Michelangelo Antonioni, Director, Dies at 94

July 31, 2007
Michelangelo Antonioni, Director, Dies at 94
By RICK LYMAN

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly canticles of alienation were cornerstones of international film*** in the 1960s, inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home in Rome, Italian news media reported today. He was 94. He died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died at his home in Sweden earlier Monday..

“With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen,” said the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. His office said it was *** plans for Mr. Antonioni’s body to lie in state on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cinephiles demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.

Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blowup,” a 1966 drama set in Swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that a photograph he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, hidden in the background, evidence of a murder. But his true, lasting contribution to cinema resides in an earlier trilogy — “L’Avventura” in 1959, “La Notte” in 1960 and “L’Eclisse” in 1962 — which explores the filmmaker’s tormented central vision that people had become emotionally unglued from one another.

This vision of the apartness of people was expressed near the end of “La Notte,” when his star Monica Vitti observes, “Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

In a generation of rule-breakers, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most subversive and venerated. He challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for such mainstream conventions as plot, pacing and clarity. He would raise questions and never answer them, have his characters act in self-destructive ways and fail to explain why, and hold his shots so long that the actors sometimes slipped out of character.

It was all part of the director’s design. As Mr. Antonioni explained, “The after-effects of an emotion scene, it had occurred to me, might have meaning, too, both on the actor and on the psychological advancement of the character.”

Mr. Antonioni broke other conventions, too. Many of his cuts, scene lengths and camera movements were highly idiosyncratic, and he frequently posed his characters in a highly formalized way. He employed point-of-view shots only rarely, a practice that helped erect an emotional shield between the audience and his puzzling characters.

“What is impressive about Antonioni’s films is not that they are good,” the film scholar Seymour Chatman wrote. “But that they have been made at all.”

Perhaps the defining moment in Mr. Antonioni’s career came on the night “LAvventura” was screened at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Many in the audience walked out and there were numerous boos, catcalls and whistles. The director and Monica Vitti thought their careers were over.

But later that night, Roberto Rossellini and a group of other influential filmmakers and critics drafted a statement which they released the following morning. “Aware of the exceptional importance of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, ‘L’Avventura,’ and appalled by the displays of hostility it has aroused, the undersigned critics and members of the profession are anxious to express their admiration for the maker of this film,” they wrote.

One of the great legends of iconoclastic film*** — how being booed at Cannes could become a badge of honor — was born.

“L’Avventura” went on to win the festival’s Special Jury Prize and become an international box-office hit, spurring furious debate. Some found the film pointless; others read reams of meaning into its languid predicaments. Mr. Antonioni’s international reputation was made.

The next year, Sight and Sound, the influential British film magazine, polled 70 leading critics from around the world and they not only endorsed “L’Avventura,” but they also chose it as the second-greatest film ever made, just behind “Citizen Kane.’

After burnishing his reputation in the early 1960s, Mr. Antonioni surprised many by trying to make movies with Hollywood’s backing. More surprising, perhaps, was that he then had his greatest commercial success with “Blowup” in 1966.

“My subjects are, in a very general sense, autobiographical,” he once wrote. “The story is first built through discussions with a collaborator. In the case of “L’Eclisse,” the discussions went on for four months. The writing was then done, by myself, taking perhaps fifteen days. My scripts are not formal screenplays, but rather dialogue for the actors and a series of notes to the director. When shooting begins, there is invariably a great amount of changing. When I go on the set of a scene, I insist on remaining alone for at least twenty minutes. I have no preconceived ideas of how the scene should be done, but wait instead for the ideas to come that will tell me how to begin.”

The world of an Antonioni film “is a world of people alienated from one another,” wrote Andrew Turner in his book “World Film Directors” (1968). “Their actions have no meaning or coherence, and even the most fundamental of emotions, love, seems unsustainable.’

Interviewers also found Mr. Antonioni to be a cool, combative subject. “Even when he is telling stories about himself, Antonioni’s face remains set in its habitually serious expression,” Melton S. Davis wrote in a 1964 profile for The New York Times Magazine. “Precise in manner, conservative in dress and quiet in speech, he could be taken for a banker or art dealer recounting an unfortunate business deal.”

