Michelangelo Antonioni in an undated photograph
© Agence France-Presse / Getty Images

It is reported in the New York Times that yesterday (yes, the same day as the death of seminal director Ingmar Bergman), Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni passed away at his home in Rome.

Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred 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 cineastes demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.

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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 such mainstream conventions as plot, pacing and clarity. He would raise questions and never answer them, have his characters act in self-destructive ways and fail to explain why, and hold his shots so long that the actors sometimes slipped out of character.

It was all part of the director’s design. As Mr. Antonioni 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.”

In 1995, Hollywood honored Antonioni’s career work — 25 films and several screenplays — with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement. Through little dialogue and long takes in his films, Antonioni depicted the alienation in modern life. Along with Federico Fellini, he assisted in turning much of the post-war Italian film away from Neorealism and toward a more personal cinema of the imagination.

Antonioni may be best known for his film Blow-Up, “a 1966 drama set in Swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that a photograph he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, hidden in the background, evidence of a murder.” This is also probably where I know him best as the film was referred to me by many photo folks — a classic that features quite a few notorious photoshoot scenes.

It’s goodbye to another great director.

Here’s the final scene in Blow-Up (spoiler warning):