ITALY:The death of the great Italian film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni at the age of 94, just one day after the death of Ingmar Bergman, removes another mighty figure from the European arthouse pantheon. But, unlike Bergman, Antonioni's great period of creativity ended long before his death late on Monday night.
Admirers of the film-maker will wince at the memory of his last picture, a toe-curlingly dated and maladroit "erotic" cine-novella in 2004 called The Dangerous Thread of Things and released as part of a triple-bill of short films, called Eros, by Antonioni, Wong Kar-Wai and Steven Soderbergh.
Decades before this, however, Antonioni had made stunningly powerful pictures with inspired images and themes: most prominently there was his black and white trilogy of the early 60s, The Eclipse, The Night and The Adventure. These films made a decisive break with the neo-realism of directors such as De Sica and Rossellini; they were fluent, hallucinatory, triangulating a new world between dream, nightmare and ordinary waking reality.
Effortlessly atmospheric, Antonioni's films often took as their starting point the ennui of Italy's leisured and fashionable classes, but transformed that into a wider sense of alienation, a further questioning of day-to-day existence. At its best his film-making transmitted a glimpse of what it found to be mysterious and occult forces at work beneath the "real" world.
Later came his English-speaking movies of the 60s and 70s; there was the Californian counter-culture experiment Zabriskie Point, his identity-swap drama The Passenger, with Jack Nicholson, and, most famously, Blowup, the 1966 film for which he, rightly or wrongly, is now most remembered. Blowup features David Hemmings as the hip photographer in David Bailey/Austin Powers mode. Vanessa Redgrave is his beautiful young subject, and there is an east London park that might contain a deadly secret. The photographer is puzzled by a snap he took in the park. By enlarging it again and again he sees a grey smudge forming - a corpse. Without realising it, the photographer has recorded a murder. Or has he?
The film became a vital part of the Swinging London legend; for a while it dominated the conversation of the chattering classes, and did its bit in establishing the "metaphysical thriller" genre on screen and on the page - the type of story that has the furniture of the conventional crime drama but is under no obligation to provide a cogent explanation.
When, two years ago, audiences frantically scanned the final, static shot of the school gates in Michael Haneke's great film Hidden, to try to discover the rumoured clue to everything that had gone before, some at least must have remembered the last time the public had been invited to scrutinise an innocuous-seeming scene for some sinister, subliminal detail. It was in Blowup. Of course, that title is ambiguous: enlargement, or destruction? The corporate structures at the end of Zabriskie Point are symbolically blown up, blown to smithereens.
By scrutinising things, by critically inspecting them, Antonioni might be saying, we will eventually find things inimical to our peace of mind. We find futility - or hostility. It is a blow-up in every sense.
Blowup is a film to which time has not been very kind. Viewers now may feel the ending is not so much enigmatic but footling, an indication that after exploring that single brilliant notion Antonioni ran out of ideas. That, I confess, is what I think.
The earlier film, The Adventure, is more successful with similar ideas. A young woman disappears and as her friend and boyfriend look for her they find themselves drawn to each other. No answer is provided on the woman. Did she ever exist? Are we watching a story of forbidden love? A parable? Perhaps the point is to disturb the audience's mental gyroscope by refusing generic expectations.
Antonioni's first film, Story of a Love Affair, from 1950, was compared to Citizen Kane in its characters questioning a dead person's friends to find answers about their lives. Antonioni found his creative development in declining to provide the answers.