Italian directing legend Michelangelo Antonioni, who died earlier this week aged 94, was buried on Thursday in his hometown of Ferrara in northern Italy.
Cult German director Wim Wenders and veteran Italian poet and screenplay writer Tonino Guerra were among those who attended the funeral ceremony at Ferrara's San Giorgio Basilica.
The church and the piazza outside were packed with mourners wishing to pay their last respects to Italy's 'poet of alienation'.
Antonioni died on Monday evening at his home in Rome.
He had been partially paralysed and unable to speak since suffering a near-fatal stroke in 1985.
The maker of groundbreaking movies such as L'Avventura and Blowup, Antonioni is regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century whose portrayals of modern angst and isolation have inspired directors the world over.
Wenders, who once described Antonioni as "the screen's greatest painter", credited the Italian with inspiring him to take up directing.
"It's difficult to sum up his legacy but one thing is certain, he created a new image of 20th-century man," Wenders said.
"He's now beyond the clouds," he added, referring to the 1995 film he worked on with Antonioni, Al di la' delle Nuvole (Beyond the Clouds), which was the Italian master's penultimate film.
Guerra, a close friend and collaborator of Antonioni who co-wrote a dozen of his films, said that the director had been "drawn back into the pale mists of Ferrara".
The 87-year-old writer, who has worked with all the great names of Italian cinema including Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica, stressed that Antonioni had been the only Italian postwar director to turn the camera's eye on middle class despair as opposed to working class poverty.
"There were the problems of the working classes, the bicycle thieves of the Neorealist school, but he chose to focus his attention on bourgeois malaise," Guerra said.
After the funeral, the childless Antonioni was buried at Ferrara's Certosa cemetery, next to his parents.
CAREER SUMMARY.
Antonioni was born in Ferrara on September 29, 1912.
Raised in a comfortable, middle-class environment, he went on to study business economics at Bologna University.
But his real interests lay with the arts and, in 1939, he enrolled at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a film school that shaped an entire generation of postwar Italian filmmakers.
He made his first feature, the film noir Cronaca di un Amore (Story of a Love Affair), in 1950.
Critics would later recognize the movie as showing much of the director's signature style but it was ignored by the public and film experts alike when released.
His breakthrough movie L'Avventura arrived in 1960 when he was 46. The first of a projected trilogy, it clinched the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.
Elements that could be detected in his previous work had crystallised into a highly-recognisable style that defied plot-driven narrative and dialogue, taking the cinema world by surprise.
L'Avventura and the subsequent works in the trio, La Notte (The Night) in 1961 and Eclisse (Eclipse) in 1962, are harsh, enigmatic reflections on the difficulties of 'connecting' in a brusque, fast-paced, technological world.
Imbued with a deep sense of desolation and alienation, the films are populated with bourgeois characters who appear to have lost their sense of self, their values and their ability to communicate in the modern era.
The 1966 film Blowup (1966) starring David Hemmings as a successful but desensitised-to-life fashion photographer living in the heart of swinging London earned perhaps the broadest audience of any of the director's films.
An imaginary tennis game at the film's end symbolising the thin line between reality and illusion became one of the defining moments of 1960s cinema.
Antonioni went to the United States to shoot his next movie, Zabriskie Point (1970) - a portrait of American society and consumerism-run-amok. Some $7 million was poured into the film, an extravagant sum for the time.
The result was a colossal flop that dealt a crippling blow to the 59-year-old director's artistic reputation and was followed by a long absence from filmmaking.
Antonioni returned in 1975 with Professione: Reporter (The Passenger) in which Jack Nicholson plays a burnt-out reporter. Although it was received more favourably than Zabriskie Point, Antonioni's output from this point on was to remain infrequent.
He made two more films - Il Mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1979) and Identificazione di Una Donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982) - before suffering a stroke on December 20, 1985.
His subsequent physical disabilities did not stop him working and, at the age of 83 and after an absence of 13 years, he made his comeback with Beyond the Clouds.
In the same year, 1995, Antonioni received a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars.
The director's last work is contained in the 2004 film Eros, an erotic drama in three parts, one shot by Antonioni and the others by two contemporary big names - America's Steven Soderbergh and Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai.
Antonioni's contribution, Il Filo Pericoloso delle Cose (The Dangerous Thread of Things), was filmed in November 2001 and came after a six-year lull from directing.
