Antonioni & Bergman

When two of the greatest filmmakers in history improbably died within 24 hours of each other on July 30, 2007, a sad, almost painful, realization dawned on cinephiles worldwide: There will be no more films from Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman.

But both men lived long and fruitful lives, so it’s hard not to enjoy the sudden interest in their work and the vigorous debates—unthinkable just a few months ago—among people now eager to compare the opposing styles of these two giant filmmakers, even as they’re tinged with melancholy.

Bergman was 89 and Antonioni was 94, and both men made movies until the end, though Antonioni needed ample assistance from his wife Enrica because of a stroke he suffered in 1985. Paste wrote about their last films—Bergman’s Saraband [Paste #17] and Antonioni’s Gaze of Michelangelo [#34]—as the vibrant works of art that they are. We didn’t know it at the time, but now each film is also a fitting end to a long, inspiring career.

Gaze of Michelangelo is a brief examination of a statue of Moses (sculpted by that other famous Michelangelo). Antonioni himself appears in the film. He walks into the cathedral, studies the stone figure, draws beautiful contrasts between skin and marble, light and dark, fleeting life and lasting legacies, and then walks out into the light of day while a chorus sings. Cut to black.

Wheelchair-bound since his stroke, the real-life Antonioni hadn’t walked anywhere in a long time, but he was a magician of cinema to the very last frame. He had an amazing run of films, one masterpiece after another, that redefined the way movies look at people, namely by paying as much attention to their surroundings as to what they’re saying. After honing his craft as a filmmaker in Italy, he arrived on the international scene in 1960 with a loose trilogy: L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, three films about privileged people so bored with their lives that they have little to do but wander the city and lament their failing relationships.

But Antonioni—counter to expectations—watched those people with extreme precision. His camera moved as if it were choreographed down to the millimeter because, while the characters in the films may have been bored, the man watching them was not. He was riveted. And he transferred his fascination to the audience, not telling them tales or teaching them lessons, but raising questions, big ones about existence­—why we move around the earth, why we interact with other people, and who we are.

In L’Avventura, Antonioni never explains how the woman who initially appears to be the star disappears a few minutes into the movie. Martin Scorcese, in his documentary about Italian cinema, notes that, in the same year, Hitchcock dispensed with his star early, too, but he was quite clear about where she went. (It involved a shower and a knife.) Antonioni, on the other hand, said nothing because, in his films, existence is an indistinct concept.

When the police come looking for Jack Nicholson’s white convertible in The Passenger, Jack asks, confused, “Officer, are you looking for the car or the person in it?” It’s the central question of Antonioni’s work: Are we separate from our shells?

When people discover Antonioni’s films, even before they understand what he’s doing—that he’s exploring his subjects not with plot or dialogue but with the movement of the camera, placing characters next to vast, imposing buildings, squeezing them into the corner of the frame—even before audiences are fully in tune with what he’s saying, they’re often mesmerized by how he’s saying it. Zabriskie Point, his first film shot in America, was called a disaster in 1970 by critics who must have expected the maverick to make something a little more commercial once he set foot in Hollywood. But that’s not our man.

Today, Zabriskie Point is simply stunning, a weird and provocative film that may have looked like a product of the hippie counterculture in 1970, but now looks like a comment on that very culture. Many a Hollywood film over the last four decades has used rock n’ roll and explosions, but give Mr. Antonioni access to Pink Floyd, a house in the desert, a pile of dynamite and a movie camera, and you’ll have what Slate writer Dennis Lim called “a feat of both geometry and anarchy, one of the most spectacular movie endings in history.”

Antonioni wasn’t a master of special effects; he was a master of bending light to suit his themes. And I don’t want to know how he did it. I don’t want to know how the woman in Blow-Up disappears from the sidewalk mid-stride. (“We ran the sequence a frame at a time and could not discover the method of her disappearance,” says Roger Ebert.) I don’t want to know how long it took to carve up the three dimensions of the living room in L’Eclisse or even how long it took to coordinate the sound of the oscillating fan with Monica Vitti’s hair. I don’t want to know how the camera does what it does at the end of The Passenger. (An admiring Nicholson reveals the secret in his DVD commentary, but his explanation raises as many questions as it answers.) But I do want to point out that, as the camera inches forward in the hotel room of the eponymous passenger, it pans slightly to the right, revealing the faint reflection of a man reaching into his pocket (for… for what, a gun?). Just before the camera leaves Jack’s story, Jack’s shell moves through the window into the courtyard, and turns around to look inward.

Again and again, Antonioni hid his plot in shadows but pulled the questions into the light. Again and again, his camera detached from the action and let his characters drift off on their own, sometimes never to return, and in the process he reminded us that we’re all passengers.