• BRAZIL

Happy Birthday, Maestro

2004-09-29

Birthday wishes to Michelangelo Antonioni and his wife Enrica.


Born 92 years ago in Italy, Antonioni lived through the years of Italian fascism and went on to make post-war films of a different ilk from his Italian Neo-realist colleagues - De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti. A master of composition, Antonioni advanced the art of cinema and deconstructed screen narrative creating a rich filmography including these films from the sixties - L' Avventura (1960) La Notte (1961), Il Rosso Deserto (1964) and the English language Blowup (1966).

Blow-up, set in swinging London of the '60's, was his commercial success for Warner Bros. The film, based on Argentine Julio Cortázar's short story, starred Vanessa Redgrave and David Hemmings, who went on to form his own film company, Hemdale.

Antonioni closed the Sixties with the wandering Zabriskie Point (1970), a film about student radicals alienation ending with repetitive, slow motion shots of an explosion of a modern house in the desert. Antonioni found his male lead Mark Frechette on a Boston street corner. Frechette was later convicted of bank robbery charges and died in the weight room of a prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts. He had been planning to stage an inmate production of "The Watergate Tapes" at the time. Frechette and his co-star, Daria Halprin, daughter of Bay Area dance therapist Anna Halprin, gave a 1969 interview in the last issue of a Boston underground newspaper, Avatar.