\u201cI do it for an ideal spectator who is this very director. I could never do something against my tastes to meet the public\u201d\u2014 this is what he said when asked who he made his films for. In 1995 he was handed a lifetime achievement Academy Award presented to him by Jack Nicholson who commented, \u201cIn the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places of our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting\u201d. In the true meaning of these terms, his cinema had slow pace, sparse dialogues and a pronounced lack of structured narrative.<\/p>\n
On the other side lies this other director who toyed with the issues of mortality, death and the existential being in almost all his major films. Reflecting on his cinema Jean-Luc Godard once commented, \u2018Nothing can be more classically romantic\u2019.<\/p>\n
Meet Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman: the two master filmmakers who along with few others ensured that cinema is essentially an art form on par with classic disciplines like painting and music. On July 30, 2007 as both of them passed away in the span of a few hours (Antonioni at 94 and Bergman at 89), the entire film community was shocked by this coincidence. This piece is just a small tribute to these geniuses\u2014not a journalistic obituary; rather, a sublime retrospect.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cAll my opinions on the subject are in my films\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2014Michelangelo Antonioni<\/em><\/p>\n Though Antonioni was never keen to appease the mainstream audiences, his 1966 film\u00a0Blow-Up<\/em> (set against the backdrop of \u2018swinging 60\u2019s\u2019 London, starring Vanessa Redgrave and David Hemmings) was probably his most commercially successful venture. It was able to capture the mood of London amidst the bubbling fashion scene. The use of photography \u2013 both still and motion, remains, to date, inspirational to budding photographers the world over.<\/p>\n The trailer of Blowup<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n