2.
Xan Brooks in the British Guardian muses that, "Antonioni has somehow aged less well than Bergman. Perhaps it is the fate of all 'modernists' to eventually turn antique, or even retro." After watching L'Avventura, a friend of mine said that it was like a feature-length perfume commercial. I think both my friend's and Xan's comments are a little off the mark. Certainly, Blow Up was a contemporary commentary on a Swinging London already past its expiration date, even as some parts of the film have aged less gracefully (oh, those mimes!). Yes, the overly mannered shots and flat acting of the "trilogy" have become so incorporated into mainstream film language that a static medium shot meant to telegraph isolation has practically become a dead metaphor. But this is simply the byproduct of Antonioni's canonization as an auteur and the concurrent proliferation of his hagiography in film schools. As Stephen Holden pointed out in his New York Times appraisal of Bergman, Bergman's icy spiritual battles with death in a Godless world are of an earlier time, just as Antonioni's ennui-wracked jet setters look like an exotic and now extinct species.

3.
It has become a cliche to say that buildings and landscapes are as much characters in Antonioni's films as the isolated nomads who inhabit them, but if we are taking cliches to be the contrail of an artist's influence, traceable across the works who kindred spirits who followed, then Antonioni irrevocably changed the way film looked at and used urban and natural space. Entire buildings, rocky outcrops, abandoned housing developments, columns, and trees are always getting in the way of Antonioni's characters, blocking their field of vision, concretizing their discomfort or alienation, obstructing their access, ruining our view. Tsai Ming Liang, Pedro Costa, Ridley Scott (specifically Alien), Wong Kar Wai, Stanley Kubrick and Dario Argento are some of the directors who come to mind, who conscious or not, are indebted to the way in which Antonioni foregrounded landscape -- never letting us forget the topography of the chess board on which he orchestrated his sublime stalemates, again and again.
(Matt Sussman)