Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (29 September 1912 – 30

Michelangelo Antonioni
July 2007), was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, and short story writer.
Best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents"[1] — L'Avventura
(1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962), as well as the English-language
Blowup (1966), Antonioni "redefined the concept of narrative cinema" and
challenged traditional approaches to storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at
large.[2] He produced "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces" and rejected action in
favor of contemplation, focusing on image and design over character and story. His
films defined a "cinema of possibilities".[2]

Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career,

including the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1960, 1962), Palme d'Or (1966), and
35th Anniversary Prize (1982); the Venice Film Festival Silver Lion (1955), Golden
Lion (1964), FIPRESCI Prize (1964, 1995), and Pietro Bianchi Award (1998); the
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon eight times; and an
honorary Academy Award in 1995. He is one of three directors to have won the Michelangelo Antonioni, 1995
Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear, and the only director to have won
Born 29 September 1912
these three and the Golden Leopard.
Ferrara, Kingdom of
Italy
Died 30 July 2007
(aged 94)
Contents Rome, Italy
Early life Nationality Italian
Career
Occupation Film director,
Early film work
International recognition screenwriter, editor,
Later career author

Reception Years active 1942–2004

Awards and honors Spouse(s) Letizia Balboni
Filmography (m. 1942–1954)
Feature films
Enrica Antonioni
Short films
(m. 1986–2007)
References
Citations Partner(s) Monica Vitti (1960–
Bibliography 1970)
External links

Early life
Antonioni was born into a prosperous family of landowners in Ferrara, Emilia Romagna, in northern Italy. He was the son of
Elisabetta (née Roncagli) and Ismaele Antonioni.[3] The director explained to Italian film critic Aldo T
assone:
 My childhood was a happy one. My mother ... was a warm and intelligent woman who had been a laborer in her
youth. My father also was a good man. Born into a working-class family, he succeeded in obtaining a comfortable
position through evening courses and hard work. My parents gave me free rein to do what I wanted: with my brother,
we spent most of our time playing outside with friends. Curiously enough, our friends were invariably proletarian,
and poor. The poor still existed at that time, you er cognized them by their clothes. But even in the way they wore their
clothes, there was a fantasy, a frankness that made me prefer them to boys of bourgeois families. I always had
sympathy for young women of working-class families, even later when I attended university: they were more
authentic and spontaneous.[4]

— Michelangelo Antonioni

While still a child, Antonioni was fond of drawing and music. A precocious violinist, he gave his first concert at the age of nine.
Although he abandoned the violin with the discovery of cinema in his teens, drawing would remain a lifelong passion. "I have never
drawn, even as a child, either puppets or silhouettes but rather facades of houses and gates. One of my favorite games consisted of
organizing towns. Ignorant in architecture, I constructed buildings and streets crammed with little figures. I invented stories for them.
These childhood happenings - I was eleven years old - were like little films."[5]

Upon graduation from the University of Bologna with a degree in economics, he started writing for the local Ferrara newspaper Il
Corriere Padano in 1935 as a film journalist.

In 1940, Antonioni moved to Rome, where he worked for Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Vittorio Mussolini.
However, Antonioni was fired a few months afterward. Later that year he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia to
study film technique, but left after three months. He was subsequently drafted into the army. During the war Antonioni survived
being condemned to death as a member of theItalian resistance.[6]

Career

Early film work

In 1942, Antonioni co-wrote A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini and worked as assistant director on Enrico Fulchignoni's I due
Foscari. In 1943, he travelled to France to assist Marcel Carné on Les visiteurs du soir and then began a series of short films with
Gente del Po (1943), a story of poor fishermen of the Po valley. When Rome was liberated by the Allies, the film stock was
transferred to the Fascist "Republic of Salò" and could not be recovered and edited until 1947 (the complete footage was never
retrieved). These films wereneorealist in style, being semi-documentary studies of the lives of ordinary people.[7]

However, Antonioni's first full-length feature film Cronaca di un amore (1950) broke away from neorealism by depicting the middle
classes. He continued to do so in a series of other films: I vinti ("The Vanquished", 1952), a trio of stories, each set in a different
country (France, Italy and England), about juvenile delinquency; La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camellias, 1953)
about a young film star and her fall from grace; and Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) about middle class women in Turin. Il grido
(The Outcry, 1957) was a return to working class stories, depicting a factory worker and his daughter. Each of these stories is about
social alienation.[7]

