Michelangelo Antonioni 1912-2007 & Ingmar Bergman 1918-2007

Cinema lost two of its foundations this month, a day apart from one another. Swedish Auteur Bergman was a lifelong influence on Woody Allen and was highly influential in the strangest of places (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101452/). His films include the ever present film class staple The Seventh Seal as well as comedy (Smiles of a Summer Night), horror (Time of the Wolf), and a modernist classic, the study of a psychoanalytic break, Persona. His style was often parodied but always with the utmost respect to the source material. He will be missed.

Antonioni died at 94. The Italian great broke all the rules of conventional narrative. In the same year Hitchcock killed off Janet Leigh partway into Psycho, Antonioni introduced L'Avventura as part of an eventual trilogy. In the picture, one of the characters disappears while on a daytrip with a group of friends to an island, and 2 characters left to find her drift across Italy, with the disappearance slowly fading from their and our attention. He would follow this with L'notte, and L'eclisse. A master of depicting alienation, there will not be another Antonioni.