Ciao…Antonioni! Cinema passes away

Yesterday it was Ingmar Bergman, today Michelangelo Antonioni. Old men fading away in rain, sat in the parkbench like bookends. And I can see a lonely man in Grenoble, stubbles and a stick, sitting in the park, paused his weary flipping through the pages of his book named Histoire du Cinema and staring blank. Time is up, JLG! The chessboard is withdrawn, the mimes have ended their tennis-play. No more stories to tell, no more women to look at, no more ideas to give birth to, no more battles to win… No more life in your Europe to wonder at through your lenses. The computers generating images still on the other side of the Atlantic, the box-office won’t pause for a moment of silence. And we forgot, cinema ain’t images only, visual or aural; cinema is the nostalgia of a history of aborted possibilities. Cinema is what would have been, rather than what it was. Recall how a film ended in a park where the girl and the boy would have met? They simply didn’t come and for a rare moment in the history of cinema the camera was rendered free, watching a perfect park, perfect streets, streamlined architecture and nameless faces, each with their own stories to tell. Recall, how the logistics of joining shots were liberated of human drama and an inhuman logistics of decreasing tonalities ended a perfect finale of L’Ecclisse? Neither fiction nor non-fiction, but pure cinema? Well man, its fin du Cinema, a cinema is dead, and you have wrote the obituary long ago. Bogarte is drunk and broken, Marilyn is sobbing stroking her wrinkled skin, the last gun is shot and the sheriff is sad as good sheriffs always are after they are impelled to shoot faster; the screen is blank because it’s filled up with pixels, a world blown up, the shooting pieces of an exploding glitz, the shrapnels of a blasting dream, the poetry of a beautiful end…

the final scene of Zabriskie Point (1975) by Michelangelo Antonioni (1912 Sep 29 – 2007 July 31)