But Mr. Antonioni could also be graciously charming. Sometimes, interviewers said, the director’s shrewd green eyes would soften and his lips would curl into a smile that some described as ironic, others as chilly.

Michaelangelo Antonioni was born on September 29,1912 into a well-to-do family of landowners in Ferrara, in northern Italy, a town that he described as a “marvelous little city on the Paduan plain, antique and silent.” Around the age of ten, his family remembered, Michelangelo began to design puppets and to build model sets for them. Later, as a teenager, he became interested in oil painting, favoring portraits to landscapes.

He attended the University of Bologna and earned a degree in economics and commerce in 1935. But it was at the university that he also began to write stories and plays and to direct some of them. He was a founder of the university’s theatrical troupe and one of the its leading tennis champions. He also wrote scathing reviews of both American and Italian genre films for the local paper, and decided to try his own hand at film***.

Mr. Antonioni wanted to make a realistic documentary about the local insane asylum. The patients helped him set up the equipment. Then, he turned on the bright floodlights.

The patients went berserk, he later wrote, “and their faces — which before had been calm — became convulsed and devastated. And then it was our turn to be petrified. The cameraman did not even have the strength to stop his machine, nor was I capable of giving any orders whatever. It was the director of the asylum who finally cried, “Stop! Lights out!” And in the half-darkened room we could see a swarm of bodies twisting as if in the last throes of a death agony.”

Mr. Antonioni decided to give up film***.

In 1940, at the age of 27, he moved to Rome to work as a secretary to Count Vittori Cini. The job didn’t last long. He worked as a bank teller and joined the staff of Cinema magazine, edited by Benito Mussolini’s son, Vittorio. During this period, Mr. Antonioni dropped his aversion to film*** and took classes at the Institute of Experimental Film***. His wrote some screenplays, including “Un Pilota Ritorna” (The Return of the Pilot) in 1942 in collaboration with another budding director, Roberto Rossellini.

In 1943, Mr. Antonioni returned to Ferrara and found a local merchant willing to bankroll his first film, a documentary called “Gente del Po” (People of the Po Valley), about the wretched lives of local fishermen. The German occupying forces destroyed much of the footage, though a few scraps survived and became a nine-minute curtain-raiser at the 1947 Venice Film Festival for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.”

After the war, Mr. Antonioni wrote more film criticism and continued *** short documentaries. All the while he became increasingly skeptical about the neo-realist movement, which dominated Italian film***, and its relentless focus on substandard social conditions. He yearned to look beyond such things and into the hearts of individuals. “His films were about street sweepers, not street sweeping,” is the way the film critic Robert Haller put it. But no one would let him make the kind of films he wanted to make.

“For ten years, the movies forced me not to use ideas but empty words, cleverness, business sense, patience, stratagems,” Mr. Antonioni wrote in an introduction to a 1963 collection of his screenplays. “I am so scantily blessed with such gifts that I recall that period as being the most painful one in my life.’

At age 38, Mr. Antonioni found backing for his most ambitious, non-documentary project, “Cronaca di un Amore” (Story of a Love). Ostensibly about a man and woman plotting to kill her husband, it turned out to be the earliest example of Mr. Antonioni’s approach. In the film, the husband dies, but it is unclear whether he was murdered, committed suicide or died by accident. This whole plot line vanishes and the film, instead, focuses on the lover’s emotions.

As with later Antonioni films, the settings were stark, the scenes fussily composed, the shots held a few beats longer than necessary. The film won the Grand Prix International at the Festival of Punta del Este in 1951.

In 1954, his 12-year marriage to the former Letizia Balboni fell apart. She later told interviewers that the director had become increasingly remote. “We lived in silence,” she said. “We reached the point where we communicated with each other only through the characters he created and about whom he wanted my advice. He has only one way of expressing himself: His work. What he does is have his actors live out emotional crises in his films, by proxy living out the crises in his own life.’

Mr. Antonioni sank into a deep depression. His insomnia worsened. Often he spent the early morning hours writing screenplays.

In 1955, at the height of this crisis, Mr. Antonioni had his first important artistic triumph. “Le Amiche” (The Girlfriends)” was about the mundane, loveless lives of a group of middle-class women in Turin. It won a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Mr. Antonioni began experimenting more with improvisation on the set. “It’s only when I press my eye against the camera and begin to move the actors that I get an exact idea of the scene,” he wrote. He used this technique extensively in “Il Grido (The Outcry)” in 1957, probably the grimmest of his films.

It was while shooting “Il Grido” that Mr. Antonioni met a young stage actress named Monica Vitti, who would become his greatest and most enduring star, and his almost constant companion during much of the “60s.

For two years, Mr. Antonioni could not find a producer to back him. Finally, in 1959, he found someone and finished a screenplay that had been burning in the back of his mind for a long time. But “L’Avventura” almost died before it was born. Chronically short of money, his producer eventually pulled out of the project just as Mr. Antonioni and the actors were working on a craggy island near Sicily.

“It had gotten to the point where there was no food,” Mr. Antonioni remembered. “One crew deserted us. We got hold of another crew and they, too, left. I had 20,000 meters of film and the actors stayed, so I carried the camera on my back and continued shooting.” Eventually, a new producer appeared.

“L’Avventura” proved to be the turning point in his career and is widely regarded as Mr. Antonioni’s masterpiece.

As with most of Mr. Antonioni’s films, it focuses on the comfortable, enervated lives of well-to-do Italians, in this case a group of friends on a yachting trip. Without warning, during a visit to a wave-thrashed atoll, one of them, an emotionally distraught woman named Anna, simply vanishes. Had she drowned herself because her lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), seemed in no hurry to marry her? Had she hurled herself off a cliff in a fit of ennui? Had she been swallowed by the shark she claimed to have seen? Or had she fled on another boat?

The small island is searched. It rains. Police arrive. Then, gradually, Sandro develops an attraction to Anna’s best friend, Claudia (Ms. Vitti). She resists, then warms to him. Eventually, they stop mentioning Anna at all. The search is forgotten. Sandro betrays Claudia, for no apparent reason. We never discover what happened to Anna.

In “L’Avventura,” Mr. Antonioni’s singular technique can be seen in full flower. “The overwhelming sense of estrangement conveyed by “L’Avventura” is as much a product of the style of the movie as of its events or dialogue,” Mr. Turner wrote.

The director rapidly found backing for his next two films, which further explored the themes of alienation he introduced in “L’Avventura” and which he later said were meant to be seen as a trilogy.

In “La Notte” (The Night),” Marcello Mastroianni plays an author with writer’s block suffering through his loveless marriage to Jeanne Moreau . He meets a young woman at a party, played by Ms. Vitti, who he believes personifies the creativity that has abandoned him. The film won the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival.

“L’Eclisse” (The Eclipse)” most directly addressed the alienating effects of material wealth, following the love affair of a young woman of simple tastes, Ms. Vitti again, and a money-hungry stockbroker (Alain Delon).

The film’s ending is much discussed. Abandoning the principal characters, the film closes with a montage several minutes long composed of 58 shots, most of them on or near a street corner where the lovers used to meet. Water seeps from a barrel. The brakes on a bus screech. A fountain is turned off. An airplane zooms overhead. Finally, with the street corner dark and empty, the camera zooms in on the white, annihilating glare of a streetlight. The end.

Mr. Antonioni said he intended the ending to show “the eclipse of all feelings,” and saw it as a coda both to the film and to the entire trilogy. But he also wanted different people to read different meanings into his work. “There may be meanings, but they are different for all of us,” he told an interviewer.

In 1964, Mr. Antonioni made his first color film, “Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert)” with Richard Harris. It, too, starred Ms. Vitti, as a woman coming gradually unhinged. To mirror her mental state, the director used color in very unusual ways, having houses and even trees painted bright colors and then changing those colors from scene to scene.

By the mid-’60s, Mr. Antonioni was one of the most famous and controversial film directors in the world; his movies were screened regularly on the global festival circuit and the auteur was the subject of countless essays and magazine articles. Inevitably, a Hollywood studio, in this case MGM, came calling. Not so inevitably, Mr. Antonioni welcomed them, signing a three-picture deal.

