R.I.P. Ingmar Bergman

[The Big Bog]

All my aches and pains were gone. The people I am most fond of in all the world were with me. I could hear their chatting around me. I could feel the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands. I wanted to hold the moment fast and thought, "Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.

- The last lines of Cries and Whispers

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/30/bergman.obit.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

[Riddley]

Another light gone out. Fanny and Alexander was a superb film.

[Eddie]

Very sad, but he was quite old and had lived a rather amazing life. He will be sorely missed. I actually had a conversation with him once. It was a rather brief conversation and I did not realise I had talked to Ingo until afterwards, but a conversation nonetheless.

[Sauniere]

The first movie of his I saw was the "Virgin Spring" (1960), and it absolutely blew my mind. Never had such a subject been so openly portrayed before. This man literally changed the face of modern movie making.

[FilmFestGuy]

My world will not quite be the same. I recently DVRed "Wild Strawberries" and "The Seventh Seal" to watch them again. When I recorded them, I didn't know it would be in memoriam.

Word is that Michelangelo Antonioni died this morning ("Blow Up", "L'Avventura", "The Passenger"). That's two of the world's masters gone.

Hate to repeat a cliche, but they really don't make 'em like they used to.

[Sauniere]

My world will not quite be the same. I recently DVRed "Wild Strawberries" and "The Seventh Seal" to watch them again. When I recorded them, I didn't know it would be in memoriam.

Word is that Michelangelo Antonioni died this morning ("Blow Up", "L'Avventura", "The Passenger"). That's two of the world's masters gone.

Hate to repeat a cliche, but they really don't make 'em like they used to.


Yes, he did... :(
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/movies/01antonioni.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

-snip-
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly depictions of alienation were cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s, inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home in Rome. He was 94.

His death was announced yesterday by Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome. No cause was given. In 1985, Mr. Antonioni had a debilitating stroke that left him partly paralyzed, though he continued to make films sporadically for two more decades.

Earlier on Monday, another great director of the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman, died, at 89, at his home on a remote Swedish island.

Tall, cerebral and serious, Mr. Antonioni, like Mr. Bergman, rose to prominence at a time, in midcentury, when filmgoing was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films set off long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cinephiles demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.

Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blowup,” a 1966 drama set in swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that a picture he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, obscured in the background, evidence of a murder.

But Mr. Antonioni’s lasting contribution to film came earlier, in “L’Avventura” (1960), “La Notte” (1961) and “L’Eclisse” (1962), a trilogy that explored his tormented central vision that people had become emotionally unglued from one another.

It was a vision expressed near the end of “La Notte,” when his frequent star Monica Vitti observes, “Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

In a generation of rule breakers, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most subversive and venerated. He challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for conventions like plot, pacing and clarity. He raised questions and never answered them, had his characters act in self-destructive ways and failed to explain why, and sometimes kept the camera rolling after a take in the hope of catching the actors in an unscripted but revealing moment.

It was all part of his design. As he explained, “The after-effects of an emotion scene, it had occurred to me, might have meaning, too, both on the actor and on the psychological advancement of the character.”

Many of Mr. Antonioni’s cuts, scene lengths and camera movements were idiosyncratic, and he frequently posed his characters in a highly formalized way.

“What is impressive about Antonioni’s films is not that they are good,” the film scholar Seymour Chatman wrote. “But that they have been made at all.”...

[GI Joe]

Bergman was definatly a great one but I am more of a Sam Peckinpah guy.

some of my other favorites
AKIRA KUROSAWA
MARTIN SCORSESE
SERGIO LEONE
CECIL B. DE MILLE

Sam said
"I want to be able to make Westerns like Kurosawa makes Westerns."

[The Big Bog]

Antonioni too? Wow. I never saw The Passenger, but I did see Blow Up and L'Avventura. I gotta admit I hated the latter the first time I saw it, but it's one of those haunting kind of movies that you think about for months and years after seeing it. I'd like to revisit all these.

[Sauniere]

Antonioni too? Wow. I never saw The Passenger, but I did see Blow Up and L'Avventura. I gotta admit I hated the latter the first time I saw it, but it's one of those haunting kind of movies that you think about for months and years after seeing it. I'd like to revisit all these.

OMG, I so want to respond, but I cannot think of a single word.
So, all I can say is, "You Go Girl."
Stupid, yes, I know, but hell I'm under a lot of pressure... :{(}