Just a few hours after the death of Ingmar Bergman on July 30, another innovator of cinema language, 94-year-old Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, passed away.
Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome, announced the news on July 31. No cause was given to his death. In 1985, Antonioni had a stroke that left him partly paralyzed.
Antonioni is known as one of the boldest filmmakers last century for his chilly depictions of the country's elite as bored and aimless people. His films with spare plots, limited dialogue and long takes have long polarized critics and audiences.
The director was born on September 29, 1912 to a middle-class family in the city of Ferrara, Italy. He studied economics at the University of Bologna before moving gradually towards his eventual career.
In the 1930s, he wrote film reviews for the local newspaper and did some theater work. In 1940 he moved to Rome, where he worked as an editorial secretary at Cinema, an entertainment magazine published by the Fascist Entertainment Guild, which was edited by Benito Mussolini's son.
He raised world's attention with the trilogy The Adventure (1960), The Night (1961), and Eclipse (1962).
Blowup is probably his best-known work, which Bergman considered as among the 20th century's "great masterpieces".
In 1972 he was invited by the Chinese government to shoot a documentary named China in the country. A stroke in 1985 left him literally speechless, but he continued to work, directing a segment of the 2004 film Eros, which also featured segments from Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai.
Source: China Daily
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