It's getting so I dread opening the newspaper, for fear of learning that another friend has died. I don't mean "friend" literally, in this case, but it does seem that many of the icons who shaped my cultural thinking have been passing away. Tom Snyder, the acerbic news anchor turned talk show host, and the embodiment of tough-but-fair questioning. Bill Walsh, football coach whose revolutionary West Coast offense is now employed by half of the NFL, including my beloved Eagles. And now, of course, the Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, who had been partially paralyzed and unable to speak due to a stroke in 1985, and was somehow able to direct several more movies and, memorably, accept an honorary Oscar with his wife at his side. He died July 30 at age 94.
Like his Swedish contemporary Bergman, Antonioni helped to shape a new language of cinema, of emotional alienation that was conveyed through both performance and mise en scene. I've struggled to figure out why Bergman's films seemed aloof while Antonioni's affected me deeply, though both certainly attained their fair share of iconic imagery. Antonioni's most outrageous and debated set pieces, such as the tennis match in Blow-Up and the exploding of capitalism in Zabriskie Point, are still impossible to forget.
Just three years ago, Antonioni contributed a segment to the anthology film Eros, proving that he never lost his love of cinema or of the female form. If his final works (including Beyond the Clouds, codirected with Wim Wenders as pictured above) seemed slight, they also seemed his most erotic and optimistic, their playful nods to earlier works like L'Avventura signaling emotional resolution rather than torment. Yet it's hard not to think that even at age 94 he died too young, with several more films in him.
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