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1981-09-05yao.reads◎一名玩具商的意外死亡
8.22
一名玩具商的意外死亡
【《财经》杂志记者季敏华 发自广东佛山 特派记者徐可 发自香港】8月2日，美国最大玩具商美泰公司（Mattel Inc.）向美国消费者安全委员会提出召回96.7万件塑胶玩具，并首次在外界压力下披露了制造商名字——佛山市利达玩具有限公司（下称佛山利达）。
事发前，佛山利达的产量已居佛山玩具制造业第二。一夜之间，这家拥有十多年良好生产记录的合资企业成为众矢之的。
召回事件起因于利达公司生产的玩具表漆含铅量超标，美国环保组织塞拉俱乐部认为危及儿童安全。在美国舆论的不断声讨下，玩具厂商及其上下游供应、检验链上的疏忽被一一曝光和放大。最终，佛山利达被出入境检验检疫部门要求整改，中国国家质量监督管理总局宣布暂停其产品的出口。
事态不断扩大，事先疏于监管的地方商检机构采取了近乎封杀的做法。接近佛山利达的一位知情人士称，利达在事件发生后曾多次送检产品，但当地商检局拒绝检验放行。断然的关停和禁止措施，成为压倒利达经营者张树鸿的最后稻草。
8月11日下午3时许，利达副董事长、港商张树鸿在自己工厂的仓库内上吊自杀。自杀前，张在厂区内巡视一圈，并将工人工资悉数结清。张自杀不到一星期，利达下属三处厂房的工人已几乎遣散一空。
这家半个月前还蒸蒸日上的企业轰然倒塌，以不堪重负的断裂，成为“中国制造”安全大事件下的一个牺牲品，也给人们留下一个沉重的问号。
8月14日，美泰公司又公布了最新的召回事件，称因油漆铅超标问题和磁铁易被儿童吞食隐患，召回近1900万件中国产玩具。这是美泰历史上召回数量最大的一次。
知情人士透露，美泰公司对中国产玩具的全面调查仍在继续，类似频发的玩具召回事件,已令国内玩具厂商噤若寒蝉。
召回后停业
在佛山利达的帅盟厂区后面，新盖的三栋厂房已基本完工，占地面积颇广。就在半个多月以前，张树鸿还经常到这里转一转。“老板盖了新厂房，本来是有更宏大的发展计划。”一位利达的部门主管叹息着告诉《财经》记者。
张树鸿在员工们的描述中，是一个“重人情”、“从不拖欠工资”、与工人们打成一片的“好人”。很多员工都已在利达工作多年，对老板的死唏嘘不已。
张一手扶持长大的佛山利达，成立于1993年，佛山市禅城区汾江实业公司和香港利达实业公司（Lee Der Industrial Company Limited，下称香港利达）各占50%的股份。但根据约定，中方在企业中不分红，亦基本不插手业务经营。
香港利达的两位股东，是香港居民赵贵全和张树鸿，各占一半股份。由于赵氏年纪较大，这些年在内地的业务上已基本交由张树鸿负责。现年50来岁的张是佛山利达的实际管理人，未有家室，多年来居于佛山南海，以厂为家，“身边也没什么人”。平时，他几乎每天来工厂，有时周日亦不例外。“他这几年赚的钱，几乎都投回玩具厂。”一位利达中层告诉《财经》记者。
佛山利达上世纪90年代后期成为美泰的供应商，专门为美泰生产塑胶玩具，制造工艺并不复杂：原料是塑料件、胶水、油墨、天那水等，基本工序是给塑料件喷油、装配到最后包装。在张树鸿的勤勉经营下，有着上千工人的佛山利达多年来亦盈利颇丰。
一位佛山利达部门主管对《财经》记者表示，因为与美泰的良好合作关系，利达曾在1997年获得过美泰的信誉证书。1998年至1999年间，佛山利达进入高速发展期，生产迅速扩大。
2000年7月，香港利达的全资子公司佛山市恒景玩具有限公司（下称佛山恒景）成立，几年后租用了原佛山帅盟玩具厂的厂房进行生产，香港利达管理下的佛山厂区已达三处。员工总数增加到2500余人，去年的产值约2亿元人民币，产量已居佛山第二，仅次于中美玩具厂。
2007年6月中旬，美泰驻中国化验室开始抽检佛山利达的产品，发现不合格。7月7日，在获知其使用的油漆中含铅量超标后，利达工厂开始启用了符合美泰标准的油墨产品，但生产已经受到影响。利达陆陆续续开了一段时间工，终于在8月初全面停产。
美泰起初拒绝公布制造商名字，后来在美国舆论的强大压力下，终于在8月2日宣布对佛山利达近百万件“芝麻街”、“小探险家多拉”等种类的塑胶玩具实行召回，并强调与过往只透露生产国的方式不同，首次向外界公布了生产企业的名字。
更为严酷的是，处于召回事件中心的佛山利达所面对的已不是严格检验，而是停业整顿。8月9日，国家质检总局通报，佛山利达已经被暂停出口产品。
知情人士证实，在美泰公司宣布召回以后，佛山利达经过自身整改，启用了美泰公司认可的油漆供应商。张树鸿等一度积极采取补救措施，重新取得了美泰的信任。召回消息发出的当日，佛山利达已经获得了来自美泰的新订单。
佛山利达现任董事长谢煜光对《财经》记者表示，厂房里已经摆放着新生产的合格产品，价值约1600万港币。但检验部门的禁令打破了利达自救的希望。
“召回的损失，工厂还承受得起。老板年初时还准备大干一场。现在货品出不了关，他是看不到希望了。”工厂的一个管理人员告诉《财经》记者。
祸端链条
确切地说，真正的罪魁祸首不是张树鸿，而是为利达供应油漆多年的东兴新能源有限公司（下称东兴）。
东兴是一个小型家族企业，成立于2001年11月，原来生产印刷品。东兴老板与张树鸿是多年的好朋友，佛山利达的彩盒、纸箱都由东兴供货。
2002年8月，东兴增加了油墨的生产项目，不久开始向佛山利达供货，当年的油墨、涂料产量为5吨。不少佛山利达的员工认为，东兴的发展很大程度上得益于张树鸿旗下利达、恒景发出的订单。
美泰有自己指定的油漆供应商。一位美泰油漆供应商的代表介绍说，美泰在中国共有八家指定的油漆供应商，东兴并不在其列。而佛山利达与东兴长达四年的合作关系，过去并未引起美泰的注意。
该油漆厂商坦承，事实上，有些为美泰生产玩具的厂家并没有选择指定的油漆厂商，产品也能被美泰接受。“美泰的要求是油漆检测报告要跟随产品给它，但不清楚东兴是否提供了类似的检测报告。”
召回事件后相关部门的调查表明，东兴供应的货品近四年来并没有出现质量上的差错。直至今年4月初，东兴称在黄色色粉紧急短缺的情况下，从网上找到一家东莞的色粉厂家购买补货。这家名为东莞众鑫色粉厂的企业向东兴提供了假的无铅色粉证书、认证证书，但东兴没有发现问题。4月10日，东兴向众鑫购买了500公斤色粉。
利达主管事后对媒体表示，按程序规定，东兴进了色粉后要到检测机构认定，但是广州的检验部门需要五到十个工作日才能出结果，东兴担心给佛山利达带来停工损失，所以省略了这个环节。这批问题色粉从4月19日起到6月中旬，陆续使用了200公斤。
佛山利达的一位油漆工证实，他在4月的时候就觉得油漆的味道和以前不同。
该厂一位内部人士对东兴方面的解释表示怀疑。他表示，供货商通常是在原料快要用完前就进行补货，不会拖到最后一刻。东兴怕耽误利达工期的说法，也不能解释为何此后使用的两个多月间都没有进行色粉检测。
知情人士称，鉴定色粉质量要经过五个检验环节，色粉厂和油漆供应商是其中两个。此后这个问题在玩具厂商、美泰和出入境检验检疫部门各处均没有引起注意，所有把关环节一一失灵。
失效的检验
国家出入境检验检疫局的前身商检局，曾于1992年9月1日颁布了《出口玩具质量许可证管理办法》，检验检疫部门对于出口玩具的监管，即基于此法规内容。该法规规定，玩具厂商要获得《出口玩具质量许可证》前，必须申请并由有关部门完成型式试验，即每出一种型号的玩具产品，要将首样送检。在日常监督方面，连续生产两年的出口玩具，应重新进行型式试验。
对于此法规的执行，多名行业人士向《财经》记者表示，在实际操作过程中，均以企业自觉汇报或者监管部门的抽查为主，规律性的检验检疫并不普遍。
“进出口检验检疫局因其自身局限管不过来，1992年法规本身就不足以对出口玩具的质量进行有效监督。”一名玩具制造业人士说。
“海关在操作中也只管进口，而玩具出口基本上就靠厂家的自觉，”另一位从事玩具外贸的人士对《财经》记者说：“从来没听说过国内海关停下来查重金属。主要是麻烦，那么多玩具，那么多型号，每个颜色都要去检验……”
2005年1月至11月，美国消费品安全委员会召回中国玩具产品27项。当年底，中国国家质检总局发出《关于加强进出口玩具检验监管的警示通报》，要求各检验检疫机构对不明确的出口玩具实施逐批检验，并根据情况做安全项目或型式试验，合格后方准出口。而广东出入境检验检疫局南海分局就在此后被检查出执行不力，曾一度为“未进行玩具产品型式试验”而进行整改。
