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Tributes pour in for Italian film 'giant' Antonioni
2007-07-31
Tributes poured in Tuesday for film legend Michelangelo Antonioni, director of the 1960s hit "Blow Up" and one of the last figures of Italy's golden age of cinema, who has died aged 94. France's former culture minister Jack Lang hailed Antonioni, who died at his home in Rome on Monday, as a "giant of world cinema." The late director "revolutionised the language of cinema by reintroducing literary intelligence to it," Lang told ANSA in an interview. As culture minister, Lang made Antonioni a commander of arts and letters in 1993. Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said Antonioni was "not only one of the greatest living directors, but also a master of modern cinema. "Thanks to Antonioni's cinema, we had another view of reality, another way to look at the face of a woman, the design of a car, even a cloud was not the same thing after having seen his films." Antonioni's body is to lie in state in the elegant Sala della Protomoteca at Rome's city hall, the Campidoglio, on Wednesday morning. He is to be buried in his home town, the affluent northern city of Ferrara, on Thursday. Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli hailed Antonioni as a "lucid and very sensitive intellectual (who) was an acute observer of the ills of the 20th century. ... His disappearance closes a historical cycle of Italian cinema." In Athens, Greece's most prominent filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos commented to AFP that Antonioni and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who also died on Monday, "had attained fullness in their life and works." Angelopoulos said he considered Anonioni as one of his personal masters. "Our first meeting was in Rome when ... I showed him my ticket for 'The Adventure' (1960), which I had seen 13 times. He smiled and showed me a ticket for my own film, 'The Travelling Players', though admitting that he had only seen it twice." Antonioni, although he made only about 20 films, was "an important reference for cinema and culture," and made cinema "more adult," said Italian director Paolo Virzi. French cinema expert Aldo Tassone told AFP that both Antonioni and Bergman interpreted "contemporary anguish (and) emotional alienation in the post-war world." On behalf of the European Commission, President Jose Manuel Barroso expressed "considerable sorrow," saying Antonioni "has bequeathed us his magnificent cinematic canon, notable for his constant striving for new forms of expression." "Blow Up" won Antonioni the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in 1967, while the Venice film festival honoured him with the Golden Lion for "Il Deserto Rosso" (The Red Desert) in 1964 and a career Golden Lion in 1983, followed two years later by a career Oscar. His "Zabriskie Point" -- a 1969 drama about a young man who steals a plane and flies it with his girlfriend into California's Death Valley against a sound track including numbers by Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones -- was a critical flop but seen at the time as a classic statement of counter-culture values. Born in Ferrara on September 29, 1912, Antonioni excelled in economics at the University of Bologna. He started out as a film critic for a local magazine before moving to Rome to study at the Experimental Cinema Centre and to work for Cinema magazine, both considered centres of resistance to fascism. By 1942 he was in Paris, where he assisted Marcel Carne in the making of "Les Visiteurs du Soir" before co-writing the screenplay of Roberto Rossellini's "Un Pilota Ritorna" (A Pilot Returns). The following year Antonioni made his first documentary, "Gente del Po" (The People of the Po Valley), and went on to make his first full-length film, "Cronaca di un Amore" (Chronicle of a Love) in 1950. It was with "Blow Up," the story of a fashion photographer who realises that he was the witness to a murder in London, that Antonioni achieved his greatest commercial and critical success. Partially paralysed by a stroke in 1985, Antonioni was feted by the Italian cinema world when he turned 90 in 2002.
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