Michelangelo Antonioni, 94; film great directed ‘Blowup’ and ‘The Passenger’

Michelangelo Antonioni, the master Italian film director who depicted the emotional alienation of Italy’s postwar generation in films such as “L’Avventura” and “La Notte” but achieved his greatest popular success with “Blowup,” an enigmatic tale set in swinging London of the 1960s, has died. He was 94.

Antonioni, who suffered a debilitating stroke in 1985 that severely limited his ability to speak, died at his home in Rome on Monday evening, according to Italy’s ANSA news agency.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said Tuesday that Italy had “lost one of cinema’s greatest protagonists and one of the greatest explorers of expression in the 20th century.”

For many American filmgoers, Antonioni may be best remembered for his English-language films “Blowup,” “Zabriskie Point” and “The Passenger,” which starred Jack Nicholson.

Nicholson said Tuesday that as a director, Antonioni was in a ranking “by himself.”

“I don’t know how to put this: He’s just a maestro, and everybody loved him,” Nicholson told The Times, searching for words to describe his longtime friend.

Describing Antonioni as “a father figure to me as a few other people I’ve worked with somehow became,” Nicholson said they had great affection for one another.

“He was a man of joy and impeccable taste,” he said. “His whole life was dedicated to modestly being a brilliant artist.”

“Blowup,” Antonioni’s 1966 film about a London fashion photographer (David Hemmings) who discovers that he may have inadvertently captured a killing in a park while surreptitiously shooting pictures of a tryst between a young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and an older man, was the director’s first English-language film.

An imaginary tennis game played by white-faced mimes at the end of the film, which movie scholars say symbolizes the difference between illusion and reality and whether or not a killing even occurred, has been described as “one of the defining moments of 1960s cinema.”

The film earned Antonioni Oscar nominations for best director and screenplay.

“Zabriskie Point,” the director’s 1970 vision of campus revolutionaries and the current American scene, was a box-office disappointment panned by most critics.

But “The Passenger,” his 1975 suspense drama starring Nicholson as a disillusioned TV journalist who is in Africa to cover a civil war and assumes the identity of a dead man in his hotel who turns out to have been a gunrunner, has been called one of the great films of the 1970s.

Film critic and former Times staff writer Kevin Thomas praised it as “a masterpiece of visual and rigorous artistry that is as tantalizing as it is hypnotic,” and the New York Times’ Vincent Canby deemed it “Antonioni’s most entertaining film.”

A former film critic and documentarian, Antonioni had a decade of feature filmmaking behind him when he achieved international renown in 1960 with “L’Avventura” (“The Adventure”), which many consider his finest film.

It is the first in a loose trilogy of acclaimed films that established the director-screenwriter as one of the world’s most enigmatic and innovative moviemakers, known for his stylistic, technical and thematic risk-taking.

In “L’Avventura,” a young woman (Lea Massari) disappears on a yachting trip to a volcanic Sicilian island, and her lover and best friend (Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti) are among the group of friends who join in the search.

But Antonioni defies movie narrative conventions and leaves the woman’s disappearance unresolved: It remains a mystery, and she is virtually forgotten after the search is abandoned and her lover and best friend begin a relationship of their own.

Indeed, the movie is not about the search for the missing young woman. It is, as critic Roger Ebert has written, “about the sense in which all of the characters are on the brink of disappearance; their lives are so unreal and their relationships so tenuous they can barely be said to exist.”

Or, as critic Pauline Kael wrote of the film: “They are people trying to escape their boredom by reaching out to one another and finding only boredom once again.”

Antonioni’s three cinematic parables of alienation -- “L’Avventura,” “La Notte” (“The Night,” 1961) and “L’Eclisse” (“The Eclipse” 1962) -- marked what film historian Andrew Turner has called the discovery of a “new cinematic language” and are “among the truly extraordinary achievements of postwar cinema.”

New Republic film critic Stanley Kaufmann went even further, calling Antonioni’s trilogy “among the highest points of film history.”

