Cinema Loses Two Giants in Two Days

Posted 31 July, 2007 in Film, Obituaries |

Yesterday, it was Ingmar Bergman, who died at his home in Sweden at 89 years of age. Today, I read the news that Michelangelo Antonioni has died at age 94.

Liam Lacey’s tribute to Bergman in today’s Globe and Mail quotes Bart Testa, the University of Toronto film professor, who wrote in 2005, “Paradoxically, he was always the film artist most apart from movies, and yet a magnetic pole of modern cinema’s ambitions to seriousness. As a consequence, his idiosyncrasy and simultaneous centrality mean that Bergman disturbs, even warps, the trajectory of cinema since The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.”

Jack Nicholson, star of The Passenger, presented Antonioni with an honorary Academy Award in 1995. Nicholson said of the director, “In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places [of] our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting.”

Cinema has lost two of its masters.

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