International recognition
In Le Amiche (1955), Antonioni experimented with a radical new style: instead of a conventional narrative, he presented a series of
apparently disconnected events, and he used long takes as part of his film making style.[7] Antonioni returned to their use in
L'avventura (1960), which became his first international success. At the Cannes Film Festival it received a mixture of cheers[8] and
boos,[9] but the film was popular in art house cinemas around the world. La notte (1961), starring Jeanne Moreau and Marcello
Mastroianni, and L'Eclisse (1962), starring Alain Delon, followed L'avventura. These three films are commonly referred to as a
trilogy because they are stylistically similar and all concerned with the alienation of man in the modern world.[10][11][12] La notte
won the Golden Bear award at the 11th Berlin International Film Festival,[13] His first color film, Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert,
1964), deals with similar themes, and is sometimes considered the fourth film of the "trilogy".[1] All of these films star Monica Vitti,
his lover during that period.

Antonioni then signed a deal with producer Carlo Ponti that would allow artistic freedom on three films in English to be released by
MGM. The first, Blowup (1966),[14] set in Swinging London, was a major international success. The script was loosely based on the
short story The Devil's Drool (otherwise known as Blow Up) by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar. Although it dealt with the
challenging theme of the impossibility of objective standards and the ever-doubtable truth of memory, it was a successful and popular
hit with audiences, no doubt helped by its sex scenes, which were explicit for the time. It starred David Hemmings and Vanessa
Redgrave. The second film was Zabriskie Point (1970), his first set in America and with a counterculture theme. The soundtrack
carried popular artists such as Pink Floyd (who wrote new music specifically for the film), the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones.
However, its release was a critical and commercial disaster. The third, The Passenger (1975), starring Jack Nicholson and Maria
Schneider, received critical praise, but also did poorly at the box office. It was out of circulation for many years, but was re-released
for a limited theatrical run in October 2005 and has subsequently been released on
DVD.

In 1972, in between Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, Antonioni was invited by the Mao government of the People's Republic of
China to visit the country. He made the documentary Chung Kuo, Cina, but it was severely denounced by the Chinese authorities as
"anti-Chinese" and "anti-communist".[15] The documentary had its first showing in China on 25 November 2004 in Beijing with a
film festival hosted by theBeijing Film Academyto honor the works of Michelangelo Antonioni.

Later career
In 1980, Antonioni made Il mistero di Oberwald (The Mystery of Oberwald), an experiment in the electronic treatment of color,
recorded in video then transferred to film, featuring Monica Vitti once more. It is based on Jean Cocteau's play L'Aigle à deux têtes
(The Eagle With Two Heads). Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982), filmed in Italy, deals one more time
with the recursive subjects of his Italian trilogy. In 1985, Antonioni suffered a stroke, which left him partly paralyzed and unable to
speak. However, he continued to make films, including Beyond the Clouds (1995), for which Wim Wenders filmed some scenes. As
Wenders has explained, Antonioni rejected almost all the material filmed by Wenders during the editing, except for a few short
interludes.[16] They shared the FIPRESCI Prize at theVenice Film Festival with Cyclo.

In 1994 he was given the Honorary Academy Award "in recognition of his place as one of the cinema's master visual stylists." It was
presented to him by Jack Nicholson. Months later, the statuette was stolen by burglars and had to be replaced. Previously, he had been
nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay for Blowup. 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").
The short film's episodes are framed by dreamy paintings and the song "Michelangelo Antonioni", composed and sung by Caetano
Veloso.[17] However, it was not well-received internationally; in America, for example, Roger Ebert claimed that it was neither erotic
nor about eroticism.[18] The U.S. DVD release of the film includes another 2004 short film by Antonioni, Lo sguardo di
Michelangelo (The Gaze of Michelangelo).

Antonioni died aged 94 on 30 July 2007 in Rome, the same day that another renowned film director, Ingmar Bergman, also died.
Antonioni lay in state at City Hall in Rome where a large screen showed black-and-white footage of him among his film sets and
behind-the-scenes. He was buried in his home town of Ferrara on 2 August 2007.

Reception
Film historian Virginia Wright Wexman describes Antonioni's perspective on the world as that of a "postreligious Marxist and
existentialist intellectual."[19] In a speech at Cannes about L'Avventura, Antonioni said that in the modern age of reason and science,
mankind still lives by "a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice and sheer
laziness". He said his films explore the paradox that "we have examined those moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them
and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones."
Nine years later he expressed a similar attitude in an interview, saying that he loathed the word 'morality': "When man becomes
reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no
longer have to use them."[20]

One of the recurring themes in Antonioni's films is characters who suffer from ennui and whose lives are empty and purposeless
aside from the gratification of pleasure or the pursuit of material wealth. Film historian David Bordwell writes that in his films,
"Vacations, parties and artistic pursuits are vain efforts to conceal the characters' lack of purpose and emotion. Sexuality is reduced to
casual seduction, enterprise to the pursuit of wealth at any cost."[21] Antonioni's films tend to have spare plots and dialogue, and
much of the screen time is spent lingering on certain settings, such as the seven-minute continuous take at the end of The Passenger
and the beautiful long-take near the beginning that "mixes time", or the scene in L'Eclisse in which Monica Vitti stares curiously at
electrical posts accompanied by ambient sounds of wires clanking. Virginia Wright Wexman summarizes his style in the following
terms: "The camera is placed at a medium distance more often than close in, frequently moving slowly; the shots are permitted to
extend uninterrupted by cutting. Thus each image is more complex, containing more information than it would in a style in which a
smaller area is framed ... In Antonioni's work we must regard his images at length; he forces our full attention by continuing the shot
long after others would cut away."[19] Antonioni is also noted for exploiting colour as a significant expressive element of his
cinematic style, especially inIl deserto rosso, his first colour film.[22]

Bordwell explains that Antonioni's films were extremely influential on subsequent art films: "More than any other director, he
encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative".[21] Film director Akira Kurosawa considered Antonioni one
of the most interesting filmmakers.[23] Stanley Kubrick listed La Notte as one of his ten favorite films in a 1963 Poll.[24] Miklós
Jancsó considers Antonioni as his master.

Antonioni's spare style and purposeless characters, however, have not received universal acclaim. Ingmar Bergman stated in 2002
that he considered some of Antonioni's films, including Blowup and La notte, masterpieces for their detached and dreamlike quality,
but found the other films boring and noted that he had never understood why Antonioni was held in such esteem. Orson Welles
regretted the Italian director's use of the long take: "I don't like to dwell on things. It's one of the reasons I'm so bored with Antonioni
- the belief that, because a shot is good, it's going to get better if you keep looking at it. 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."[25]

American actor Peter Weller, whom Antonioni directed in Beyond the Clouds, explained in a 1996 interview: "There is no director
living except maybe Kurosawa, Bergman, or Antonioni that I would fall down and do anything for
. I met Antonioni three years ago in
Taormina at a film festival. I introduced myself and told him that I adored his movies, his contributions to film, because he was the
first guy who really started making films about the reality of the vacuity between people, the difficulty in traversing this space
, Antonioni—that's the beautifulthing."[26]
between lovers in modern day ... and he never gives you an answer

Awards and honors

Academy Honorary Award (1995)
Berlin International Film FestivalFIPRESCI Prize (1961)
Berlin International Film FestivalGolden Bear (1961), for La Notte
Bodil Award for Best European Film (1976), forThe Passenger
British Film Institute Sutherland Trophy (1960), for L'Avventura
Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1960), for L'Avventura
Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1962), forEclipse
Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or (1967), for Blowup
Cannes Film Festival 35th Anniversary Prize (1982), forIdentification of a Woman
David di Donatello Award for Best Director (1961), forLa Notte
David di Donatello Luchino Visconti Award (1976)
European Film Awards Life Achievement Award (1993)
Flaiano Prize Career Award in Cinema (2000)
French Syndicate of Cinema CriticsAward for Best Foreign Film (1968), forBlowup
 Giffoni Film Festival François Truffaut Award (1991)
Giffoni Film Festival Golden Career Gryphon(1995)
International Istanbul Film FestivalLifetime Achievement Award (1996)
Italian National Syndicate of Film JournalistsSilver Ribbon for Best Documentary (1948), forN.U.
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon for Best Documentary (1950), for Lies of Love
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Special Silver Ribbon (1951), forStory of a Love Affair
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon for Best Director
(1956), for Le Amiche
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon for Best Director
(1962), for La Notte
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon for Best foreign film Director (1968), for
Blow up
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon for Best Director
(1976), for The Passenger
Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director (1968), for Blowup
Locarno International Film FestivalPrize (1957), for Il Grido
Montreal World Film Festival Grand Prix Special des Amériques (1995)
National Society of Film CriticsSpecial Citation Award (2001)
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director (2001), for Blowup
Palm Springs International Film FestivalLifetime Achievement Award (1998)
Valladolid International Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize for Short Film (2004), forMichelangelo Eye to Eye
Venice Film Festival Silver Lion (1955), for Le Amiche
Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize (1964),for Red Desert
Venice Film Festival Golden Lion (1964), for Red Desert
Venice Film Festival Career Golden Lion (1983)
Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize (1995),for Beyond the Clouds (with Wim Wenders)
Venice Film Festival Pietro Bianchi Award (1998)