Antonioni’s 1964 film “Il Deserto Rosso” (“The Red Desert”), his first in color, had a similar style and themes, which he called the “spiritual aridity” and “moral coldness” of Italian society after World War II.

“The Red Desert,” also starring Vitti, was notable for Antonioni’s use of color: Rooms, streets, trees and even apples were painted and repainted different colors to reflect the neurotic main character’s unbalanced emotional state.

“Sometimes,” Antonioni once said, “you need to force the reality to give the audience the right mood.”

Film critic Thomas has described Antonioni as “one of the most rigorous screen poets in the history of film,” a director who “communicates as much as possible through the camera rather than by dialogue.”

But the work was not everyone’s cup of espresso.

“L’Avventura” was famously booed and hissed at when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 -- members of the audience reportedly even yelled “cut!” when they thought shots lasted too long -- although the film won the Special Jury Prize and went on to become a worldwide box-office hit.

But many moviegoers complained that Antonioni’s films were too slow, too intellectual and too vague, thus prompting the term “Antonioniennui.”

Former Los Angeles Times critic Philip K. Scheuer observed in 1966 that Antonioni’s “detractors maintain that he sacrifices content to technique and that he never really departs from his obsession with what might be called the loneliness of the long-distance sleep walker.”

“As a reviewer I fall somewhere between the two camps,” Scheuer added. “I am alternately aggravated and even bored by the length of footage he consumes in what he has to say (if anything) and electrified by the depth and beauty of the visual effects he composes.”

The son of middle-class landowners, Antonioni was born Sept. 29, 1912, in Ferrara, Italy. He demonstrated his creative side at an early age, designing puppets and building sets when he was 10. As a teenager, he began oil painting.

Antonioni graduated from the University of Bologna in 1935. While earning his degree in economics and commerce, he wrote stories and plays, co-founded a student theater company and wrote film reviews for the local newspaper. He also made a failed attempt to film a documentary in a mental institution -- the patients panicked when the bright camera lights were turned on.

After moving to Rome in 1939, Antonioni worked for the film journal Cinema and attended the renowned film school Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. By 1942, he had collaborated with director Roberto Rossellini on the script for Rossellini’s “The Return of a Pilot.”

Although drafted into the Italian army in 1942, Antonioni continued working in films in his spare time and served as an assistant director and co-screenwriter on director Enrico Fulchignoni’s “The Two Foscari,” among other films.

In 1943, he obtained financing to direct a short documentary about the people of the Po River, “Gente del Po,” but the German occupation of Italy interrupted his work on the film and he did not complete editing it until 1947.

After the war, Antonioni resumed working as a film critic and making short documentaries, including a study of Rome street cleaners.

He also continued writing screenplays for other directors, including Federico Fellini (“The White Sheik”).

His first feature film as a director, “Cronaca di un Amore” (“Story of a Love Affair”), was released in 1950.

Antonioni’s breakthrough feature film was “Il Grido” (“The Outcry,” 1957), the story of a Po Valley worker (played by American actor Steve Cochran) who is abandoned by his wife. The character’s inner despair is reflected by the desolate landscape and empty compositions that became the director’s trademark.

During the dubbing of “Il Grido” Antonioni met actress Vitti, with whom he became personally involved. She later co-starred in his landmark trilogy and became known as “the classic Antonioni woman.”

A trim, patrician-featured man who dressed impeccably, Antonioni was described by one American interviewer in the 1970s as having “an austere authority that mixes oddly with an Old-World charm.”

But with Antonioni’s international acclaim as a director came reports of his touchy temperament and unusual working methods.

A 1973 Los Angeles Times story about the making of “The Passenger” noted that Antonioni cleared his sets for 20 minutes before each take to sit behind the camera and “brood” over the shot and the atmosphere. And he’d yell when he saw a stranger on the set, proclaiming, “I will not shoot another foot of film until the offense has been removed!”

Antonioni was considered an intuitive filmmaker who welcomed spontaneity.

“It’s only when I press my eye against the camera and begin to move the actors that I get an exact idea of the scene,” he once said. “It’s only when I hear dialogue from the actor’s mouth itself that I realize whether the lines are correct or not.... Screenplays are on the way to becoming actually sheets of notes for those who, at the camera, will write the film themselves.”

Antonioni’s penchant for keeping communication to a minimum infuriated some actors.

“He gave me no direction; he rarely spoke to me, and he drove us all beyond the point of exhaustion,” Jeanne Moreau complained after working with Antonioni on “La Notte.”

Hemmings reportedly had a similar experience on “Blowup,” saying, “He never talked to me.”

In a 1973 interview with the L.A. Times, Antonioni countered the negative aspects of his reputation.

“I don’t think I’m an ogre,” he said. “No, that’s not justified. As far as I know only one actress claimed I was -- Moreau. Yet I had no problem with her, and I was astonished when she said all those things about me. I usually end the best of friends with my actors. I never have a fight with them.”

But, he acknowledged, “I like to provoke the mood I need from them. I don’t think they should know too much about what I want to do, otherwise the actor becomes the director. They overact -- in good faith, of course, but it’s still wrong. Actors have a personal filter. They see life through the eyes of their characters. I am forced to see it in its unity, and therefore I have to control all of them.”

In 1982, the director’s drama “Identification of a Woman,” about a film director in search of “the ideal woman” for a movie, generated negative critical reaction and failed to receive U.S. distribution.

“I have lived through so many opinions, so many difficulties in my long career that in some ways I just don’t care,” Antonioni said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times when “Identification of a Woman” was screened at the New York Film Festival.

But rather than reflect on the ups and downs of his career or the meaning of his work, he was eager to move on to his next film.

“Sometimes there is the temptation to stop working,” he said. “But what would I do? I can’t keep quiet.”

Three years later, he had no choice after suffering the debilitating stroke that paralyzed his right side and severely limited his ability to speak.

The stroke seemed to signal the end of a filmmaking career of the man who once said, “To direct is to live.”

“After the stroke, he was so bored, so unhappy,” his wife, Enrica, told the New York Times a decade later. “He’s a man of enormous energy, and there was nothing for him to do.”

The once-divorced Antonioni married Enrica Fico in 1986. A graduate of an art school in Milan, she had met him in Rome in 1971 after asking an artist friend if he knew anyone in Rome who might help her find work.

Antonioni offered her a job as a wardrobe assistant on his new film, and their personal relationship began.

After Antonioni’s stroke, Enrica is said to have become the inspiration for his rehabilitation. Through the efforts of his wife and several French producers, Antonioni returned to filmmaking with “Beyond the Clouds,” a 1995 European-made quartet of love stories based on his 1983 collection of undeveloped film ideas, “Bowling Alley on the Tiber.”

When insurance companies refused to guarantee the film because of Antonioni’s health problems, the producers hired director Wim Wenders as a standby. Wenders directed the linking episodes in the film featuring a director-narrator played by John Malkovich.

Unable to say much more than a few words, including basta (enough), Antonioni directed the film by having others speak for him and by making faces and gesturing with his one good hand.

He also drew simple line drawings to show the actors how to move and where the cameraman should place the camera.

The film had its world premiere at the annual American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles in 1995, the same year Antonioni received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.

“Most movies celebrate the ways we connect with one another. Films by this master mourn the failures to connect,” Nicholson said in his introduction at the Academy Awards ceremony.

Greeted by a standing ovation, Antonioni walked slowly on stage holding the arm of his wife, who spoke for him.

“It’s very beautiful to receive this award, and also very beautiful to receive all this love,” she said. “Sometimes words are not needed because of this love. Michelangelo always went beyond words, to meet silence, the mystery and power of silence.”

Antonioni concluded the speech with a simple word of thanks, “Grazie.”

Antonioni, who had no children, is survived by his wife.

His body will lie in state today in Rome’s city hall. A funeral is scheduled for Thursday in his native Ferrara.

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report from Rome.