a film director in search of “the ideal woman” for a movie, generated negative critical reaction and failed to receive U.S. distribution. Three years later, he suffered the debilitating stroke that paralyzed his right side and severely limited his ability to speak.

“After the stroke, he was so bored, so unhappy,“ his wife, Enrica, told The New York Times a decade later. “He’s a man of enormous energy, and there was nothing for him to do.”

The once-divorced Antonioni married Enrica Fico in 1986, and she is his only survivor, since he had no children. A graduate of an art school in Milan, she had met him in Rome in 1971 after asking an artist friend if he knew anyone in Rome who might help her find work. Antonioni offered her a job as a wardrobe assistant on his new film, and their personal relationship began.

After Antonioni’s stroke, Enrica is said to have become the inspiration for his rehabilitation. Through the efforts of his wife and several French producers, Antonioni returned to filmmaking with Beyond the Clouds, a 1995 European-made quartet of love stories based on his 1983 collection of undeveloped film ideas, Bowling Alley on the Tiber.

When insurance companies refused to guarantee the film because of Antonioni’s health problems, the producers hired director Wim Wenders as a standby. Wenders wound up directing the linking episodes in the film featuring a film director narrator played by John Malkovich.

The film had its world premiere at the annual American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles in 1995, the same year Antonioni received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.

“Most movies celebrate the ways we connect with one another,” Nicholson said in his introduction at the Academy Awards ceremony. “Films by this master mourn the failures to connect.”