Research in Progress: Oct 23, 2021
Michelangelo Antonioni Career Summation
Occupational Inheritance: No
Social Class: Upper middle; landowners
Race/Ethnicity
Nationality: Italian (also English-speaking)
Formal Education: University of Bologna, economics
Training: journalist, fascist film magazine, fired; assistant director, Rossellini
First Film: 1950, age 38 (before that shorts)
First Oscar Nomination: Blow-Up, 1966; age 54
Other Nominations: No
Oscar Awards: Trio of Fests; Golden Lion
Nominations Span: NA
Genre (specialties): malaise, boredom of middle class
Collaborators: Monica Vitti (4 films); also his lover
Last Film: Beyond the Clouds, 1995; age 83
Contract:
Career Output: about 16; plus shorts
Career Span: 1950-1995; short 2005
Marriage: several; Monica Vitti
Politics:
Death: 2007; age 94
Michelangelo Antonioni Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (September 29, 1912–July 30, 2007) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, painter, and author.
He is best known for his “trilogy on modernity and its discontents”: L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962)—as well as the English-language films Blowup (1966) and The Passenger (1975).
His films have been described as “enigmatic and intricate mood pieces” that feature elusive plots, striking visuals, and a preoccupation with modern landscapes. His work had substantially influenced subsequent art cinema.
Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations, including the Cannes Film Fest Jury Prize (1960, 1962), Palme d’Or (1966), and 35th Anniversary Prize (1982); the Venice Film Fest 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 honorary Osca Award in 1995.
Festival Winner
He is one of three directors to have won the Palme d’Or, the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear, and the only director to have won these three and the Golden Leopard of Locarno Fest.
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. The director explained to film critic Aldo Tassone: 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 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.
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 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.”
Upon graduation from the University of Bologna with 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, he was fired after a few months.
Later that year he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia to study film technique, but left after 3 months. He was then drafted into the army. During the war Antonioni survived being condemned to death as a member of Italian resistance.
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 were neorealist in style, semi-documentary studies of the lives of ordinary people.
However, Antonioni’s first 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.
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 style.
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 and boos, 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 referred to as a trilogy because they are stylistically similar, and they are all concerned with the alienation of man in the modern world.
La notte won the Golden Bear award at the 11th Berlin Film Festival.
His first color film, Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964), deals with similar themes, and is considered the fourth film of the “trilogy.” 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 3 films in English to be released by MGM. The first, Blowup (1966), 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 theme of the impossibility of objective standards and the ever-doubtable truth of memory, it was a successful and popular hit with audiences, 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 dealing with a counterculture theme. The soundtrack carried popular artists such as Pink Floyd (who wrote new music for the film), the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones. However, its release was critical and commercial disaster.
The third, The Passenger (1975), starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, received critical praise, but 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 is available 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. He made the documentary Chung Kuo, Cina, but it was denounced by the Chinese authorities as “anti-Chinese” and “anti-communist”. The docu had its first showing in China on 25 November 2004 in Beijing with a film festival hosted by the Beijing Film Academy to honor the works of Antonioni.
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. Antonioni rejected almost all the material filmed by Wenders during the editing, except for a few short interludes. They shared the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival with Cyclo.
In 1994 he was given the Honorary Oscar “in recognition of his place as one of the cinema’s master visual stylists,” presented to him by Jack Nicholson. Months later, the statuette was stolen by burglars and had to be replaced. Previously, he had been Oscar nominated 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’s episodes are framed by dreamy paintings and the song “Michelangelo Antonioni”, composed and sung by Caetano Veloso. However, it was not well-received internationally; it was neither erotic nor about eroticism. 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 July 30, 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 hometown of Ferrara on August 2, 2007.
Style and themes
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. —Antonioni, interviewed about Red Desert (1964).[21]
Critic Richard Brody described Antonioni as “the cinema’s exemplary modernist” and one of its “great pictorialists—his images reflect, with a cold enticement, the abstractions that fascinated him.” 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. Haunted by a sense of instability and impermanence, his work defined a cinema of possibilities.”
Stephen Dalton of the BFI described Antonioni’s influential visual hallmarks as “extremely long takes, striking modern architecture, painterly use of colour, and tiny human figures adrift in empty landscapes,” noting similarities to the “empty urban dreamscapes” of surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico.
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.” Antonioni is noted for exploiting color as a significant expressive element in his later works, especially in Il deserto rosso, his first color film.
Antonioni’s plots were experimental, ambiguous, and elusive, often featuring middle-class characters who suffer from ennui, desperation, or joyless sex. Film historian David Bordwell 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.”
The New Yorker wrote that “Antonioni captured a new bourgeois 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 cinematic modernism.” 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.”
Wexman describes Antonioni’s perspective a “postreligious Marxist and existentialist intellectual.” 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 […] 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 similar attitude, 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.” Critic Roland Barthes wrote that Antonioni’s art “consists in always leaving the road of meaning open and as if undecided,” and claimed that his approach “is not that of a historian, a politician or a moralist, but rather that of a utopian whose perception is seeking to pinpoint the new world, because he is eager for this world and already wants to be part of it.”
Bordwell explains that Antonioni was extremely influential on subsequent art films: “More than any other director, he encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative.”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 absolutely formal terms.”
Film director Akira Kurosawa considered Antonioni one of the most interesting filmmakers.
Stanley Kubrick listed La Notte as one of his ten favorite films in a 1963 Poll.
Miklós Jancsó considers Antonioni as his master.
American director Scorsese paid tribute to Antonioni after 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. Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul.”
American directors Coppola and De Palma paid homage to Antonioni in their own films.
Antonioni’s spare style and purposeless characters, however, have not received universal acclaim.
Ingmar Bergman stated in 2002 that while he considered Antonioni films Blowup and La notte masterpieces, he found the other films boring. Bergman 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.”
American actor Peter Weller, whom Antonioni directed in Beyond the Clouds, explained in 1996: “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 between lovers in modern day … and he never gives you an answer—that’s the beautiful thing.”
Awards and honors
Honorary Oscar Award (1995)
Berlin International Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize (1961)
Berlin International Film Festival Golden Bear (1961), for La Notte
Bodil Award for Best European Film (1976), for The 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), for Eclipse
Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or (1967), for Blowup
Cannes Film Festival 35th Anniversary Prize (1982), for Identification of a Woman
David di Donatello Award for Best Director (1961), for La 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 Critics Award for Best Foreign Film (1968), for Blowup
Giffoni Film Festival François Truffaut Award (1991)
Giffoni Film Festival Golden Career Gryphon (1995)
International Istanbul Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award (1996)
Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon for Best Documentary (1948), for N.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), for Story 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 Festival Prize (1957), for Il Grido
Montreal World Film Festival Grand Prix Special des Amériques (1995)
National Society of Film Critics Special Citation Award (2001)
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director (2001), for Blowup
Palm Springs International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award (1998)
Valladolid International Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize for Short Film (2004), for Michelangelo 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
Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore, 1950)
I Vinti (The Vanquished, 1953)
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)
10. Blowup (1966)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Chung Kuo, Cina (documentary, 1972)
The Passenger (1975)
The Mystery of Oberwald (Il mistero di Oberwald, 1980)
Identification of a Woman (Identificazione di una donna, 1982)
16. Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole, 1995) with Wim Wenders
