Michelangelo Antonioni

• 1. Introduction

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  Michelangelo Antonioni died in Rome on the 30th of July 2007, the same day as Ingmar Bergman. Two titans of world cinema left on the same afternoon. Antonioni was 94 years old. His body lay in state at City Hall in Rome, where a large screen played black-and-white footage of him on his film sets. He was buried in his hometown of Ferrara on the 2nd of August 2007.

  What kind of filmmaker draws Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma into his orbit? What does it mean to make films that Bergman could simultaneously call masterpieces and find boring? And how does a man who suffered a stroke in 1985 that left him unable to speak or write still go on directing films for another two decades?

  Antonioni was the first and one of only two directors in history to win all four of the major European festival awards: the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear, and the Golden Leopard. Three of his films sit on the list of one hundred Italian films to be saved. In 1994, Jack Nicholson presented him with an Honorary Academy Award recognizing his place as one of cinema's master visual stylists. That statuette was later stolen by burglars and had to be replaced.

• 2. Ferrara and Formation

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  On the 29th of September 1912, Antonioni was born into a prosperous family of landowners in Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. He described his childhood in his own words to Italian film critic Aldo Tassone, recalling a mother who "was a warm and intelligent woman who had been a labourer in her youth" and a father who had risen from a working-class family through evening courses and hard work.

  The friends he chose as a child were, in his telling, invariably from poorer families. He saw in them a quality he prized: "they were more authentic and spontaneous." That sympathy for working-class lives would haunt his films for decades.

  At nine years old, Antonioni gave his first public concert as a violinist. He would abandon the instrument once cinema entered his life as a teenager. Drawing, however, never left him. He recalled organising imaginary towns as a child of eleven, constructing buildings and streets peopled with little figures. "I invented stories for them," he said. "These childhood happenings were like little films."

  After graduating from the University of Bologna with a degree in economics, he turned to film journalism, writing for the Ferrara newspaper Il Corriere Padano starting in 1935. By 1940 he had moved to Rome, where he worked briefly for Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Vittorio Mussolini. Fired within months, he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia to study film technique, left after three months, was drafted into the army, and survived being condemned to death as a member of the Italian Resistance.

• 3. From Neorealism to Alienation

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  In 1942, Antonioni co-wrote A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini, and the following year he travelled to France to assist Marcel Carné on Les visiteurs du soir. Also in 1943, he began his first short film, Gente del Po, a neorealist study of poor fishermen in the Po valley. When Rome was liberated by the Allies, the film stock was seized by the Fascist Republic of Salò and could not be recovered and edited until 1947. Some footage was never retrieved at all.

  His first feature, Cronaca di un amore, released in 1950, marked a deliberate break from neorealism by turning its attention to the middle classes rather than the working poor. A string of features followed: I vinti in 1952, exploring juvenile delinquency across France, Italy, and England; La signora senza camelie in 1953, about a young film star's fall from grace; Le amiche in 1955, about middle-class women in Turin; and Il grido in 1957, which returned to the working class with a story of a factory worker and his daughter.

  At the 1955 Venice Film Festival, Le amiche won the Silver Lion and gave Antonioni a chance to test a new idea: instead of a conventional narrative, he presented a series of apparently disconnected events and used long, extended takes as a structural principle. The experiment would return, more fully formed, five years later, and change international cinema.

• 4. The Alienation Trilogy

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  L'avventura premiered at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival to a mixture of cheers and boos from the audience. It won a Jury Prize regardless, and went on to become Antonioni's first sustained international success in arthouse cinemas worldwide.

  La notte followed in 1961, starring Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni. It won the Golden Bear at the 11th Berlin International Film Festival. L'Eclisse arrived in 1962 with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti. All three films share a preoccupation with characters who are emptied out by modern life, adrift in landscapes that dwarf or ignore them. Together they are known as the alienation trilogy.

  Il deserto rosso, released in 1964, is sometimes counted as a fourth part of that sequence. It was Antonioni's first color film and again starred Monica Vitti, who was his romantic partner at the time. The Venice Film Festival awarded it the Golden Lion that same year.

  At Cannes, speaking about L'Avventura, Antonioni articulated the idea beneath all four films. He argued that modern people still cling to "a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice and sheer laziness." He saw a civilisation technically sophisticated enough to dissect its own moral codes, but unable to replace them with anything. Nine years after that speech, he told an interviewer he loathed the very word morality.

