Legend of Italian cinema, Antonioni, dies, aged 94

The second great film director to die this week, Michelangelo Antonioni passed away on Monday night at his home in Rome, aged 94. The Italian director, whose work became identified with the vanity of the late 1960s, thanks to his two foreign films, Blow-up and Zabriskie Point, had been in retirement since suffering a devastating stroke in 1982.

Despite the long silence, broken in 1995 by Beyond the Clouds, made with Wim Wenders, Antonioni remained a treasured figure. He was awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1995.

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"It's curious that he should die the day after [Ingmar] Bergman," said the director Paolo Virzi. "The two men followed the same path, both gave expression not only to the interior world but to the spirit of the feminine character. Antonioni was undoubtedly one of the most feminist directors who ever lived."

Another director, Daniele Lucchetti, said: "He was a shining light for a generation of cineastes, and represented an inimitable way of making film."

Born to a middle-class family in Ferrara, north-east Italy, in 1912, Antonioni graduated in economics and worked in a bank before gravitating to journalism, writing film criticism for the local paper. His first experiment in filming was a disaster: around 1940 he set out to make a documentary in a mental hospital, but when the set lights were turned on they sent the patients into delirium and the film had to be abandoned.

He began making documentaries during the Second World War. The first, set in his own backyard, was Gente del Po (People of the Po): made in 1943 but not shown until 1947 when it was finished, despite much of the footage having been lost or damaged.

Antonioni was out of sympathy with the neo-realists who dominated Italian cinema in the 1950s. Nor was he particularly interested in plot and character. Instead, starting from his first feature film, Cronaca di un Amore, he was preoccupied with the helplessness of human beings before their compulsions and the circumstances that confine them, with repetitiveness, the menace of both interior and exterior landscapes, the dumbness of people before their destinies.

The director made challenging films throughout the Fifties then hit his stride in the following decade with L'Avventura, still a favourite of his aficionados.

Suddenly he was famous and celebrated. The culmination of his success, though it looks rather dated now, was his only film set in Britain, Blow-Up, about the accidental involvement of a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, in what may or may not have been a murder. The film features cameos by the Yardbirds and a very young Janet Street-Porter, dancing in stripey loon pants.

And like Bergman, Antonioni's influence lingers on. "Even today Antonioni is the most imitated film-maker in the world, particularly in the Far East," said the director Paolo Taviani. "Often we find ourselves watching an Asian film and saying to each other, it's just like Antonioni."