Antonioni, Michelangelo

(1912– )

   Postwar Italy’s most intellectually challenging film director, Michelangelo Antonioni was born in Ferrara. His career in the cinema began in the 1940s, when he was an editor of Cinema, the film magazine directed by Benito Mussolini’s son Vittorio. Antonioni was soon dismissed for political reasons. During the German occupation, Antonioni joined the Partito d’Azione and took an active role in the resistance. Antonioni’s early films were documentaries. His first feature film was Cronaca di un amore (Chronicle of an Affair, 1950), but his first real success was the internationally acclaimed Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), which won the Silver Lion award at the Venice festival. Antonioni’s masterpiece, however, is probably the 1960 film L’Avventura(The Adventure), which won the Special Jury prize at the Cannes film festival. L’Avventurawas followed in short order by two other classics, La Notte (Night, 1961) and L’Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962). In these films, Antonioni’s almost painfully austere direction reaches its peak. Alienation has seldom been portrayed this deftly by any artist, although Antonioni is careful, in all three films, to offer a counterpoint character, played in every case by the talented actress Monica Vitti, who retains normal human feelings of warmth, spontaneity, and friendship. In the late 1960s, Antonioni directed two major English-language films. Blow Up (1966) was a sardonic look at the “swinging sixties”; Zabriskie Point(1970) was a big-budget movie that somewhat didactically condemned the materialistic emptiness of modern Californian life. Antonioni has made few films since 1970, although The Passenger (1975) won critical acclaim. In 1994, Hollywood recognized the work of this most uncommercial of directors with an Oscar for lifetime achievement.