Category: Illusion and Magic

Michelangelo Antonioni, who was best known for his film Blow-Up, died Monday at his home in Rome. He was 94.

Remembrances
Antonioni, a Filmmaker with an Eye for the Invisible [Listen and/or Watch ‘Blow-Up’ Clips]
by Neda Ulaby
NPR
July 31, 2007

Michelangelo Antonioni had a long, solemn face and hooded eyes “” he looked like Humphrey Bogart. But the work of the Italian filmmaker, who died at home on Monday at the age of 94, couldn’t be further from the traditions of Hollywood.

Antonioni, whose name became synonymous with European art-house cinema in the 1960s, began his career as part of the Italian filmmaking movement known as Neorealism. Their style, says film scholar Peter Brunette, was obsessed with the visual “” in the sense of what we can see, the visible surfaces of reality. But Antonioni was different from such gritty Italian Neorealists as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sicca, who focused on postwar problems; Antonioni preferred stark, existential meditations on the things you can’t see and things you can’t say.

“And so you have to read between the lines,” Brunette says. “Everything is powerfully expressive, but you can never exactly pin down what it means.” Continue reading “Filmmaker Antonioni Dies at Age 94”

From About.com, July 30, 2007:

Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century, died Monday at his home on the Swedish island of Faro, his sister Eva reported. He was 89.

Over a career that spanned four decades, Bergman made over fifty films, including perhaps his most famous work The Seventh Seal (1957), in which Max Von Sydow engages Death in a legendary game of chess. Bergman’s top awards include the Golden Palm of Palms at the 50th Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for his body of work. He received a lifetime Oscar in 1970 and another in 1984, for the autobiographical family drama Fanny And Alexander.

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From Bergman’s NY Times obit:

Once, when asked by the critic Andrew Sarris why he did what he did, Mr. Bergman told the story of the rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral in the Middle Ages by thousands of anonymous artisans.

“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn”t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn”t matter!”

Mr. Bergman”s celluloid carvings often revealed an obsession with death. But in later life he said that the obsession had abated. “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” he said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It”s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

Read the entire New York Times Obituary here and here –> Continue reading “Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman dies at 89”

This film by Joan C. Gratz won an Academy Award for Best Short Film, Animated in 1992. Gratz is known among animators around the world for her unique animation technique, clay-painting. Working with bits of clay as if they were oil paints, she blends colors and etches fine lines to create a seamless flow of images.

via Artdaily.org