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.

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Antonioni, Michelangelo 

Born Sept. 29, 1912, in Ferrara. Italian director. He has been a film critic, a scriptwriter, and a producer of documentary films.

In 1950, Antonioni made his first feature film, Story of a Love Affair. The common theme which runs through his works is the isolation of man in contemporary bourgeois society. He has made the films Le Amiche (1955), The Cry (1957, in Soviet release Despair), L’Avventura (1959), La Notte (1960), Eclipse (1962), Red Desert (1964), Blow-Up (1967), and Zabriskie Point (1972). Not accepting the contemporary bourgeois reality, Antonioni, with the skill of a researcher and astute psychologist, shows the destruction of man’s internal ties with the surrounding world. The tragic lack of mutual understanding between people, the aimlessness of existence, the spiritual impoverishment of his heroes, who find it impossible to overcome their isolation, are depicted as the sole and inevitable form of life for all mankind. Antonioni’s films are pessimistic; they are strongly marked by irrational motifs. The pictures bear the mark of his great skill as a director—his subtle choice of means of expression and the subordination of all the components of the film (music, camera work, and actors’ performances) to the director’s scheme.

REFERENCES

Turovskaia, M. M. “Antonioni . . .” Iskusstvo kino, 1962, no. 6.
Karaganov, A. “Vstrechi v Italii.” Iskusstvo kino, 1965, no. 3.
Capri, F. Michelangelo Antonioni. Parma, 1958.
Leprohon, P. Michelangelo Antonioni. [Paris, 1961.]