Antonioni was born into a prosperous family of landowners inFerrara,Emilia-Romagna. He was the son of Elisabetta (née Roncagli) and Ismaele Antonioni.[5] The director explained to Italian film critic Aldo Tassone:
My childhood was a happy one. My mother... was a warm and intelligent woman who had been a labourer 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 recognized 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.[6]
— Michelangelo Antonioni
As 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 favourite games consisted of organizing towns. Ignorant in architecture, I constructed buildings and streets crammed with little figures. I invented stories for them. These childhoodhappenings—I was eleven years old—were like little films."[7]
Upon graduation from theUniversity of Bologna with a degree in economics, he started writing for the Ferrara newspaperIl Corriere Padano in 1935 as a film journalist.
In 1940, Antonioni moved to Rome, where he worked forCinema, the officialFascist film magazine edited byVittorio Mussolini. However, Antonioni was fired a few months afterwards. 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, and survived being condemned to death as a member of theItalian Resistance.[8]
In 1942, Antonioni co-wroteA Pilot Returns withRoberto Rossellini and worked as assistant director on Enrico Fulchignoni'sI due Foscari. In 1943, he travelled to France to assistMarcel Carné onLes visiteurs du soir and began a series of short films withGente del Po (1943), a story of poor fishermen of thePo 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 semi-documentary studies of the lives of working-class people.[9]
However, Antonioni's first featureCronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 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; andLe 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 aboutsocial alienation.[9]
InLe Amiche (1955), Antonioni experimented with a radical new style: instead of a conventional narrative, he presented a series of apparently disconnected events, and usedlong takes as part of his style.[9] Antonioni returned to their use inL'avventura (1960), which became his first international success. At the1960 Cannes Film Festival it received a mixture of cheers and boos,[10][11] but won aJury Prize and became popular in arthouse cinemas around the world.La notte (1961), starringJeanne Moreau andMarcello Mastroianni, andL'Eclisse (1962), starringAlain Delon andMonica Vitti, followedL'avventura. These three films are often referred to as a trilogy.[12][13][14]La notte won theGolden Bear at the11th Berlin International Film Festival,[15] 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 four films featured Vitti, his romantic partner at the time.
In 1966, Antonioni drafted a treatment entitled "Technically Sweet", which he later developed into a screenplay withMark Peploe,Niccolo Tucci, andTonino Guerra, with plans to begin filming in the early 1970s with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. On the verge of production in the Amazon jungle Ponti suddenly withdrew support and the project was abandoned, with Nicholson and Schneider going forward to star inThe Passenger.[18] In 2008, "Technically Sweet" became an international group exhibition curated by Copenhagen-based artistsYvette Brackman and Maria Finn, in which the creations of artists, working in multiple mediums and based on Antonioni's manuscript, were displayed in New York.[19] One of these was the short film "Sweet Ruin", directed byElisabeth Subrin and starringGaby Hoffmann.[20] Antonioni's widowEnrica and director André Ristum announced plans to produce a film based on the screenplay, with filming in Brazil and Sardinia to begin in 2023.[21][needs update]
In 1972, Antonioni was invited by to China to film the achievements of theCultural Revolution.[22]: 13 The resulting documentary,Chung Kuo, Cina, was strongly condemned by the Chinese authorities as "anti-Chinese" and "anti-communist".[23][24] It was first shown in China on 25 November 2004 in Beijing, with a film festival hosted by theBeijing Film Academy to honour the works of Antonioni. The film is now well-regarded by Chinese audiences, particularly by people who lived during the Cultural Revolution.[22]: 14
In 1980, Antonioni directedIl mistero di Oberwald (The Mystery of Oberwald), based onJean Cocteau's play,L'Aigle à deux têtes (The Eagle With Two Heads). Featuring Monica Vitti in the lead, the film delves into an experimental approach to color enhancement through electronic treatment. The process involves initially capturing the footage on video and transferring it to 35mm film stock during post-production.
Identificazione di una donna ("Identification of a Woman",) a 1982 film shot in Italy, explores the recurring themes found in his Italian trilogy. In 1983, Antonioni published the bookThat Bowling Alley on the Tiber, which containssketch stories and musings he described as "nuclei" for possible films.[25] In 1985, Antonioni suffered a stroke that left himaphasic and partly paralyzed. Despite his incapacity to speak or write, Antonioni continued to direct films includingBeyond the Clouds (1995), based on four stories fromThat Bowling Alley on the Tiber, for whichWim Wenders was hired as a back-up director to shoot various scenes. As Wenders has explained, "without someone else, no film of his would find insurers." During the editing, however, Antonioni rejected almost all of the material filmed by Wenders except for a few short interludes.[26] They shared the FIPRESCI Prize at theVenice Film Festival withCyclo.
In 1994, he was given an HonoraryAcademy Award "in recognition of his place as one of cinema's master visual stylists." Presented to him by Jack Nicholson, the statuette was later stolen by burglars and had to be replaced. Previously, Antonioni had received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay forBlowup (1967).
Antonioni's final film, directed when he was in his 90s, was a segment of theanthology filmEros (2004), entitledIl filo pericoloso delle cose (The Dangerous Thread of Things). The short film's episodes are framed using a series of enigmatic paintings by Antonioni, a luxury sports car that has difficulty negotiating the narrow lanes and archaic stone bridges of the provincial town setting, a bikini-clad women performing a cryptic choreography on a beach, and the song "Michelangelo Antonioni", composed and sung byCaetano Veloso.[27] The film was not well-received internationally. In America,Roger Ebert claimed it was neither erotic nor about eroticism.[28] 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 in Rome, aged 94, on 30 July 2007, the same day as renowned Swedish directorIngmar Bergman.[29] 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 hometown of Ferrara on 2 August 2007.
