Michelangelo Antonioni ( ; ; 29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and editor. He is best known for a trio of films often dubbed the "alienation trilogy": L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962); the English-language film Blowup (1966); and the multilingual The Passenger (1975). His films have been described as "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces"

Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, being the first and one of two directors, the other being Jafar Panahi, to have won the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear and the Golden Leopard. Three of his films are on the list of hundred Italian films to be saved. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Blowup. In 1995, he received an Honorary Oscar "in recognition of his place as one of cinema's master visual stylists".

Early life

Antonioni was born into a prosperous family of landowners in Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna. He was the son of Elisabetta (née Roncagli) and Ismaele Antonioni. The third, The Passenger (1975), starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, received critical praise but did poorly at the box office.

In 1966, Antonioni drafted a treatment entitled "Technically Sweet", which he later developed into a screenplay with Mark Peploe, Niccolo Tucci, and Tonino 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 in The Passenger. In 2008, "Technically Sweet" became an international group exhibition curated by Copenhagen-based artists Yvette 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. One of these was the short film "Sweet Ruin", directed by Elisabeth Subrin and starring Gaby Hoffmann. Antonioni's widow Enrica and director André Ristum announced plans to produce a film based on the screenplay, with filming in Brazil and Sardinia to begin in 2023.

In 1972, Antonioni was invited by to China to film the achievements of the Cultural Revolution. The resulting documentary, Chung Kuo, Cina, was strongly condemned by the Chinese authorities as "anti-Chinese" and "anti-communist". It was first shown in China on 25 November 2004 in Beijing, with a film festival hosted by the Beijing 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. In 1985, Antonioni suffered a stroke that left him aphasic and partly paralyzed. Despite his incapacity to speak or write, Antonioni continued to direct films including Beyond the Clouds (1995), based on four stories from That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, for which Wim 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. They shared the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival with Cyclo.

In 1994, he was given an Honorary Academy 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 for Blowup (1967).

Antonioni's final film, directed 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 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 by Caetano Veloso. 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.

Style and themes

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." 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 also noted for exploiting colour as a significant expressive element in his later works, especially in Il deserto rosso, his first colour film.

Antonioni's plots were experimental, ambiguous, and elusive, often featuring middle-class characters who suffer from ennui, desperation, or joyless sex. 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." He added that his art "consists in always leaving the road of meaning open and as if undecided."

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. Andrei Tarkovsky was deeply influenced by Antonioni, especially for the development of his film Nostalghia. 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 film Beyond the Clouds. Miklós Jancsó considers Antonioni as his master. American director Martin 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."

  • 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)

See also

  • List of Italian Academy Award winners and nominees
  • List of atheists in film, radio, television and theater

References

Citations

Sources

Further reading

  • Michelangelo Antonioni Bibliography in the University of California, Berkeley Library
  • Michelangelo Antonioni writings and interviews : antonioni9.wordpress.com

Metadata

  • Michelangelo Antonioni : AFI Catalog of Feature Films

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