Filmography

Feature films
Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore, 1950)
I Vinti (The Vanquished, 1952)
The Lady Without Camelias (La signora senza camelie, 1953)
Le Amiche (The Girl Friends, 1955)
Il Grido (The Cry, 1957)
L'Avventura (The Adventure, 1960)
La Notte (The Night, 1961)
L'Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962)
Red Desert (1964)
Blowup (1966)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Chung Kuo, Cina (documentary, 1972)
The Passenger (1975)
The Mystery of Oberwald(Il mistero di Oberwald, 1981)
Identification of a Woman(Identificazione di una donna, 1982)
Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole, 1995) with Wim Wenders

Short films
Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley, filmed in 1943, released in 1947) 10 minutes
N.U. (Dustmen, 1948) 11 minutes
Oltre l'oblio (1948)
Roma-Montevideo (1948)
Lies of Love (L'amorosa menzogna, 1949) 10 minutes
Sette canne, un vestito(Seven Reeds, One Suit, 1949) 10 minutes
 Bomarzo (1949)
Ragazze in bianco (Girls in White, 1949)
Superstizione (Superstition, 1949) 9 minutes
La villa dei mostri (The House of Monsters, 1950) 10 minutes
La funivia del Faloria (The Funicular of Mount Faloria, 1950) 10 minutes
Tentato suicido (When Love Fails, 1953) episode in L'amore in città (Love in the City)
Il provino (1965) episode in I tre volti
Inserto girato a Lisca Bianca(1983) 8 minutes
Kumbha Mela (1989) 18 minutes
Roma (Rome, 1989) episode in 12 registi per 12 città, for the 1990 FIFA World Cup
Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale (Volcanoes and Carnival, 1993) 8 minutes
Sicilia (1997) 9 minutes
Lo sguardo di Michelangelo(The Gaze of Michelangelo, 2004) 15 minutes
Il filo pericoloso delle cose(The Dangerous Thread of Things, 2004) episode in Eros

