Antonioni, Italian Director of Introspective Films, Dies at 94
By Adam L. Freeman and Steve Scherer
July 31 (Bloomberg) -- Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director who explored modern alienation and the enigma of human relationships, has died. He was 94.
Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni announced a public viewing of Antonioni's body tomorrow at City Hall, according to a written statement. The filmmaker died Monday night at his home, Ansa reported earlier, citing unidentified family members.
In milestone movies like 1966's English-language ``Blow-Up'' Antonioni's work offered the audience time to contemplate interior struggles through psychology and symbolism rather than action. When the director's classic ``L'Avventura was presented at Cannes in 1960 it greeted with jeers.
``Antonioni changed the narrative structure of telling a story,'' said Chiara Caselli, who acted in ``Beyond the Clouds'' (1995) in an interview. ``In the history of Italian cinema, Antonioni with always be there.''
Born into a middle-class family in Sept. 29, 1912 in Ferrara, Italy, Antonioni attended the University of Bologna where he studied classics and economics. As a college student, he wrote film reviews for a local paper, often angering the country's film industry with barbed attacks on Italian comedies.
His attempts at documentary filmmaking ended in failure. When he tried to film an insane asylum, his subjects became hysterical every time the camera turned on them, forcing him to call off the production.
Antonioni continued to write about film in Rome, where he worked for Cinema, the official Fascist magazine dedicated to movies and edited by Vittorio Mussolini, son of the Italian dictator. A political disagreement prompted his dismissal. He opted to study filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale.
Fishing Documentary
After collaborating with neo-realist auteur Roberto Rossellini and French film director Marcel Carne, Antonioni returned to Italy for his military service and obtained financing for a documentary about the impoverished fishermen of northern Italy's Po Valley.
Italian filmmaking came to a halt with the Allied invasion in 1943. In the interim Antonioni wrote film criticism for magazines including Film Rivista.
His feature debut came in 1950 when he directed ``Cronaca di un Amore.'' The film recounts the story of a bourgeois wife who meets her penniless lover in cheap hotels and plots her husband's murder. When he dies in an accident, the couple are left guilt stricken.
Italy's New Rich
To film the story, Antonioni departed from fashionable neo- realist practice by employing real actors and shunning social criticism. He also steered clear of traditional plot lines, aiming instead to draw the audience into the character's internal drama. The film had little success, and the director had to wait a decade before his work was noticed.
Antonioni was sensitive to Italy's budding industrial success. Through World War II the country was largely agrarian and one of the poorest in Europe. With one foot in traditional moralistic Catholicism and the other in modernism, a new monied class emerged, confused and awash in wealth.
``Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer,'' Antonioni said in a 1969 interview.'' Hence this upset, this disequilibrium that makes weaker people anxious and apprehensive, that makes it so difficult for them to adapt to the mechanism of modern life.''
Shark Lie
With ``L'Avventura'' in 1960, Antonioni focused on Italy's new rich and their residual ennui and anxiety. The premise of the story is a group of well-to-do couples who take a boat tour of the Aeolian islands off of Sicily. Anna tries to add some life to the dreary trip by crying ``shark'' -- a lie that the director uses to spotlight the passiveness and lack of curiosity of the jaded middle class, and to represent Anna's friend, the serial bed- hopper Sandro.
Anna later disappears on a volcanic island. After a search, her friends return to their mundane lives and Anna is dropped from the film with no explanation.
The audience revolted against the 145-minute film, attacking it as long and pretentious. L`Avventura ``is like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several of the reels have got lost,'' wrote New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther in 1961.
Indeed, scenes come to an end leaving viewers scratching their heads wondering if they missed something. The slowly built- up drama doesn't peak, and seems to simply disappear --just like Anna.
``Antonioni never really learned the trade,'' IMDb, the Internet movie database, quoted Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, who died yesterday, as saying. ``He never concentrated on single images, never realizing that film is a rhythmic flow of images.''
`Blow-Up'
Crowther and Bergman aside, critics loved `L'Avventura'' for its cinematography. Despite the audience reaction, the movie won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. (Compatriot Federico Fellini's ``La Dolce Vita'' won the Palme d'Or.)
Antonioni's biggest international success was the 1966 ``Blow-Up,'' an existential murder mystery in hipster-Sixties London.
Thomas, a famous fashion photographer bored by the grooviness of free love, finds exhilaration by snapping photos in the park where he thinks he photographed a murder. The film earned Antonioni Academy Award nominations for best director and original screenplay. Hollywood psycho-thriller director Brian Di Palma did a remake in 1981 as ``Blow Out'' starring John Travolta as a movie sound technician.
``Identificazione di una Donna'' about a filmmaker on a quest for the perfect woman was a hit in Italy and won the Special 35th Anniversary Award at Cannes in 1982. It never was distributed in North America after New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called it an ``excruciatingly empty work.''
More than a decade after suffering a stroke in 1983, Antonioni collaborated with German director Wim Wenders on ``Beyond the Clouds,'' four vignettes about love. Much later, in 2004, Antonioni directed one of three tales on the subject of desire in ``Eros,'' alongside Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai.
Presented with an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1995, Antonioni, debilitated by age and stroke, accepted the award with one word: ``Grazie.''
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I leave this entry in sadness with 2 clips:
