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ROME: 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 “revolutionized the
language of cinema by reintroducing literary intelligence to it,”
Lang told ANSA in an interview.
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 hometown, 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 Agence France-Presse that Antonioni
and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who also died on Monday, “had
attained fullness in their life and works.”
Angelopoulos said he considered Antonioni 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 postwar world.”
--AFP
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