A woman vanishes on a volcanic island off Sicily; the search for her turns into an affair and she is never found (1960)
L'Avventura — booed at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize, then acclaimed as a landmark
Film · European
Michelangelo Antonioni
1912–2007 · Italian
Italian modernism; the cinema of alienation
Michelangelo Antonioni emptied narrative out of the art film. His 1960 mystery about a woman who disappears and is simply never found was booed at Cannes and went on to win the Jury Prize; with the two films that followed it formed a trilogy about people unable to connect. He was a master of composition in landscape, of the dead time after a scene has ended, and of colour used as psychology.
How to spot them
- ▸A plot that is dropped rather than resolved; characters dwarfed by architecture, volcanic rock or industrial haze
- ▸'Dead time': the camera stays after the characters have left the frame
- ▸Monica Vitti, his star and partner through the trilogy
- ▸The trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse, sometimes extended to a tetralogy with Red Desert
- ▸Colour as mood — he had grass and fruit painted for Red Desert
Key films
A novelist and his wife pass one Milanese night from a hospital bedside to a party and a dawn on a golf course (1961)
La Notte — Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti; it won the Golden Bear at Berlin
The uproar of the Rome stock exchange, and a closing sequence of seven minutes of empty streets waiting for a couple who never arrive (1962)
L'Eclisse — Monica Vitti and Alain Delon
A woman moving through a poisoned industrial landscape at Ravenna; the director's first film in colour, with grass painted to order (1964)
Red Desert (Il deserto rosso) — it won the Golden Lion at Venice
A London fashion photographer enlarges a park photograph and believes he has found a body; the film closes with a mimed game of tennis (1966)
Blow-Up — his first film in English, and winner of the festival's top prize at Cannes in 1967
A student, a girl and Death Valley, ending with a desert house exploding over and over in slow motion, filmed from many angles at once (1970)
Zabriskie Point — a notorious commercial failure in America
A reporter in North Africa swaps passports with a dead man and takes on his life; the penultimate shot passes slowly out through a barred hotel window (1975)
The Passenger (Professione: reporter) — Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider
A ruined Chinese junk, three friends and a stretch of the Po; his 1943–47 documentary about the river people of his own region (1947)
People of the Po Valley (Gente del Po) — his first film as director, begun in 1943
Key ideas
- Alienation and 'the malady of the emotions' — his characters have a moral apparatus that no longer fits the world
- Narrative can be abandoned mid-film without loss; the mystery need not be solved
- Landscape and architecture as the real subject; people are placed in them like figures in a painting
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Ferrara in 1912; he studied economics at Bologna and wrote film criticism before directing
- •L'Avventura was jeered at its Cannes premiere in 1960 but won the Jury Prize and a defence signed by many critics
- •Monica Vitti starred in four consecutive films and was his partner during that period
- •Blow-Up was inspired by a Julio Cortázar short story and won the top prize at Cannes in 1967
- •He was one of the few directors to win the top prize at all three of Cannes, Venice and Berlin
- •A stroke in 1985 left him unable to speak or write; he directed Beyond the Clouds (1995) with Wim Wenders assisting
- •He received an honorary Oscar in 1995, presented by Jack Nicholson
- •He died in Rome on 30 July 2007, the same day as Ingmar Bergman
Drill it — 8 cards
1 / 8new card
Sources
- Festival de Cannes — Michelangelo Antonioni — awards and selections
- Michelangelo Antonioni — The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema