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Dying hours apart from Bergman, Antonioni shed a wholly different light on existential cinema from his Scandinavian counterpart.

Boomers during the '60s and '70s were the generation that embraced foreign films like none before or since. So in many ways, July 30th 2007, when both Ingmar Bergman (89) and Michelangelo Antonioni (94) died hours apart was like July 4th, 1826, when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died. The last heroic icons of a founding age went out together, hundreds of miles distant from each other.

The age of foreign cinema that Antonioni, Bergman and their fellow masters like Fellini, Truffaut and Kurosawa founded in America was an existential view of life in its full array. That array matched boomers' coming-of-age observations of the post-war world they were inheriting. In many ways, Antonioni and Bergman presented opposite sides of the same coin, an alchemist's coin metaphorical for how so many elements of life have difficulty bonding.

Whereas Bergman often set his stories in earlier centuries and even netherworlds with dreamlike flashbacks full of metaphors in a quest of spiritual meaning, Antonioni's films were entirely contemporary, seeming to use the absence of literary metaphor as metaphor itself, a cinematic metaphor of emptiness. Bergman focused on the angst of people, giving us close-ups of faces struggling to make connection. Antonioni lingered on the spaces between people, seeming to suggest that the divides could not be crossed, so the spaces between them were more interesting than the efforts (or lack thereof) to cross them. Bergman sought resolution; Antonioni suggested there was none to be had.

And linger Antonioni did. Endlessly, excruciatingly, he would hold shots until we got through the discomfort of being held in thrall and finally saw. Like a landscape painter with motion pictures slowly tracking us through his territory, he would not let us move too quickly from one picture to the next in his museum until we virtually came to inhabit and then disappear into each shot.

Antonioni's most notable films starting with the black and white L'avventura (1960) and L'eclisse (1962) and moving onto color with The Red Desert (1964), Blow-Up (1966), Zabriski Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975), blended contrast into grays or pastels, suggesting a lack of definition or solidity. This imagery supported his rather ephemeral story lines whose anchors seemed no more than the mournful foghorns echoing in the toxic factory wasteland of The Red Desert.

The question of reality, reality more solid than a motion picture's image held in the mind (the question of meaning itself), was the nerve among young boomers that Antonioni was pricking. The sailing party's search in L'avventura for their member who disappears on the volcanic island dissolves to the point where her existence becomes little more than a thought, much less a concern. The photographer's determination in Blow-Up to prove via his pictures that a murder occurred in a London park, fails with the loss of his images, the disappearance of the body, and his own removal from existence. The amazing cinematic ballet of blowing up the house in Zabriski Point rendered material culture into experiential wonder and the horror of radical, anarchistic violence into a stoned: "Beautiful!" The effort of the reporter to change his life by assuming a dead man's identity in The Passenger ends with his assassination for being a dead man (someone whom he isn't).

Two disparate sides of a coin. Bergman gave us people wandering in other time periods desperate for meaning, for solid reality. Antonioni gave us the present with people wandering disconnected through landscapes until they figuratively dissolved into them making it questionable whether their existence had ever been of any consequence.

Both sides were a kick in the pants for boomers to "rage, rage against the dying of the light," contributing to our formative psychological makeup that keeps us still kicking today. For that we pay tribute to these foreign masters. Hollywood recognized this truth by giving Antonioni an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 1995 Oscars.

 

Entertainment Editor Jeff Stein (Jeffry John Stein) is the author of Life, Myth, and the American Family Unreeling.