Michelangelo Antonioni R.I.P.

Jeepers. This blog is starting to look like an obituary page. While the death of Bergman is sad, the death of Michelangelo Antonioni breaks my heart. Antonioni's films are timeless and are as enigmatic today as they were twenty, thirty or, in the case of L'Avventura, forty-seven years ago. In looking at his filmography, I realize how few of his films I have seen, many unavailable in the US. Antonioni has an inquisitiveness about the world and the human condition and this translated into his art. Life's ambiguity was a stage for Antonioni's visual poetics. His 1975 film with Jack Nicholson, The Passenger, was given a re-release in theaters with a restored print a few years ago, and I was stunned at how amazing this film was on the big screen. His most well-known work is from the 60s, including L'Avventura (1960), L'Eclisse (1962) and Blow-Up (1966). A stroke kept his work to a minimum in recent years. His last film was a short contained in the omnibus film entitled Eros. He will be missed, but his art lives on.