Tonino Guerra | Screenwriter, 92

Tonino Guerra, 92, an Italian screenwriter and poet whose film collaborators, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos, amounted to a who's who of European cinema's golden age, died Wednesday at his home in Santarcangelo di Romagna.

In a screenwriting career covering a half-century, Mr. Guerra earned three Academy Award nominations and had a long partnership with Antonioni. Their first collaboration, the enigmatic L'Avventura (1960), was also the film that put Antonioni on the world cinema map and forever linked him with the modernist theme of alienation.

In the decade that followed, Mr. Guerra and Antonioni worked together on La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964), then ventured abroad to capture the restless energy of youth-culture epicenters: swinging London in Blow-Up (1966) and radicalized, disillusioned California in Zabriskie Point (1970).

He wrote three films with Fellini, including Amarcord (1973), which drew on their shared memories of growing up in the Emilia-Romagna region. He worked with several generations of his countrymen, including Francesco Rosi (Lucky Luciano), Mario Monicelli (Casanova '70), the Taviani brothers (The Night of the Shooting Stars), Marco Bellocchio (Henry IV) and Giuseppe Tornatore (Everybody's Fine). And he played a key role as Italian cinema moved away from the neo-realism of the postwar years to incorporate stylization and artifice.

His Oscar-nominated screenplays were for Casanova '70, Blow-Up and Amarcord. - N.Y. Times News Service