Michelangelo Antonioni

Biography

The 1960 Cannes Film Festival greeted L’Avventura with a mixture of cheers and boos, yet the film won a Jury Prize. Audiences expected a thriller about a woman who vanishes on an island and is never found; what they got was a picture about how the search gradually stops mattering to anyone. Antonioni was forty-seven, and this was his first international success.

He was born on 29 September 1912 in Ferrara, in Emilia-Romagna, into a well-off family: his father was Ismaele Antonioni, his mother Elisabetta Roncagli. As a child he played the violin and gave his first concert at nine, but later dropped it for cinema. Drawing stayed with him all his life. He recalled afterwards that as a boy he drew not little figures but house façades and gates, and that his favourite game was building towns and populating them with tiny people. He studied in Ferrara, then took a degree in economics and commerce at the University of Bologna. With a student company he staged Pirandello, Ibsen and Chekhov. From 1935 he wrote about film for the Ferrara newspaper Il Corriere Padano.

In 1940 he moved to Rome and took a job at the magazine Cinema, but was dismissed a few months later. He enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the state film school, and left after three months. In 1942 he worked on the screenplay of A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini and was assistant director to Enrico Fulchignoni. In 1943 he went to France as assistant to Marcel Carné on Les visiteurs du soir. On his return he began a documentary about the poor fishermen of the Po valley. The film stock fell into the hands of the Fascist “Republic of Salò” and was lost; the film could not be edited until 1947, and the complete footage was never recovered. Sources also differ on what happened to Antonioni during the war: by one account, he was drafted into the army and, as a member of the Italian Resistance, escaped a death sentence.

His first feature, Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore), came out in 1950. Instead of the working-class outskirts so dear to the neorealists, he showed the Milanese middle class, and the line was continued by The Vanquished, The Lady Without Camellias and Le Amiche, based on a novella by Cesare Pavese. Il Grido (1957) took him back to the story of a working man. These films were not commercial successes, and in the late 1950s Antonioni took on work on other people’s films, not always under his own name. In 1957 he directed a short-lived theatre company at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome. There he grew close to Monica Vitti, who appeared in his next films.

After L’Avventura came La Notte (1961), which won the Golden Bear in Berlin, and L’Eclisse (1962), which won a Jury Prize at Cannes. His first colour film, Red Desert (1964), brought him the Golden Lion in Venice. In it Antonioni, by the testimony of the director and critics, had grass, trees and rivers painted, and built landscapes and interiors as surfaces of colour. To my mind it is here that you can see he was a draughtsman, not merely a storyteller. Vitti appeared in all four films.

Next the producer Carlo Ponti signed him to make three films in English. Blowup (1966), set in London, was a critical and commercial success, won the Palme d’Or in 1967 and earned two Academy Award nominations. Zabriskie Point (1970), with music by Pink Floyd, failed, though it later acquired cult status. The third, The Passenger (1975), with Jack Nicholson, was well received by critics and ignored by audiences. Between them, in 1972, he travelled by invitation to China to film a documentary about the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese authorities condemned Chung Kuo, Cina as anti-Chinese and anti-communist; in China itself it was first shown only in 2004.

In the 1980s he made The Mystery of Oberwald, based on a play by Jean Cocteau, experimenting with electronic treatment of colour, and Identification of a Woman (1982), for which he received an honorary Palme d’Or on the 35th anniversary of the Cannes festival. Around the same time came his book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, with sketches for possible films.

On 20 December 1985 he suffered a stroke that took away his speech and left him partly paralysed. In 1995 he nevertheless managed to make Beyond the Clouds, based on stories from that book. Wim Wenders took part as a back-up director, because without him no insurer would have covered the shoot. In the editing Antonioni rejected almost all the footage Wenders had shot, keeping a few short interludes. In the same year he received an Honorary Oscar, and at the Venice Film Festival the film shared the FIPRESCI Prize. In his last years he painted and exhibited his pictures.

His last work for the cinema was the episode The Dangerous Thread of Things in the anthology Eros (2004); in the same year he made the short film The Gaze of Michelangelo, about the restoration of Michelangelo’s Moses in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli.

Antonioni died in Rome on 30 July 2007, the same day as Ingmar Bergman. He lay in state at Rome’s City Hall and was buried on 2 August in his native Ferrara, in the Certosa cemetery.