• 5. English Language and the World

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  Antonioni signed a deal with producer Carlo Ponti that offered him artistic freedom on three English-language films to be released by MGM. The first was Blowup, shot in 1966 and set in Swinging London. It starred David Hemmings as a fashion photographer and was loosely based on a short story by the Argentine-French writer Julio Cortázar. Blowup was an international critical and commercial success and won the Palme d'Or at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. It also earned Antonioni Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

  The second Ponti film, Zabriskie Point in 1970, was set in America and followed counterculture themes. Its soundtrack featured Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones. Critics were far less welcoming. The film has been described as "the worst film ever made by a director of genius."

  A separate project, a treatment Antonioni drafted in 1966 and titled "Technically Sweet," was developed into a screenplay with Mark Peploe, Niccolo Tucci, and Tonino Guerra. It was planned for the Amazon jungle, with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider attached to star. Carlo Ponti withdrew support on the verge of production. In 2008, the manuscript became the basis of an international group exhibition curated by the Copenhagen-based artists Yvette Brackman and Maria Finn, displayed in New York. Antonioni's widow Enrica and director André Ristum later announced plans to produce a film from the screenplay, with filming in Brazil and Sardinia set to begin in 2023.

  Nicholson and Schneider did appear in The Passenger in 1975, the third Ponti film, which received critical praise but fared poorly at the box office.

• 6. After the Stroke

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  In 1983, Antonioni published That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, a book of sketch stories and musings he called "nuclei" for possible films. Two years later, in 1985, a stroke left him aphasic and partly paralyzed, depriving him of speech and writing.

  He continued directing regardless. Beyond the Clouds, released in 1995, was based on four stories from That Bowling Alley on the Tiber. Because no insurer would back a production led solely by Antonioni in his condition, Wim Wenders was hired as a back-up director to shoot scenes. As Wenders explained, "without someone else, no film of his would find insurers." During editing, Antonioni rejected nearly all of Wenders's footage, keeping only a few short interludes. The two shared the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival with Cyclo.

  His final film came when he was in his nineties: a segment called Il filo pericoloso delle cose, meaning The Dangerous Thread of Things, made for the 2004 anthology film Eros. The piece featured enigmatic paintings by Antonioni, a luxury sports car negotiating narrow lanes and stone bridges, a woman performing a cryptic dance on a beach, and a song titled "Michelangelo Antonioni," composed and performed by Caetano Veloso. Roger Ebert wrote that the film was neither erotic nor about eroticism. The U.S. DVD release also included a 2004 short, Lo sguardo di Michelangelo, meaning The Gaze of Michelangelo.

• 7. Visual Style and Legacy

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  Film critic Richard Brody called Antonioni "the cinema's exemplary modernist" and described his images as reflecting, "with a cold enticement, the abstractions that fascinated him." Film historian Virginia Wright Wexman pointed to the slowness of his camera and his avoidance of frequent cuts, writing that "he forces our full attention by continuing the shot long after others would cut away." Stephen Dalton of the British Film Institute compared his empty landscapes to the "empty urban dreamscapes" of the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico.

  Film historian David Bordwell credited Antonioni with more influence on art cinema than any other single director, noting that he encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative. Jean-Luc Godard, in a 2004 interview with Serge Kaganski, judged Antonioni the filmmaker who had most influenced contemporary cinema. Andrei Tarkovsky drew on his work especially in developing Nostalghia. Stanley Kubrick listed La Notte among his ten favourite films in a 1963 poll.

  Not every giant agreed. Orson Welles was direct about his boredom with the long take: "I don't like to dwell on things. He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, 'Well, he's not going to carry that woman all the way up that road.' But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she's gone." Bergman, in 2002, called Blowup and La notte masterpieces while finding the rest boring, and admitted he never understood why Antonioni was held in such esteem.

  Actor Peter Weller, who worked with Antonioni on Beyond the Clouds, offered a different account in a 1996 interview. He described Antonioni as "the first guy who really started making films about the reality of the vacuity between people, the difficulty in traversing this space between lovers in modern day." The Chung Kuo, Cina documentary Antonioni filmed in China in 1972 was condemned as anti-Chinese by Chinese authorities; it was not shown in China until the 25th of November 2004, when the Beijing Film Academy screened it as part of a festival honouring his work.