References

Citations
1. Holden, Stephan (4 June 2006)."Antonioni's Nothingness and Beauty"(https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/movie
s/04hold.html). The New York Times. Retrieved 21 May 2012.
2. Ankeny, Jason. "Michelangelo Antonioni"(http://www.allmovie.com/artist/michelangelo-antonioni-p79780). AllMovie.
Retrieved 21 May 2012.
3. "Michelangelo Antonioni, Director"(http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-A-Ba/Antonioni-Michelangelo.html). Film
Reference. Retrieved 9 May 2016.
4. Tassone 2002, p. 6.
5. Tassone 2002, p. 7.
6. Bachmann, Gideon; Antonioni, Michelangelo (Summer 1975). "Antonioni after China: Art versus Science".28 (4).
Berkley: University of California Press: 26–30.JSTOR 1211645 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1211645).
7. Cook 2004, p. 535.
8. Houston, Penelope (31 July 2007). "Obituary: Michelangelo Antonioni"(http://film.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/0,,21385
57,00.html). The Guardian. Retrieved 9 May 2016.
9. Bradshaw, Peter (27 September 2012)."Michelangelo Antonioni: Centenary of a Forgotten Giant"(https://www.thegu
ardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/sep/27/michelangelo-antonioni-centenary-forgotten-giant)
. The Guardian. Retrieved
9 May 2016.
10. Gazetas 2008, p. 246.
11. Wakeman 1988, p. 65.
12. Cameron & Wood 1971, p. 105.
13. "Berlinale 1961: Prize Winners"(http://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/1961/03_preistr_ger_1961/03_Preist
raeger_1961.html). Berlinale. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
14. Tast, Brigitte; Tast, Hans-Jürgen (14 March 2014). "Light Room, Dark Room: Antonioni's low-Up
B und der Traumjob
Fotograf". Kulleraugen (in German) (44). ISBN 978-3-88842-044-3.
15. Echo and Leefeld 1977, pp. 8–12.
16. Wenders 2000, p. 79.
17. Johnston, Ian (August 1, 2006)."We're Not Happy and We Never Will Be" (http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/53/cronac
a.htm). Bright Lights Film Journal. Retrieved 9 May 2016.
18. Ebert, Roger (8 April 2005)."Eros" (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/eros-2004). Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved
March 28, 2016.
19. Wexman 2006, p. 312.
20. Samuels, Charles Thomas (29 July 1969)."Interview with Michelangelo Antonioni in Rome"(http://zakka.dk/euroscre
enwriters/interviews/michelangelo_antonioni_02.htm)
. Euro Screenwriters. Retrieved 9 May 2016.
21. Bordwell and Thompson 2002, pp. 427–428.
22. Grant 2006, p. 47.
23. Kurosawa, Akira: Something Like an Autobiography, p.242. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982.
24. Ciment 2003, p. 34.
25. Bogdanovich 1992, pp. 103–104.
26. "From Acting to Directing, Cigars to Jazz, Actor Peter W
eller Is a Man of Many Passions"(http://www.cigaraficionad
o.com/webfeatures/show/id/The-Man-Behind-the-Mask_9108) . Cigar Aficionado. 1 March 1996. Retrieved 9 May
2016.

Bibliography
Antonioni, Michelangelo (1963).Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni. New York: Orion Press.
Arrowsmith, William (1995). Ted Perry, ed. Antonioni: The Poet of Images. New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN 978-0-19-509270-7.
Bogdanovich, Peter (1992). This is Orson Welles. New York: HarperPerennial. ISBN 978-0-306-80834-0.
Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin (2002).Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-
338613-3.
Brunette, Peter (1998).The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. New York: Cambridge University Press.ISBN 978-0-
521-38992-1.
Cameron, Ian Alexander; Wood, Robin (1971). Antonioni. New York: Praeger.
Chatman, Seymour (1985).Antonioni: The Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press.ISBN 978-
0-520-05341-0.
Chatman, Seymour (2008).Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films. Köln: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-3030-7.
Ciment, Michel (2003). Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-21108-1.
Cook, David A. (2004).A History of Narrative Film. New York: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-97868-1.
Eco, Umberto; Leefeldt, Christina (1977).De Interpretatione, or the Difficulty of Being Marco Polo
. Film Quarterly
30.4: Special Book Issue: 8-12.
Gazetas, Aristides (2008).An Introduction to World Cinema(Second ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.ISBN 978-0-
7864-3907-2.
Grant, Barry Keith (2007).Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, Vol 4. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale.ISBN 978-0-
02-865795-0.
Kurosawa, Akira (1982).Something Like an Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-50938-9.
Lyons, Robert Joseph (1976).Michelangelo Antonioni's Neo-Realism: A World V
iew. Dissertation on Film. North
Stratford, NH: Ayer Company Publishers.ISBN 978-0-405-07618-3.
Pomerance, Murray (2011).Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema
. Berkeley: University of
California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25870-9.
Samuels, Charles Thomas (1972).Encountering Directors. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 978-0-306-80286-
7.
Tassone, Aldo (2002). I film di Michelangelo Antonioni: un poeta della visione
. Milan: Gremese Editore.ISBN 978-
88-8440-197-7.
Wakeman, John, ed. (1988).World Film Directors: Volume Two, 1945–1985. New York: H.W. Wilson. ISBN 978-0-
8242-0763-2.
Wenders, Wim (2000). My Time with Antonioni: The Diary of an Extraordinary Experience
. London: Faber & Faber.
ISBN 978-0-571-20076-4.
Wexman, Virginia Wright (2006). A History of Film. Boston: Pearson. ISBN 978-0-205-62528-4.

External links
Michelangelo Antonionion IMDb
Michelangelo Antonioniat the TCM Movie Database
 Michelangelo Antonioniat AllMovie
Michelangelo AntonioniAntonioni writings and interviews
Michelangelo AntonioniBibliography in the University of California, Berkeley Library

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