It’s not a good week for fans of international cinema. Not only has the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman passed away, but Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni also died, on the very same day.

Antonioni begand his directorial career in the 1950s (although he worked beforehand with Roberto Rossellini). But his first major success was L’Avventura, a 1960 film which received a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. If Bergman dealt more with human interaction through dialogue and emotion, than Antonioni did the opposite. His films were more visual, and less dialogue based. In L’Avventura, the camera very much is telling its own story, setting itself apart from the characters involved. The camera is often distanced, almost alone, in an effort to represent human alienation. It is a style that came to define European art-house cinema, and has rarely been replicated in such an effective manner.

The director went on to direct 3 English-language films, such as the popular Blow-Up, the orgy-tastic Zabriskie Point, and The Passenger, which starred Jack Nicholson and has finally received a DVD release.

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