Wow––this is amazing. Enrico Enrica Fico, the widow of Michelangelo Antonioni, told Italy’s La Stampa that her husband essentially committed long, slow suicide by refusing to eat. The article is in Italian and I’m sure the Google translation is imperfect, but it’s good enough to get the gist.

The filmmaker went nearly completely blind after suffering a stroke and, according to his widow, “not to see for him had become absolutely unacceptable.” Fico says Antonioni actually asked her to shoot or poison him, but she refused, and instead allowed him to starve himself by subsisting on “only a few teaspoons” of food each day from September 2006 until his death the following summer.

Incredibly, Antonioni’s widow compares his chosen manner of death to his filmmaking style. The translation is mangled but the sentiment seems clear: “Like his films, even his death was a masterpiece. It went quiet in absolute and embracing the absolute, as if it were a mystic.”

Above: the end of Il Grido, in which the protagonist falls (accidentally) to his death at the feet of his horrified former mistress.

Via Hollywood Elsewhere.