Michelangelo Antonioni, who has died aged 94, was the least Italianate of great Italian filmmakers. A glacial anatomist of love, despair and the alienating tropes of modern life, he seemed to come from another country and culture than the one inhabited by Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini and Bertolucci.

Where they coloured their movies with human passion and extremes of style or emotional expression, Antonioni created a landscape and screen language where subtext, symbol and enigma reigned. His stories, from a girl disappearing on a volcanic island (L’Avventura) through a permissive age’s bequest of disillusionment (La Notte) to the semi-surreal blends of drama and mime in Blow Up and Zabriskie Point, were mysteries wrapped in mazy narratives. His protagonists, epitomised in the beautiful ‘blankness’ of his longtime leading lady and one-time wife Monica Vitti, were seekers who did not know quite what they were seeking.