While lauding the DVD editions of “L’Avventura” and “L’Eclisse” (both on Criterion), the New York Times makes a sly encouraging bid to the rest of the DVD world to reissue the AWOL works of Michelangelo Antonioni, stat. Hear, hear. [NY Times]
The film world is mourning the death of Michelangelo Antonioni? Unfortunately not as vociferously and bold-faced name like compared to the death of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (though filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos did give a tribute). We think this is a crying shame. But pretentious, scarf-wearing German director, film historian and friend Wim Wenders (Europe’s answer to Peter Bogdanovich, who interviewed Antonioni in his Cannes/what-does-Cinema-mean? documentary, “Chambre 666,” and helped him complete “Al di là delle Nuvole” [“Beyond the Clouds” – a film redolent with Wenders pretentious stink]; ) attended the filmmakers funeral in his hometown of Ferrara. [BBC]
Wenders said of his friend, “It is difficult to sum up what the ‘Maestro’ has left. He certainly created a new image of man in the 20th century.” [Reuters]
The Washington Post tribute to the Italian director is a wonderful read and called him an “auteur [that] depicted bourgeois despair.” It also reminds us that Brian DePalma already gave his fitting tribute to the director in 1981 with the homage, “Blow Out” (with John Travolta as a David Hemmings surrogate). When critic Rex Reed asked why the director’s films lacked conventionally happy endings, Mr. Antonioni replied: “All of them have happy endings. The people never come together, but they like it that way.” [Washington Post]
Another Times appraisal of Antonioni mentioned the critical essay by Pauline Kael scathingly titled, “Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties.” The Times called his vision of the bourgeois ennui, “urbane and cosmopolitan,” and defended the sometimes soulless fashionableness of his characters. Though their shallowness was a means to an end: they called Monica Vitti’s character (Claudia) in, “L’Avventura” the “first celebutante.” [New York Times]
Yet another cinephillic tribute to both Antonioni, and Bergman; their similarities and differences was lovingly penned by A.O. Scott. “The two of them — along with the other masters whose work had defined, from the mid-’50s through the late ’60s, a golden age of high-brow movie love — were pillars in the pantheon, canonical figures toward whom the only acceptable posture was one of veneration,” he wrote admiringly. [NY Times]
Update
And finally one of North America’s premiere film historians, the exhaustively knowledgeable Marty Scorsese has weighed in on both the revered and recently passed directors. “Bergman was one giant; Antonioni was another. Both of them cast very long shadows,” he told EW*. “He was like an explorer who took us into new emotional and visual territory with every new movie” (*guys, your website sucks; can’t link to the proper place).
Meanwhile, this Philstine at the New York Post (god, naturally) needs to be crucified for his ignoramus censure of Bergman. If I had his address for to encourage the outraged to murder him, I would surely post it.
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
