And the groundbreaking Italian director Antonioni dies on the same day as the groundbreaking Swedish director Bergman. Wow. If deaths really come in threes, as the old wives’ tale dictates, who’s next?

I have really only seen one Antonioni film, 1966’s Blow-Up (also, I believe, his first English-language film), but it was pretty incredible. It’s been many years since I saw it, though–it was one of the first really arty films I ever saw. I’ve also seen most of L’Avventura, but still need to finish it. I can’t explain why I stopped watching it–it wasn’t that I didn’t like it, or I was bored or anything. It was more like, it was too late at night to finish it, and I intended to finish it the next day, but I own it and since I own it I put it off to watch the films from Netflix that came in the mail the next day. Something like that. Anyway. He’s pretty cerebral. As if I weren’t already totally entrenched in French art films, these two deaths have renewed my interest in Swedish and Italian films, too. (Actually, they were all making films around the same time, so there are connections between them–certainly Godard got a lot out of Antonioni. Now I want to rewatch Contempt, which I’ve heard owes a good bit to the Italian director, but it would probably be more helpful to wait until I’ve seen more Antonioni first.)

Karina Longworth has a set of four clips and commentary from Antonioni’s work (they’re all closing scenes from films I haven’t seen, so I didn’t watch them, but I bookmarked the post to come back to later); Coffee Coffee and More Coffee has some thoughts on him, and GreenCine has a roundup of posts and articles.