Antonioni, Michelangelo

Antonioni, Michelangelo (mëkālän`jālō äntōnyô`nē), 1912–, Italian film director and scriptwriter, b. Ferrara, Italy. In the 1940s he made documentaries that contributed to the development of Italian neorealism. His later films deal with the alienation, malaise, and loveless eroticism of modern life, with plot and dialogue often subordinate to visual and aural images. His works include Le Amiche (1955), L'Avventura (1959), L'Eclisse (1961), The Red Desert (1964), Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point (1969), The Passenger (1975), Identification of a Woman (1983), and Beyond the Clouds (1995).

Bibliography

See studies by I. Cameron and R. Wood (rev. ed. 1971), S. Chatman (1985), S. Rohdie (1990), and W. Arrowsmith (1995); T. Perry, Michelangelo Antonioni, A Guide for Reference and Resources (1986); E. Antonioni's Making a Film for Me Is Living (film, 1995).

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Antonioni, Michelangelo

(born Sept. 29, 1912, Ferrara, Italy—died July 30, 2007, Rome) Italian film director and producer. He wrote film reviews and studied filmmaking before directing his short film People of the Po Valley (1947). His first major film, The Girlfriends (1955), was followed by the international successes The Adventure (1960), The Eclipse (1962), and Blow-up (1966). His other films include The Red Desert (1964), Zabriskie Point (1970), and The Passenger (1974). In Antonioni's films, plot and dialogue are subordinated to the visual image, which becomes a metaphor of human existence rather than a record of it.