此次美泰召回事件披露出佛山利达的名字，使广东当地检验检疫部门备感压力。
一位南海检验检疫的办事人员说，在今年8月以前，对于出口玩具的检查是抽检。此次佛山利达玩具被召回事件发生以后，当地检验检疫部门才开始大张旗鼓推行强制性检查。“现在的检查比以前要严格了。”
玩具商的冬天
张树鸿自杀后，利达员工谈及此，多有感慨怀念。创业至今，这家埋头生产的玩具企业发展顺遂，并未受到中美贸易摩擦的重大影响。原计划今年产值达到3亿元的佛山利达，未曾料到噩运不期而至。
“这个行业我已经做了20多年，召回的事情经常听到，但从来没有听说过有工厂因此而倒闭。”一位油漆供应商说，“利达的事，这次是闹大了。”
2006年中国出口到美国的玩具约30万批左右，同期被美国消费者安全委员会召回的玩具案例近40项。而今年截至8月16日，该委员会公布召回的产自中国的玩具已有约35项。
虽然相对于中国出口玩具的总量而言，召回的比例仍然很小，但中国玩具被召回的绝对次数确实在不断上升。恰逢今春以来对于“中国制造”的质疑频频见诸美国报端，召回事件在宠物食品、牙膏、汽车等诸多产品领域均有出现。中国产品的质量问题受到全球质疑。
8月8日，中国国家质检总局有关负责人表示，中国政府将继续采取一系列措施，进一步提高产品质量和安全水平，进一步完善消费品安全控制体系的建设。但这位负责人亦指出，玩具出现问题，品牌商和进口商也有很大的责任。
有关出口玩具的检验新规由此应运而生。在佛山南海，针对利达召回以及其后引发的老板自杀事件，南海出入境检验检疫局于8月16日上午召集了南海所有玩具厂商，参与南海玩具企业检测监管工作会议，并研读由国家认证认可监督管理委员会同月最新制定的《出口玩具质量许可（注册登记）实施细则（试行）》。
新规将1993年适用的4种玩具类型扩大到11种，并强调玩具质量许可模式包括型式试验、企业审核、跟踪检查和日常监管。《出口玩具质量许可证书》的有效期从以前的五年缩短为三年，规定如果吊销证书，则玩具厂商一年内不得再次申请。
一位佛山利达的供应商说，至今不知出入境检验检疫部门何时放行佛山利达的产品。在张树鸿去世后的第四天，该玩具制造厂商的管理层已推介其上千名员工去其他企业工作。当日，厂区内已人去楼空，零星的一些工人收拾完自己的行李，准备离开。
而此时，美泰公司公布了其历史上最大数额的召回事件——由于存在磁铁易被儿童吞食隐患，在全球召回的约1820万件中国产玩具，其责任在于美泰自己的设计。
同时，因为中国制造商又一次发生油漆含铅量超标问题，召回另一种玩具共43.6万件，制造商和油漆供应商的名字一并公布于众。
美泰管理层对外表示，可能还有更多的召回将会公布。美泰公司65%的玩具产品在中国生产。美泰的首席执行官Bob Eckert在接受采访时说，美泰在佛山利达召回事件中的损失已经得到恢复。
目前，广东玩具协会和相关商会正多方奔走，力图消除玩具召回事件对广东玩具生产厂商声誉的影响——但张树鸿已看不到这一切了。■
（本文刊载于8月20日出版的2007年第17期《财经》杂志） -
8.2
Michelangelo Antonioni
Director
Dies at 94THE NEW YORK TIME
By RICK LYMAN
Published: July 31, 2007Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly depictions of alienation were cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s, inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home in Rome, Italian news media reported today. He was 94. He died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died at his home in Sweden earlier Monday..
