Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni developed his interest in theatre and cinema while a student at Bologna University, and began writing for a newspaper published in his native Ferrara. He continued to do so until the late thirties, severely criticising the Italian films of the ‘white telephone’ era. His first essay in cinema was a documentary in a mental hospital, never completed. In 1939 he moved to Rome to work on the universal exhibition planned to take place in 1943, and began contributing articles to Cinema. The following year he enrolled as a student of directing at the Centro Sperimentale. His career proper began in 1942, with his collaboration on the script of Rossellini’s Un piloa ritorna: in the same year he worked on the script of Enrico Fulchignoni’s I due foscari (on which he was also assistant director) and spent some time working with Carne on Les Visiteurs. His own first film, Gente del Po, a documentary about life in the Po valley, was begun in 1943. It was partly lost in processing and storage, and the final version in 1947 was edited from barely half the original footage. In 1947 he worked on the script of De Santis’s Caccia Tragica, and in 1948 he made two short films, one about city cleaners and one about rural superstitions. On these two films he began the collaboration with the musician, Giovanni Fusco, whose work was to make a considerable contribution to his later career. 

His next short film, L’amorosa menzogna (1949), attacking the false glamour of the fumetti, magazine photo-strips, foreshadowed his participation as co-scriptwriter in 1952 for Lo Sceicco Bianco, Fellini’s attack (though a more light-hearted one) on the same subject, and underlined his detestation of vulgarized art. Antonioni made three more short films before getting the opportunity to direct his first feature, Cronaca di un amore (1950), starring Lucia Bose, which marked a departure from the tenets of Neo-Realism within which he had worked as a documentarist. The story of a rich married woman, her poor lover, and the death of her husband in a car crash, it drew directly on the American thriller conventions which had inspired Ossessione (1942). Many qualities were already apparent which were to distinguish Antonioni’s later work: the haunting imagery of city streets, some sequences of remarkably complex camera movements, the element of unsolved mystery, and above all the confrontation of a beautiful, erotic woman with an impoverished lover. Several critics, especially in France, noticed the film with enthusiastic approval. His next film, I vinti (1952), returned nearer the documentary spirit in treating the activities of young delinquents in episodes set in Italy, France, and England. The film had difficulties with censorship in Italy, where Antonioni’s proposed depiction of neo-Fascist activity had to be watered down, and in France, where the film was banned. 

In 1953 he contributed `Tentato suicido’ to the Episode film Amore In Citta. Suicide was to be another theme recurring in his work, and at this time Antonioni denied the assertion made by some critics that this was connected with the writer Pavese’s preoccupation with suicide. During the same year he directed La signora senza camelie, with Lucia Bose as a shop-girl who is transported to stardom on the screen then reduced, after an ambitious failure, to playing pulp roles. The workings of the film industry are viewed with an acrid eye reminiscent of Antonioni’s distaste for the fumetti, and the treatment of failed glamour recalls Scott Fitzgerald, whose work Antonioni admired. Above all, the imagery of the film, with the characters viewed in relation to the physical surroundings of the studio and the streets of Milan, showed Antonioni’s developing assurance.

His next film, Le Amiche (1955), the only one of his films adapted directly from a literary work, the story `Tra donne sole’ by the misogynist Pavese, is a beautifully controlled study of the relationships between a group of women and their men-friends. Although no moral pronouncement is explicit, and the film is informed by a taste for women characteristic of Antonioni and quite foreign to Pavese, the characters’ manoeuvres and the film’s culmination in a suicide clearly express a condemnation of society’s prescriptions for human relationships. Antonioni’s scathing view of male inadequacy in particular was the dramatic focus for Il Grido (1957). Less at ease in the worker’s milieu and hampered perhaps by the international cast imposed on him, Antonioni achieved a film of much less complexity and effectiveness: but the full power of his experience was realized in L’Avventura (1960). The film is irradiated by the performance Antonioni drew from Monica Vitti, one of great vitality and eroticism; and he became an international success overnight, helped by the outcry with which the audience at Cannes greeted the film’s elusive mixture of mystery, eroticism, and implicit social comment.

