Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008)

Harold Pinter's The Caretaker - "The Job Offer" (1963, directed by Clive Donner)

More Harold Pinter search results @ YouTube

Harold Pinter, British playwright of the Modernist generation of "Angry Young Men", has died at the age of 78. He received the Literature Nobel Prize in 2005.

Paavo Haavikko (1931 - 2008)

Rauta-aika (1982)

("The Iron Age", an expensive TV production based on Finnish national epic Kalevala and written by Haavikko.)

Paavo Haavikko, a Finnish Academy member and one of the most prominent Modernist poets and writers in Finland has passed away. Haavikko was also a playwright, essayist, book publisher and an avid social commentator.

Paavo Haavikko biography @ Kirjasto.sci.fi

Michelangelo Antonioni In Memoriam

Il Deserto Rosso by Michelangelo Antonioni
(September 29, 1912 - July 30, 2007)


Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni has also passed away. It's an interesting coincidence that his death took place exactly on the same day as Ingmar Bergman's, since both directors exemplified European art cinema of the 1950s-70s era. Antonioni, for some reason, is not remembered today perhaps as well as his contemporaries Bergman and Fellini, but especially in the 1960s and 70s his films -- such as L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, Il Deserto Rosso, Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, Professione: Reporter -- with their alienated characters and meandering scenes were obligatory watching among the intellectual modernist audiences.

Antonioni also had an eye for contemporary fashions and styles: who can forget The Yardbirds' guitar-smashing performance for the catatonic audiences in the 1966 "Swinging London" study Blow-Up or Pink Floyd's hypnotic music for the infamous explosion scene of Zabriskie Point (1970)?

Obituaries:

BBC
CNN
The New York Times

Michelangelo Angelo search results @ YouTube

Michelangelo Antonioni @ pHinnWeb