Just when we were grappling with the news of Bergman’s death, we got hit with Antonioni. I think Godard must be in his basement wearing a bicycle helmet — though as the recently re-released Pierrot le Fou reminded us, no man is really safe if he wants to blow himself up.

Serious film critics (unlike me) are no doubt hard at work on big long Sunday section thumbsuckers about the death of the serious European cinema of the fifties and sixties, and the landscape does seem a lot emptier with the absence of those Janus Films stars. Those were men who set out to ask, if not answer, life’s big questions, using cinema as both brush and canvas, and while you can see their influence everywhere,it’s hard to say who their legitimate heirs might be. (I know Tarantino likes to name-check Godard and others, but let’s not be L-7.)

Not that I understood much of what Antonioni was on about. I remember watching L’Aventura the first time and thinking: what the hell? Where’d the girl go? How come no one cares anymore? Before realizing that the meaninglessness of her disappearance was the point (if there was one) and that real art was sometimes difficult and unsatisfying, that it asked things of you mere entertainment wasn’t meant to. I liked Blowup better, partly because I liked the Yardbirds (and naked girls) and it was in English and seemed to have a mystery too…until that also didn’t matter. “Do you?” the filmmaker seemed to be asking.

Antonioni’s most famous explosion was that of a beautiful house in the desert that ends the seriously silly Zabriskie Point. Watch it now and see if you’re not moved. It’s a real explosion, not some CGI crapola, with Bruce Willis flying backwards and landing on his feet — close one! Hollywood blows up stuff all the time and it’s not supposed to mean anything. You still walk out of the theater as they play some lame rock song and the couples clinch. The difference was that Antonioni meant it to not mean anything, or that’s what I think. He’s not going to say anything to the contrary.