Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni (, ; 29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007) was an Italian director and filmmaker.

Upon graduation from the University of Bologna with a degree in economics, he started writing for the local Ferrara newspaper Il Corriere Padano in 1935 as a film journalist.

In 1940, Antonioni moved to Rome, where he worked for Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Vittorio Mussolini.

However, Antonioni was fired a few months afterwards.

Later that year he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia to study film technique but left after three months.

He was subsequently drafted into the army.

During the war Antonioni survived being condemned to death as a member of the Italian resistance.

In 1942, Antonioni co-wrote A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini and worked as assistant director on Enrico Fulchignoni's I due Foscari.

In 1943, he travelled to France to assist Marcel Carné on Les visiteurs du soir and began a series of short films with Gente del Po (1943), a story of poor fishermen of the Po valley.

When Rome was liberated by the Allies, the film stock was transferred to the Fascist "Republic of Salò" and could not be recovered and edited until 1947.

The complete footage was never retrieved.

These films were neorealist in style, semi-documentary studies of the lives of working class people.

However, Antonioni's first full-length feature film Cronaca di un amore (1950) broke away from neorealism by depicting the middle classes.

He continued to do so in a series of other films: I vinti ("The Vanquished", 1952), a trio of stories, each set in a different country (France, Italy and England), about juvenile delinquency; La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camellias, 1953) about a young film star and her fall from grace; and Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) about middle-class women in Turin.

In Le Amiche (1955), Antonioni experimented with a radical new style: instead of a conventional narrative, he presented a series of apparently disconnected events, and used long takes as part of his style.

Il Grido (The Outcry, 1957) was a return to working class stories, depicting a factory worker and his daughter.

Each of these stories is about social alienation.

He is best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents" —L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962)—as well as the English-language film Blowup (1966).

His films have been described as "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces" that feature elusive plots, striking visual composition, and a preoccupation with modern landscapes.

His work substantially influenced subsequent art cinema.

Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, being the only director to have won the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear and the Golden Leopard.

Antonioni was born into a prosperous family of landowners in Ferrara, Emilia Romagna, in northern Italy.

He was the son of Elisabetta (née Roncagli) and Ismaele Antonioni.

The director explained to Italian film critic Aldo Tassone:

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As a child, Antonioni was fond of drawing and music.

A precocious violinist, he gave his first concert at the age of nine.

Although he abandoned the violin with the discovery of cinema in his teens, drawing would remain a lifelong passion.

"I have never drawn, even as a child, either puppets or silhouettes but rather facades of houses and gates. One of my favourite games consisted of organizing towns. Ignorant in architecture, I constructed buildings and streets crammed with little figures. I invented stories for them. These childhood happenings—I was eleven years old—were like little films."

Antonioni returned to their use in L'avventura (1960), which became his first international success.

At the Cannes Film Festival it received a mixture of cheers and boos, but was popular in art house cinemas around the world.

La notte (1961), starring Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, and L'Eclisse (1962), starring Alain Delon, followed L'avventura.

These three films are referred to as a trilogy because they are stylistically similar and concerned with the alienation of people in the modern world.

La notte won the Golden Bear award at the 11th Berlin International Film Festival, His first color film, Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964), deals with similar themes, and is sometimes considered the fourth film of the "trilogy".

All these films star Monica Vitti, his lover during that period.

Antonioni then signed a deal with producer Carlo Ponti that would allow artistic freedom on three films in English to be released by MGM.

The first, Blowup (1966), set in Swinging London, was a major international success.

The script was loosely based on the short story The Devil's Drool (otherwise known as Blow Up) by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar.

Although it dealt with the challenging theme of the impossibility of objective standards, and the ever-doubtable truth of memory, it was a successful and popular hit with audiences, perhaps helped by its sex scenes, which were explicit for the time.

It starred David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave.