Bad Week For Cinema

Eyewear is sad - and a little shocked - to learn of the death of cinema's great Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni - who gave us such great films as L'avventura, Blowup, Professione: Reporter (The Passenger) and Zabriskie Point.

Coming just after Art House Cinema's other major European Existentialist Auteur, Bergman, has died, this is staggeringly bad news for movie lovers. Antonioni's heroes looked out at the world, and into themselves, on journeys that brought them, often, to silent, mortal zones - in the process encountering erotic, dangerous interzones - as the image, and the imagination, hot and vast as a desert - mixed like windblown sands.

Antonioni was one of the finest image-makers, and thus givers, in film history, and Blowup's eerie London park, with its rustling leaves, and apparently abandoned body, is just one of them. More than films, his works were - are - environments - where mood, landscape, desire, and fate - meet (and sometimes absurdly) part ways. Profession: Genius, more like it.

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IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

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E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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