For his next two films, which pursued the themes of L’avventura so that the three are often spoken of as a trilogy, he was able to command the cream of international stars. In La Notte (1961), Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni played a couple confronting the stresses arising in their marriage and finding nothing more than a tenuous solution. In L’eclisse (1962) Monica Vitti once again assumed a central role, enacting with Alain Delon the final drifting into nothingness of a relationship. The films of this remarkable series are all characterized by two particular stylistic hallmarks of Antonioni: formal visual beauty, and an increasingly assured use of pacing and rhythm in which, instead of the manipulation of time according to cinematic conventions comfortable for the spectator, dramatic ellipsis alternates with sequences where natural time is inexorably observed.

Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert, 1964) gave Antonioni his first opportunity to relate his characters to their environment through the use of colour. Typically, he imposed his own vision on landscapes and interiors, so that the settings reject naturalism to become a visual metaphor for despair. The film’s lack of conviction stems as much perhaps from the failure of Monica Vitti to sustain the demanding central neurotic role as from the aridity of the generalisations about man’s alienation in industrial society. 

Antonioni’s move to production abroad coincided with a point in his career at which he had exhaustively pursued the theme preoccupying him since his first feature, the inadequacy of human roles and attitudes. It was also the point at which his artistic relationship with Vitti, so fruitful during his later Italian films, had broken down, and at which the use of colour dictated radical stylistic departures for him. He directed an episode, ‘Prefazione’, in Dino De Laurentiis’ I tre volti (1965), and in the same year he made, under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Blow-Up (released 1967). Although there is a sense of strain about the excesses of swinging London and unease in the performances of his stars, the film makes accomplished use of pop art modes and carries sharp observations about the reality of an artist’s relation to society. 

Antonioni’s next assignment took him to California, where he spent two years preparing and shooting Zabriskie Point (1970). Critics who had, not without justification, pointed to self-indulgent mannerisms in Blow-Up were even more hostile in their reception of Zabriskie Point, which contains nevertheless sequences of great beauty and is a resounding condemnation of materialistic values. Returning to his roots as a documentarist in 1972, Antonioni shot Chung-Kuo Cina, a RAI sponsored film on China, critically acclaimed in the West but reviled by the Chinese authorities as subversive of official photographic etiquette. In 1973, Antonioni returned to London to make The Passenger (1975). 

Antonioni’s interest in technical innovations brought him to experiment with a video camera for The Mystery of Oberwald, (1980), a film based on a play by Jean Cocteau. With Identification of a Woman (1982), Antonioni returned to Italian characters and situations. In 1995, after years of silence due to illness, he co directed with Wim Wenders his “comeback” film, Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds). In the same year, Antonioni was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime commitment to the cinema. Antonioni’s final film, made when he was in his 90s, was a segment of the anthology film Eros (2004), entitled “Il filo pericoloso delle cose” (“The Dangerous Thread of Things”).

Antonioni died aged 94 on July 30, 2007 in Rome, just a few hours after the death of another renowned film director, Ingmar Bergman.  He was buried in his home town of Ferrara on August 2, 2007.

WEBSITES

michelangeloantonioni.info
Official Site


archivioantonioni.it/en/
The Michelangelo Antonioni Archive 


neugraphic.com/blow-up/
Comprehensive collection of articles and critical analysis on Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film. Site includes bibliography, gallery, articles and production information.

PUBLICATIONS:

Antonioni: Centenary Essays: Laura Rascaroli, John David Rhodes 2004

WRITINGS:

Michelangelo Antonioni That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director
1986

Michelangelo Antonioni Unfinished Business: Screenplays, Scenarios, and Ideas
1998

Michelangelo Antonioni The Architecture of Vision Writings and Interviews on Cinema
2008