These things are getting harder to write. Influential Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni died at age 94.
2007 has seen the passing of three of the all time greats- three men who redefined our very thinking about the cinema in every respect. About genre, about content, and about form. Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, and now Michelangelo Antonioni have all died this year- Bergman and Antonioni on the same day, no less- leaving the world a much less rich place in their abscesses, but much richer through their work.
Of the three, I'm most familiar with Altman's work, Antonioni's the least- attributable to some degree to the spotty Region 1 availability of his films. This Times piece details this frustrating situation. But his influence and originality is indelible, in particular on two of my favorite auteurs, Dario Argento and Brian DePalma, and on one of my favorite films, Francis Coppola's The Conversation.
Antonioni's international breakthough came with L' Avventura. My entry point into the man's work was through his greatest success, the 60's mod meditation Blowup. Famous for its unflinching look at an unsympathetic Swinging London photographer (David Hemmings) who suspects he's photographed a murder, Blowup is unforgettable for its elliptical narrative. Hemmings blows up a series of photographs of an arguing couple over and over, convinced that a dark blur is the outline of a corpse. Desperately searching each increasingly abstract image for a clue, he is ultimately thwarted by the subjective nature of truth. One man's conspiracy is another man's coincidence. The film, like all of Antonioni's best known work, is an epic meditation on alienation in the modern world. Art film causality abounds; scenes don't connect. The plots are afterthoughts, or in some cases, forgotten altogether. I imagine his films felt very modern at the time, a chilly reminder of the disconnect between people in the modern world.
The plot device of the wronged man with a nagging doubt solving a mystery became the central thesis of Dario Argento's work. Beginning in a prototypical form in Argento's script for Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, (recall the Bronson's character's history) this theme was predominant in his directing career right out of the gate with The Bird With Crystal Plumeage, Deep Red, and Suspira. Deep Red is the most direct Antonioni homage, a kind of giallo read of Blowup, even going so far as to cast David Hemmings in the lead as a music professor marked for murder after witnessing his neighbor's near beheading. He could crack the cast, if only remember that one little nagging detail... Unlike his inspiration, Argento, for once in his career, plays totally fair, as sharp-eyed viewers with the benefit of a pause button can spot the face of the mystery killer in the first reel. Argento is ultimately more concerned with delivering the genre goods that Michelangelo.
Although slagged unfairly with the Hitchcock imitator tag, Brian De Palma's muses were Goddard and Antonioni as much as Hitch. Blowup's most direct influence came in De Palma's 1981 thriller Blow Out. John Travolta is a sound man working on a sleazy horror movie ("Coed Frenzy") who accidentally tape records an assassination attempt while capturing nighttime atmosphere. Unlike Blowup, De Palma settles on a more conventional thriller framework, reassuring the audience that, yes, there really is a conspiracy and yes, someone is responsible. The guilty parties are punished, but not before Travolta's heroics leave his lone ally dead.
Coppola's The Conversation is the most direct of the Blowup influenced films: a couple argues in a public place, a lone figure surreptitiously records them, and the ambiguities of their argument spin his world out of control. This time, the investigator is an emotionally shut off surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) who tape records an argument that might be about industrial espionage, murder, or a simple lover's spat. Caul is more of a victim than his sleuthing brethren due to his extreme emotionally vulnerability- making his descent into obsession and madness over the nature of the recording even more harrowing. But like the others, the ephemeral nature of truth, as he has come to practice it as sound on magnetic tape, destroys him.
All three films drew from the wellspring of Antonioni. Let's hope that his passing motivates the distributors who own his films to let the world see them- and influence another generation of filmmakers.
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