Michelangelo Antonioni, 94

Two cinema greats are gone in one day.

Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni has died at the age of 94. He passed away at his home in Rome Monday night.

While Antonioni has been pretty much non-functional since a 1985 stroke - and his recent films have been beyond dreadful - his work from L'Avventura to The Passenger are part of the canon of modern film art. He defined modern existentialist alienation with his bleak visual beauty in a tetraology of films with Monica Vitti (L'Avventuara (1960), La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962) and Il Deserto Rosso (1964)).

Even in Antonioni's English language pictures, he still had his finger firmly on what it was to be living at that exact time in history. A three picture deal with producer Carlo Ponti (providing the films be in colour) feel like a culture time capsule of their given year - the David Bailey, English mod inspired, Blow-Up in 1966, with scenes of an awakaning sexual revolution, and even the Yard Birds; 1970's Zabriskie Point, a commercial flop, had the Grateful Dead, an orgy in the California desert, Pink Floyd playing to a magnificent exploding house, and a fleeting glimpse of a young Harrison Ford, cast as a baggage handler. Finally, in 1975's the The Passenger (1975) Antonioni explored identity, dopplegangers and politics, with Jack Nicholson as an assumed gun-runner in North Africa and Spain.

His last film, "Il filo pericoloso delle cose,"a segment in Eros, a collaboration with Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai, was largely embarrassing. Antonioni's sequences felt more like soft core porn than erotica, clumsily executed and ill advised, a sad foot note to a once brilliant career.

Jack Nicholson said about Antonioni at the 1975 Academy Awards -

"In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting."

The New York Times Obituary