It's too simplistic to say—as many people have done—that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention ... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable ... There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date.
CriticRichard Brody described Antonioni as "the cinema's exemplarymodernist" and one of its "great pictorialists—his images reflect, with a cold enticement, the abstractions that fascinated him."[31]AllMovie stated that "his films—a seminal body of enigmatic and intricate mood pieces—rejected action in favor of contemplation, championing image and design over character and story."[2] Stephen Dalton of theBritish Film Institute described Antonioni's influential visual hallmarks as "extremelylong takes, striking modern architecture, painterly use of colour, [and] tiny human figures adrift in empty landscapes," noting similarities to the "empty urban dreamscapes" ofsurrealist painterGiorgio de Chirico.[3] Film historian Virginia Wright Wexman notes the slowness of his camera and the absence of frequent cuts, stating that "he forces our full attention by continuing the shot long after others would cut away."[32] Antonioni is also noted for exploiting colour as a significant expressive element in his later works, especially inIl deserto rosso, his first colour film.[33]
Antonioni's plots were experimental, ambiguous, and elusive, often featuring middle-class characters who suffer fromennui, desperation, or joyless sex.[3] Film historianDavid Bordwell writes that in Antonioni's 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."[4]The New Yorker wrote that "Antonioni captured a newbourgeois society that shifted from physical to intellectual creation, from matter to abstraction, from things to images, and the crisis of personal identity and self-recognition that resulted," calling his 1960s collaborations with Monica Vitti "a crucial moment in the creation of cinematicmodernism."[34] Richard Brody stated that his films explore "the way that new methods of communication—mainly the mass media, but also the abstractions of high-tech industry, architecture, music, politics, and even fashion—have a feedback effect on the educated, white-collar thinkers who create them," but noted that "he wasn't nostalgic about the premodern."[31]
Wexman describes Antonioni's perspective on the world as that of a "postreligiousMarxist andexistentialist intellectual."[32] In a speech at Cannes aboutL'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 [...] 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."[35] CriticRoland Barthes claimed that Antonioni's approach "is not that of a historian, a politician or a moralist, but rather that of autopian whose perception is seeking to pinpoint the new world, because he is eager for this world and already wants to be part of it."[36] He added that his art "consists in always leaving the road ofmeaning open and as if undecided."[36]
Bordwell explains that Antonioni was extremely influential onart films: "More than any other director, he encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative."[4]The Guardian described him as, "in essence, a director of extraordinary sequences," and advised viewers to "forget plotting, characters or dialogue, his import is conveyed in absolutelyformal terms."[37]
Film directorAkira Kurosawa considered Antonioni one of the most interesting filmmakers.[38]Stanley Kubrick listedLa Notte as one of his ten favorite films in a 1963 Poll.[39]Andrei Tarkovsky was deeply influenced by Antonioni, especially for the development of his filmNostalghia. In an interview with Serge Kaganski in 2004,Jean-Luc Godard judges that Antonioni is the filmmaker who has most influenced contemporary cinema.Wim Wenders considered Antonioni as a master and the two collaborated as directors for the filmBeyond the Clouds.Miklós Jancsó considers Antonioni as his master. American directorMartin Scorsese paid tribute to Antonioni following his death in 2007, stating that his films "posed mysteries—or rather the mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul."[3] American directorsFrancis Ford Coppola andBrian De Palma paid homage to Antonioni in their own films.[3]
Antonioni's spare style and purposeless characters, however, have not received universal acclaim.Ingmar Bergman stated in 2002 that while he considered the Antonioni filmsBlowup andLa notte masterpieces, he 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 thelong 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 hedoes. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she's gone."[40]
American actorPeter Weller, whom Antonioni directed inBeyond the Clouds, explained in a 1996 interview: "There is no director living except maybeKurosawa,Bergman, or Antonioni that I would fall down and do anything for. I met Antonioni three years ago inTaormina at afilm 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 between lovers in modern day ... and he never gives you an answer, Antonioni—that's the beautiful thing."[41]
^Bachmann, Gideon; Antonioni, Michelangelo (Summer 1975). "Antonioni after China: Art versus Science".Film Quarterly.28 (4). Berkeley: University of California Press:26–30.doi:10.2307/1211645.JSTOR1211645.
^Tast, Brigitte; Tast, Hans-Jürgen (14 March 2014). "Light Room, Dark Room: Antonioni's Blow-Up und der Traumjob Fotograf".Kulleraugen (in German) (44).ISBN978-3-88842-044-3.
^Craven, Peter. "Uneasy moments from master of angst."The Age, A2, May 17, 2008, p. 20.
^Durrani, Shandana A. (1 March 1996)."Man Behind the Mask".Cigar Aficionado. From Acting to Directing, Cigars to Jazz, Actor Peter Weller Is a Man of Many Passions. Retrieved9 May 2016.
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.ISBN978-0-19-509270-7.
Brunette, Peter (1998).The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. New York: Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-38992-1.
Chatman, Seymour (2008).Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films. Köln: Taschen.ISBN978-3-8228-3030-7.
Lyons, Robert Joseph (1976).Michelangelo Antonioni's Neo-Realism: A World View. Dissertation on Film. North Stratford, NH: Ayer Company Publishers.ISBN978-0-405-07618-3.
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