July 31 (Bloomberg) -- Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian movie director whose depiction of human alienation influenced a generation of actors and filmmakers, has died. He was 94.

Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni announced a public viewing of Antonioni's body tomorrow at City Hall, according to a written statement. The director died last night at his home, Ansa reported earlier, citing unidentified family members.

He was the second European filmmaking great of his generation to die in as many days. Swedish director Ingmar Bergman died yesterday at age 89.

``Thanks to Antonioni's films, accepted reality takes on a different meaning,'' said Veltroni, who founded the city's film festival last year. ``To look at a woman's face, the design of a car or a cloud after seeing one of his films isn't the same.''

Antonioni, who made more than 30 films over six decades, dedicated his work to the study of human dilemmas, using loitering silent camera shots. Movies such as ``L'Avventura'' and ``Blowup'' were driven by metaphors rather than action, prompting peers and critics to both praise his work and shun it.

``In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places in our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting,'' said actor Jack Nicholson when he presented Antonioni with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Honorary Award for lifetime achievement in 1995. Nicholson acted in Antonioni's 1975 film ``The Passenger.''

Cannes Jeers

In milestone movies such as the English-language ``Blowup'' (1966), Antonioni's work offered the audience some time to contemplate interior struggles through psychology and symbolism rather than action. When ``L'Avventura'' was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 it attracted boos from some members of the audience, who rejected his non-narrative approach and themes of desolation. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the festival and gave Antonioni a name in the international film market.

``Antonioni changed the narrative structure of telling a story,'' actress Chiara Caselli, who starred in ``Beyond the Clouds'' (1995), said in an interview. ``In the history of Italian cinema, Antonioni will always be there.''

`Closes a Circle'

He was among the last Italian masters of film, said cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, whose work earned him three Academy Awards for movies including ``Apocalypse Now'' (1979).

``After the deaths of Fellini, Visconti and now Antonioni, it closes a circle of directors who worked to study and teach new ways of expression,'' he said in an interview. ``I hope there is some director in Italy ready to inherit their legacy.''

Antonioni was born into a middle-class family on Sept. 29, 1912, in Ferrara, north-east Italy. He attended the University of Bologna, where he studied classical literature and economics. As a college student, he wrote scathing reviews of Italian comedies for a local newspaper.

His attempts at documentary filmmaking failed. When he tried to film a mental asylum, Antonioni's subjects became hysterical in front of the camera, forcing him to call off the production.

In the early 1940s, he continued to write about film in Rome, contributing to Cinema, a magazine with the Fascist imprimatur and edited by Vittorio Mussolini, son of Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator. Fired from the magazine, Antonioni opted to study filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale.

Film Critic

As a scriptwriter, he worked for neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini and French filmmaker Marcel Carne before securing financing for a documentary about the impoverished fishermen of northern Italy's Po Valley.

After Italian filmmaking came to a halt during the war, Antonioni worked as a film critic for magazines, including Film Rivista.

His feature debut came in 1950 when he directed ``Cronaca di un Amore,'' recounting the story of a bourgeois wife who meets her penniless lover in cheap hotels and plots her husband's murder. When the husband dies in an accident, the couple is left guilt-stricken.

To film the story, Antonioni departed from fashionable neo- realist practice by employing real actors and shunning social criticism. He also steered clear of traditional plot lines, aiming instead to draw the audience into the character's internal drama. The film had little success.

`Concepts of Homer'

Antonioni was sensitive to Italy's budding industrial success. Through World War II, the country was largely agrarian and one of the poorest in Europe. With one foot in traditional moralistic Catholicism and the other in modernism, a new class emerged, confused and awash in wealth.

``Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer,'' Antonioni said in a 1969 interview. ``Hence this upset, this disequilibrium that makes weaker people anxious and apprehensive, that makes it so difficult for them to adapt to the mechanism of modern life.''

Antonioni was hard to understand for popular audiences and his inaccessibility could be a risk for producers. In his 1985 book ``Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World,'' Seymour Chatman cites Antonioni's description of an exchange the director once had with a producer: ``You, Antonioni, are a great director, but we've got to kill you because you're too dangerous to cinema, because it's such a pain to see your films.''

New Rich

With ``L'Avventura,'' Antonioni focused on Italy's new rich and their residual ennui and anxiety in a story about a group of well-to-do couples on a boat tour of the Aeolian islands, near Sicily. Anna tries to add some life to the dreary trip by crying ``Shark!'' -- a lie that the director uses to spotlight the passiveness and lack of curiosity of the jaded middle class, and to highlight Anna's friend, the bed-hopper Sandro.

Anna later disappears on a volcanic island. After a search, her friends return to their mundane lives and Anna is dropped from the film with no explanation.

The audience revolted against the 145-minute film, attacking it as longwinded and pretentious. ``It is like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several of the reels have got lost,'' wrote New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther in 1961.

Indeed, scenes end abruptly, leaving viewers scratching their heads wondering if they missed something. The slowly building drama dissipates and so does Anna.

``Antonioni never really learned the trade,'' IMDb, the Internet movie database, quoted Bergman as saying. ``He never concentrated on single images, never realizing that film is a rhythmic flow of images.''

International Success

Antonioni's biggest international success was ``Blowup,'' an esoteric murder mystery set in Swinging London of the 1960s.

Thomas, a famous fashion photographer bored with free love, finds exhilaration by snapping photos in a park where he thinks he captured a murder on film. ``Blowup'' earned Antonioni two Oscar nominations for best director and best original screenplay. Hollywood psycho-thriller director Brian De Palma released a remake in 1981 as ``Blow Out,'' starring John Travolta as a movie sound technician who records an exploding tire.

Antonioni's follow-up film, ``Zabriskie Point'' (1970), included music by Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead, though it was a flop at the box office.

``Identificazione di una Donna'' about a filmmaker on a quest for the perfect woman was a hit in Italy and won the Special 35th Anniversary Award at Cannes in 1982. It wasn't distributed in the U.S. after New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called it an ``excruciatingly empty work.''

Suffers Stroke

Antonioni continued to work after suffering a debilitating stroke in 1985. (The director was cited by the Los Angeles Times as describing the benefit of having a stroke: ``It got rid of the facial twitch I had since I was a boy.'')

He collaborated with German director Wim Wenders on ``Beyond the Clouds,'' four vignettes about love. In 2004, Antonioni directed one of three tales on the subject of desire in ``Eros,'' alongside Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-Wai.

Presented with his lifetime achievement Oscar in 1995, Antonioni, worn down by age and barely able to talk since his stroke, accepted the award with one word: ``Grazie.''

Antonioni was married twice, most recently to Enrica Fico, who survives him. His funeral will be held on Aug. 2 in his hometown of Ferrara, according to a statement posted on that city's Web site.

To contact the reporter on this story: Adam L. Freeman in Rome at afreeman5@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 31, 2007 13:31 EDT