Michelangelo Antonioni Overview

As an audience, we have learned to expect standard portions of plot, characters, and action when we go to the movies. These elements, coupled with the logic of the satisfying (if not happy) ending, have become the criteria by which we... [more]

As an audience, we have learned to expect standard portions of plot, characters, and action when we go to the movies. These elements, coupled with the logic of the satisfying (if not happy) ending, have become the criteria by which we evaluate our experiences as film consumers. Perhaps this is why Antonioni's breakthrough feature, "L'Avventura" (1960), was booed when it was first screened at Cannes, though it went on to win the Jury Prize. Seemingly, nothing of import happens in an Antonioni film. Long shots linger on the scenery after the actors have passed through it. Silence reigns in place of dialogue. Characters wander lost and aimless amidst alienating landscapes, their identities in crisis. But where the narrative leaves off, the visual is allowed to triumph. By downplaying words and story, Antonioni has shown the potential of film to work on a purely imagistic level. While the audience starts out watching his actors, the actors in turn watch their surroundings. In typical Antonioni fashion, Monica Vitti's gaze moves from a group of protesting workers to trace a blue line that runs up an adjacent wall. Soon, we too are contemplating images and colors. Though he spent years as an assistant to Neo-Realist filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini, Antonioni's own work moves away from the socialist parables of these earlier masters. His films investigate the state of the middle-class soul: the suffocation of the spirit in a technological, market-driven society and the loss of cultural and interpersonal moorings. The early "Il Grido" (1957) traces a kind of anti-journey, as the disconnected Aldo wanders through postindustrial northern Italy. Returning to the town from which he started only to encounter a former lover with her new child, the protagonist commits suicide. In "L'Avventura," a well-off couple, Anna and Sandro, go on a Mediterranean cruise with their friend, Claudia. When Anna mysteriously disappears on an island, Sandro and Claudia begin to search for her, but become distracted by banal tourist pursuits, the island's mysterious landscape, and their own eventual love affair. Gradually Anna is forgotten, obliterated by the horizon, the sea, rocks, and waves. Antonioni's black-and-white images achingly conveyed the alienation of his characters. But with "Red Desert" (1964), he presented a world saturated with color -- in some cases, outdoor scenery was actually painted by his crew in order to achieve the precise effect the director wanted. The result has been called one of the most beautiful color films of all time. Monica Vitti, playing the bored middle-class wife of an engineer, wanders through the desolate, industrialized terrain around Ravenna. The colors of the lacerated landscape are intense. They hold her attention, and ours, more closely than any of the film's human interactions can. They keep her, in fact, self-absorbed and disconnected. The impact of the visual -- its replacement of language as the modern world's repository of meaning -- is also the theme of "Blow-Up" (1966), in which a photographer believes he can find truth in the details of a photo. But by enlarging the image too much, he pushes beyond reality and into the realm of the subjective, where truth exists only in his own mind. Antonioni went on to direct "Zabriskie Point" (1969), "The Passenger" (1975), and "Identification of a Woman" (1982) before suffering a debilitating stroke in 1985. While he continued to pursue writing and painting, he was not to return to filmmaking until 1995, when (with Wim Wenders acting as co-director) he made "Beyond the Clouds," which is based on four of his own short stories. In that same year, the Motion Picture Academy presented Antonioni with a lifetime achievement award. [show less]