Director among avant-garde

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, July 31, 2007

ROME – In Michelangelo Antonioni’s movies, dialogue was sparse, shots lengthy and action minimal. This abstract style and a ruthless exploration of the malaise of modern man made the Italian director a darling of avant-garde cinema and a celebrated filmmaker across the world.

Antonioni died at 94 in his home, officials said Tuesday, after a career that spanned six decades and included an Oscar for lifetime achievement and movies that have become classics, among them “L’Avventura,” “Blow-Up” and “Zabriskie Point.”

His death Monday evening shortly after that of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman leaves European cinema without two of its most significant personalities.

“With Antonioni, cinema loses an author without whom it would not have been the same,” Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said.

Along with Federico Fellini, Antonioni helped turn postwar Italian film away from neorealism and toward a cinema more interested in exploring the alienation and fragile relationships of modern society than the down-to-earth troubles of life.

In the words of Jack Nicholson, one of his actors, Antonioni’s movies mourned people’s “failures to connect” in a cold, technological world.

Antonioni became a symbol of art-house cinema, if not a crowd pleaser. His critics found his films pretentious and aimless exercises with only vague significance.

A stroke in the mid-1980s significantly slowed down Antonioni’s activity, leaving him largely unable to speak.

“If I hadn’t become a director,” Antonioni once said, “I would have been an architect, or maybe a painter. In other words, I think I’m someone who has things to show rather than things to say.”

Antonioni’s breakthrough came in 1960 with “L’Avventura,” which explores existential malaise through a story based on a woman’s disappearance during a boating trip.

Halliwell’s Film Guide said the movie made the director “a hero of the highbrows.” If critics loved it, the audience hissed when the film was presented at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Many filmgoers were frustrated by the lack of action and the camera’s endless lingering on Monica Vitti, one of Antonioni’s favorite actresses.

“L’Avventura” opened a trilogy that continued with “La Notte” (1961) and “L’Eclisse” (1962).

The films flesh out Antonioni’s most distinctive themes: lovers who drift and fail to connect; unresolved stories played out in comfortable middle-class settings; an attempt to match cinematic visuals to the characters’ feelings.

Film historian Peter Bondanella wrote in “Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present” that Antonioni’s originality was in his break with conventional plots and “his ability to portray modern neurotic, alienated, and guilt-ridden characters whose emotional lives are sterile – or at least poorly developed – and who seem to be out of place in their environments.”