“With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen,” said the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. His office said it was making plans for Mr. Antonioni’s body to lie in state on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
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 cinephiles demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.
Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blowup,” 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. But his true, lasting contribution to cinema resides in an earlier trilogy — “L’Avventura” in 1959, “La Notte” in 1960 and “L’Eclisse” in 1962 — which explores the filmmaker’s tormented central vision that people had become emotionally unglued from one another.
This vision of the apartness of people was expressed near the end of “La Notte,” when his star Monica Vitti observes, “Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”
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.”
Mr. Antonioni broke other conventions, too. Many of his cuts, scene lengths and camera movements were highly idiosyncratic, and he frequently posed his characters in a highly formalized way. He employed point-of-view shots only rarely, a practice that helped erect an emotional shield between the audience and his puzzling characters.
“What is impressive about Antonioni’s films is not that they are good,” the film scholar Seymour Chatman wrote. “But that they have been made at all.”
Perhaps the defining moment in Mr. Antonioni’s career came on the night “LAvventura” was screened at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Many in the audience walked out and there were numerous boos, catcalls and whistles. The director and Monica Vitti thought their careers were over.
But later that night, Roberto Rossellini and a group of other influential filmmakers and critics drafted a statement which they released the following morning. “Aware of the exceptional importance of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, ‘L’Avventura,’ and appalled by the displays of hostility it has aroused, the undersigned critics and members of the profession are anxious to express their admiration for the maker of this film,” they wrote.
One of the great legends of iconoclastic filmmaking — how being booed at Cannes could become a badge of honor — was born.
“L’Avventura” went on to win the festival’s Special Jury Prize and become an international box-office hit, spurring furious debate. Some found the film pointless; others read reams of meaning into its languid predicaments. Mr. Antonioni’s international reputation was made.
The next year, Sight and Sound, the influential British film magazine, polled 70 leading critics from around the world and they not only endorsed “L’Avventura,” but they also chose it as the second-greatest film ever made, just behind “Citizen Kane.’
After burnishing his reputation in the early 1960s, Mr. Antonioni surprised many by trying to make movies with Hollywood’s backing. More surprising, perhaps, was that he then had his greatest commercial success with “Blowup” in 1966.
“My subjects are, in a very general sense, autobiographical,” he once wrote. “The story is first built through discussions with a collaborator. In the case of “L’Eclisse,” the discussions went on for four months. The writing was then done, by myself, taking perhaps fifteen days. My scripts are not formal screenplays, but rather dialogue for the actors and a series of notes to the director. When shooting begins, there is invariably a great amount of changing. When I go on the set of a scene, I insist on remaining alone for at least twenty minutes. I have no preconceived ideas of how the scene should be done, but wait instead for the ideas to come that will tell me how to begin.”
The world of an Antonioni film “is a world of people alienated from one another,” wrote Andrew Turner in his book “World Film Directors” (1968). “Their actions have no meaning or coherence, and even the most fundamental of emotions, love, seems unsustainable.’
Interviewers also found Mr. Antonioni to be a cool, combative subject. “Even when he is telling stories about himself, Antonioni’s face remains set in its habitually serious expression,” Melton S. Davis wrote in a 1964 profile for The New York Times Magazine. “Precise in manner, conservative in dress and quiet in speech, he could be taken for a banker or art dealer recounting an unfortunate business deal.”
But Mr. Antonioni could also be graciously charming. Sometimes, interviewers said, the director’s shrewd green eyes would soften and his lips would curl into a smile that some described as ironic, others as chilly.
Michaelangelo Antonioni was born on September 29,1912 into a well-to-do family of landowners in Ferrara, in northern Italy, a town that he described as a “marvelous little city on the Paduan plain, antique and silent.” Around the age of ten, his family remembered, Michelangelo began to design puppets and to build model sets for them. Later, as a teenager, he became interested in oil painting, favoring portraits to landscapes.
He attended the University of Bologna and earned a degree in economics and commerce in 1935. But it was at the university that he also began to write stories and plays and to direct some of them. He was a founder of the university’s theatrical troupe and one of the its leading tennis champions. He also wrote scathing reviews of both American and Italian genre films for the local paper, and decided to try his own hand at filmmaking.
Mr. Antonioni wanted to make a realistic documentary about the local insane asylum. The patients helped him set up the equipment. Then, he turned on the bright floodlights.
The patients went berserk, he later wrote, “and their faces — which before had been calm — became convulsed and devastated. And then it was our turn to be petrified. The cameraman did not even have the strength to stop his machine, nor was I capable of giving any orders whatever. It was the director of the asylum who finally cried, “Stop! Lights out!” And in the half-darkened room we could see a swarm of bodies twisting as if in the last throes of a death agony.”
Mr. Antonioni decided to give up filmmaking.
In 1940, at the age of 27, he moved to Rome to work as a secretary to Count Vittori Cini. The job didn’t last long. He worked as a bank teller and joined the staff of Cinema magazine, edited by Benito Mussolini’s son, Vittorio. During this period, Mr. Antonioni dropped his aversion to filmmaking and took classes at the Institute of Experimental Filmmaking. His wrote some screenplays, including “Un Pilota Ritorna” (The Return of the Pilot) in 1942 in collaboration with another budding director, Roberto Rossellini.
In 1943, Mr. Antonioni returned to Ferrara and found a local merchant willing to bankroll his first film, a documentary called “Gente del Po” (People of the Po Valley), about the wretched lives of local fishermen. The German occupying forces destroyed much of the footage, though a few scraps survived and became a nine-minute curtain-raiser at the 1947 Venice Film Festival for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.”
After the war, Mr. Antonioni wrote more film criticism and continued making short documentaries. All the while he became increasingly skeptical about the neo-realist movement, which dominated Italian filmmaking, and its relentless focus on substandard social conditions. He yearned to look beyond such things and into the hearts of individuals. “His films were about street sweepers, not street sweeping,” is the way the film critic Robert Haller put it. But no one would let him make the kind of films he wanted to make.
“For ten years, the movies forced me not to use ideas but empty words, cleverness, business sense, patience, stratagems,” Mr. Antonioni wrote in an introduction to a 1963 collection of his screenplays. “I am so scantily blessed with such gifts that I recall that period as being the most painful one in my life.’
At age 38, Mr. Antonioni found backing for his most ambitious, non-documentary project, “Cronaca di un Amore” (Story of a Love). Ostensibly about a man and woman plotting to kill her husband, it turned out to be the earliest example of Mr. Antonioni’s approach. In the film, the husband dies, but it is unclear whether he was murdered, committed suicide or died by accident. This whole plot line vanishes and the film, instead, focuses on the lover’s emotions.
As with later Antonioni films, the settings were stark, the scenes fussily composed, the shots held a few beats longer than necessary. The film won the Grand Prix International at the Festival of Punta del Este in 1951.
In 1954, his 12-year marriage to the former Letizia Balboni fell apart. She later told interviewers that the director had become increasingly remote. “We lived in silence,” she said. “We reached the point where we communicated with each other only through the characters he created and about whom he wanted my advice. He has only one way of expressing himself: His work. What he does is have his actors live out emotional crises in his films, by proxy living out the crises in his own life.’
Mr. Antonioni sank into a deep depression. His insomnia worsened. Often he spent the early morning hours writing screenplays.
In 1955, at the height of this crisis, Mr. Antonioni had his first important artistic triumph. “Le Amiche” (The Girlfriends)” was about the mundane, loveless lives of a group of middle-class women in Turin. It won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Mr. Antonioni began experimenting more with improvisation on the set. “It’s only when I press my eye against the camera and begin to move the actors that I get an exact idea of the scene,” he wrote. He used this technique extensively in “Il Grido (The Outcry)” in 1957, probably the grimmest of his films.
It was while shooting “Il Grido” that Mr. Antonioni met a young stage actress named Monica Vitti, who would become his greatest and most enduring star, and his almost constant companion during much of the “60s.
For two years, Mr. Antonioni could not find a producer to back him. Finally, in 1959, he found someone and finished a screenplay that had been burning in the back of his mind for a long time. But “L’Avventura” almost died before it was born. Chronically short of money, his producer eventually pulled out of the project just as Mr. Antonioni and the actors were working on a craggy island near Sicily.
“It had gotten to the point where there was no food,” Mr. Antonioni remembered. “One crew deserted us. We got hold of another crew and they, too, left. I had 20,000 meters of film and the actors stayed, so I carried the camera on my back and continued shooting.” Eventually, a new producer appeared.
“L’Avventura” proved to be the turning point in his career and is widely regarded as Mr. Antonioni’s masterpiece.
As with most of Mr. Antonioni’s films, it focuses on the comfortable, enervated lives of well-to-do Italians, in this case a group of friends on a yachting trip. Without warning, during a visit to a wave-thrashed atoll, one of them, an emotionally distraught woman named Anna, simply vanishes. Had she drowned herself because her lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), seemed in no hurry to marry her? Had she hurled herself off a cliff in a fit of ennui? Had she been swallowed by the shark she claimed to have seen? Or had she fled on another boat?
The small island is searched. It rains. Police arrive. Then, gradually, Sandro develops an attraction to Anna’s best friend, Claudia (Ms. Vitti). She resists, then warms to him. Eventually, they stop mentioning Anna at all. The search is forgotten. Sandro betrays Claudia, for no apparent reason. We never discover what happened to Anna.
In “L’Avventura,” Mr. Antonioni’s singular technique can be seen in full flower. “The overwhelming sense of estrangement conveyed by “L’Avventura” is as much a product of the style of the movie as of its events or dialogue,” Mr. Turner wrote.
The director rapidly found backing for his next two films, which further explored the themes of alienation he introduced in “L’Avventura” and which he later said were meant to be seen as a trilogy.
In “La Notte” (The Night),” Marcello Mastroianni plays an author with writer’s block suffering through his loveless marriage to Jeanne Moreau. He meets a young woman at a party, played by Ms. Vitti, who he believes personifies the creativity that has abandoned him. The film won the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival.
“L’Eclisse” (The Eclipse)” most directly addressed the alienating effects of material wealth, following the love affair of a young woman of simple tastes, Ms. Vitti again, and a money-hungry stockbroker (Alain Delon).
The film’s ending is much discussed. Abandoning the principal characters, the film closes with a montage several minutes long composed of 58 shots, most of them on or near a street corner where the lovers used to meet. Water seeps from a barrel. The brakes on a bus screech. A fountain is turned off. An airplane zooms overhead. Finally, with the street corner dark and empty, the camera zooms in on the white, annihilating glare of a streetlight. The end.
Mr. Antonioni said he intended the ending to show “the eclipse of all feelings,” and saw it as a coda both to the film and to the entire trilogy. But he also wanted different people to read different meanings into his work. “There may be meanings, but they are different for all of us,” he told an interviewer.
In 1964, Mr. Antonioni made his first color film, “Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert)” with Richard Harris. It, too, starred Ms. Vitti, as a woman coming gradually unhinged. To mirror her mental state, the director used color in very unusual ways, having houses and even trees painted bright colors and then changing those colors from scene to scene.
By the mid-’60s, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most famous and controversial film directors in the world; his movies were screened regularly on the global festival circuit and the auteur was the subject of countless essays and magazine articles. Inevitably, a Hollywood studio, in this case MGM, came calling. Not so inevitably, Mr. Antonioni welcomed them, signing a three-picture deal.
“Blow-Up” was his first effort for the studio. Filmed in English, with the British stars David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave in the hip milieu of the swinging London fashion scene, “Blow-Up” became the director’s biggest hit. It was also, stylistically, different from his previous films, more conventionally plotted and faster-paced, though still fundamentally ambiguous.
