Freshly baked from CNN:
ROME, Italy (Reuters) -- Michelangelo Antonioni, one of Italy's most famous and influential filmmakers, has died at the age of 94, city officials in Rome say.
Considered the cinematic father of modern angst and alienation, Antonioni had a career spanning six decades which included the Oscar-nominated "Blow-Up" and the internationally acclaimed "L'Avventura" (The Adventure).
His death on Monday night followed that of Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman, who died on Monday aged 89.
"With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen," said Rome mayor Walter Veltroni Tuesday. His office said it was making plans for Antonioni's body to lie in state on Wednesday.
Antonioni's deliberately slow-moving and oblique movies were not always crowd pleasers but films such as "L'Avventura" turned him into an icon for directors like Martin Scorsese, who has described him as a poet with a camera.
Antonioni was born in 1912 in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. He directed his first feature, "Cronaca di un amore" ("Story of a Love Affair"), in 1950 at the age of 38.
Over the next two decades Antonioni worked with some of the greatest names in post-war Italian cinema like Marcello Mastroianni but it was not until the 1960s that he emerged on the international stage.
Read the rest of the article, press here
a few pertinent youtube clips:
Trailer from Criterion Collection edition.
Amazing long take from the film Professione: Reporter (1975)
Relevant articles from Senses of Cinema.com
Biographical piece by James Brown
Essay on L'Avventura by Gregory Solman
Discussion of Blowup by Jonathan Dawson
Film studies programs the world over need to brace themselves.
Any director who became famous or received critical acclaim just before or just after the world wars are going to make headlines within the decade.
pic cred: google image search
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