But like Bergman, he was a figurehead for the modernist arthouse movement of the 1960s, a time when directors made difficult films and cinephiles took them very seriously. If their deaths seem to signal the end of an era, the reality is that era has long since passed: today, there are few highminded directors whose work become talking points for a wide audience . . . perhaps David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai and now Michael Haneke. But those films are a trickle. During Bergman's and Antonioni's hey day, challenging films were a flood.

Antonioni's work is considered the embodiment of '60s cool . . . a fact, some critics argue, that dates it today. Blow-Up (1965) is his most famous film. Its puzzling story about a photographer who accidentally captures a murder framed swinging London at its height.

Today it looks jaded by the very zeitgeist that made it so chic.

But Antonioni's key film, L'Avventura . . . the first part of a trilogy including La Notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962) . . . still breathes fresh air. It split Cannes upon its arrival in 1960 but it soon became an all-time favourite for many critics. It embodied everything that was to become known about the director: stunning composition, long takes, unconventional, detached narrative and the use of architecture to create a mood of estrangement. Antonioni depicted a world where human connection was impossible.

Today, perhaps because of its ancient Sicilian setting, L'Avventura has not dated. The fad of existentialism has come and gone, but L'Avventura is still great for its behaviourist depiction of humans going through the motions, without emotion.

The highpoint of Antonioni's cinema of estrangement came in the final, extraordinary seven-minute sequence of his 1975 film The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson, in which the camera roams outside a hotel window, while a person in the room behind is killed, completely excluding the viewer.