Following its commercial and critical success, Mr. Antonioni came to America to make his first big-budget film, and chose the student protest movement as his subject. “Zabriskie Point” (1970) was the result and it was a disaster.
Though some foreign critics praised the film, it was almost universally panned in the United States. “To many critics, it seemed as if the director, who had begun the decade in absolute control of his medium, was ending it in something approaching total confusion,” Mr. Turner wrote.
“Zabriskie Point” was a box-office flop for MGM, one of the biggest financial failures of its day. Mr. Antonioni was devastated and, in many ways, his career never recovered. Certainly, his most fertile creative period was over. He had made six films in the 1960s, many of them regarded as masterpieces, but would make only three more films in the ensuing quarter-century.
But Mr. Antonioni recaptured some of his previous critical respect with 1975’s “The Passenger,” starring Jack Nicholson as a reporter in North Africa who assumes the identity of a gun-runner. The film closes with a famous, 10-minute continuous tracking shot in which Mr. Nicholson is seen in his hotel room, waiting to be killed. The camera pulls out of the room and meanders through the courtyard. People and objects move in and out of the seamless shot before the camera comes full circle and re-enters the hotel room to find Mr. Nicholson dead. “ ‘The Passenger’ leaves no doubt about Antonioni’s mastery,” wrote the film critic David Thomson, who called it “one of the great films of the ‘70s.”
Following “The Passenger,” Mr. Antonioni announced he wanted to take some time to study new technologies and spent five years doing so, before Ms. Vitti asked him to return to directing with a 1980 Italian television film called “Il Mistery di Oberwald” (The Mystery of Oberwald).” Shot on videotape and transferred to film, it was substantially lighter than his previous works. This, he said, allowed him to “escape from the difficulty of moral and esthetic commitment, from the obsessive desire to express oneself.” It was awarded a silver ribbon for visual effects at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, but made little international impact.
Mr. Antonioni made his final commercial film, “Identificazione di una donna” (Identification of a Woman) in 1982, about a man who has affairs with two women following the death of his wife. It won a Grand Prix at the Cannes festival that year.
In 1985, while working on a film adaptation of a short story he had written in 1976, Mr. Antonioni suffered a stroke and the project was put aside. He married the next year for the second time, to the former Enrica Fico, and they lived quietly in an apartment in Rome. She was at his side when he died, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. He had no children, The Associated Press reported.
After the stroke, Mr. Antonioni worked on an Italian television documentary built around the 1990 World Cup soccer championship, but did not work on a feature film again until 1995 when Italian producers lured him out of retirement to make “Beyond the Clouds,” based on a book of his stories. Because of Mr. Antonioni’s infirmity, though, German director Wim Wenders was brought in to help and is listed as its co-director.
Since his stroke, Mr. Antonioni had difficulty speaking more than a few words at a time, so much of the work was done by his wife, Enrica, who energetically interpreted the director’s demands. The film starred Jeanne Moreau and John Malkovich. The reemergence of Mr. Antonioni spurred the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to present him with a Lifetime Achievment Award in 1995.
Mr. Antonioni began directing again in his 90s. He collaborated with Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director, on a trilogy about love and sexuality called Eros, which was released in 2004. He also made a short film called Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo. To his champions, like David Thomson, “the predicament of the world’s greatest living filmmaker unable to work is a fit subject for one of his mediations.”
For Mr. Thomson, “The enigmas in Antonioni’s work are as subject to time as monuments are to erosion, and the achievements of some films can offset or explain the apparent, or early, limits of others. For example, ‘The Passenger’ helped us to see the longing for escape and space in ‘L’Avventura’ and illuminated the persistence of life at the end of ‘L’EcLisse.’ I suspect that Antonioni’s best films will continue to grow and shift, like dunes in the centuries of desert. In that process, if there are eyes left to look, he will become a standard for beauty.”
But for others Mr. Antonioni remained not only enigmatic, but also unreachable to the end.
One interviewer asked him to look back over his life. “In a world without film, what would you have made?” he was asked.
Mr. Antonioni replied: “Film.”
