A bad week for European cinema. Not even 24 hours after Ingmar Bergman died, the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni left life.

Michelangelo Antonioni was born in 1912 and grew up grew up in bourgeois surroundings of the Italian province. He studied commerce and started to write film criticisms for a local newspaper. In 1939 he went to Rome to study directorship at the School of Cinema. There he came in touch with Frederico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini.

Surrounded by the upcoming neorealism, Michelangelo Antonioni took distance of this currant by focusing his films on middle and upper class characters instead of lower class, poor main characters, like DeSica and Rossellini did. Also did his films not treat after-war misery and social subjects, as usual in neorealism, but themes like existentialism, isolation and twisted psychlogical storylines.

Antonioni's first big success was l'Avventura which (after beeing booed by the audience) won the Jury prize at the 1960 Cannes festival. A fascinating mystery, shot with rule-breaking camera work.

Other successful films were La notte (1961), L'eclisse (1962), Blowup (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1970, both in the USA).

In 1985 he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak.

Antonioni died on July 30, 2007 at the age of 94.