“Blow-Up” was his first effort for the studio. Filmed in English, with the British stars David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave in the hip milieu of the swinging London fashion scene, “Blow-Up” became the director’s biggest hit. It was also, stylistically, different from his previous films, more conventionally plotted and faster-paced, though still fundamentally ambiguous.

Following its commercial and critical success, Mr. Antonioni came to America to make his first big-budget film, and chose the student protest movement as his subject. “Zabriskie Point” (1970) was the result and it was a disaster.

Though some foreign critics praised the film, it was almost universally panned in the United States. “To many critics, it seemed as if the director, who had begun the decade in absolute control of his medium, was ending it in something approaching total confusion,” Mr. Turner wrote.

“Zabriskie Point” was a box-office flop for MGM, one of the biggest financial failures of its day. Mr. Antonioni was devastated and, in many ways, his career never recovered. Certainly, his most fertile creative period was over. He had made six films in the 1960s, many of them regarded as masterpieces, but would make only three more films in the ensuing quarter-century.

But Mr. Antonioni recaptured some of his previous critical respect with 1975’s “The Passenger,” starring Jack Nicholson as a reporter in North Africa who assumes the identity of a gun-runner. The film closes with a famous, 10-minute continuous tracking shot in which Mr. Nicholson is seen in his hotel room, waiting to be killed. The camera pulls out of the room and meanders through the courtyard. People and objects move in and out of the seamless shot before the camera comes full circle and re-enters the hotel room to find Mr. Nicholson dead. “ ‘The Passenger’ leaves no doubt about Antonioni’s mastery,” wrote the film critic David Thomson, who called it “one of the great films of the ‘70s.”

Following “The Passenger,” Mr. Antonioni announced he wanted to take some time to study new technologies and spent five years doing so, before Ms. Vitti asked him to return to directing with a 1980 Italian television film called “Il Mistery di Oberwald” (The Mystery of Oberwald).” Shot on videotape and transferred to film, it was substantially lighter than his previous works. This, he said, allowed him to “escape from the difficulty of moral and esthetic commitment, from the obsessive desire to express oneself.” It was awarded a silver ribbon for visual effects at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, but made little international impact.

Mr. Antonioni made his final commercial film, “Identificazione di una donna” (Identification of a Woman) in 1982, about a man who has affairs with two women following the death of his wife. It won a Grand Prix at the Cannes festival that year.

In 1985, while working on a film adaptation of a short story he had written in 1976, Mr. Antonioni suffered a stroke and the project was put aside. He married the next year for the second time, to the former Enrica Fico, and they lived quietly in an apartment in Rome. She was at his side when he died, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. He had no children, The Associated Press reported.

After the stroke, Mr. Antonioni worked on an Italian television documentary built around the 1990 World Cup soccer championship, but did not work on a feature film again until 1995 when Italian producers lured him out of retirement to make “Beyond the Clouds,” based on a book of his stories. Because of Mr. Antonioni’s infirmity, though, German director Wim Wenders was brought in to help and is listed as its co-director.

Since his stroke, Mr. Antonioni had difficulty speaking more than a few words at a time, so much of the work was done by his wife, Enrica, who energetically interpreted the director’s demands. The film starred Jeanne Moreau and Jeremy Irons. The reemergence of Mr. Antonioni spurred the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to present him with a Lifetime Achievment Award in 1995.

Mr. Antonioni began directing again in his 90s. He collaborated with Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director, on a trilogy about love and ***uality called Eros, which was released in 2004. He also made a short film called Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo. To his champions, like David Thomson, “the predicament of the world’s greatest living filmmaker unable to work is a fit subject for one of his mediations.”

For Mr. Thomson, “The enigmas in Antonioni’s work are as subject to time as monuments are to erosion, and the achievements of some films can offset or explain the apparent, or early, limits of others. For example, ‘The Passenger’ helped us to see the longing for escape and space in ‘L’Avventura’ and illuminated the persistence of life at the end of ‘L’EcLisse.’ I suspect that Antonioni’s best films will continue to grow and shift, like dunes in the centuries of desert. In that process, if there are eyes left to look, he will become a standard for beauty.”

But for others Mr. Antonioni remained not only enigmatic, but also unreachable to the end.

One interviewer asked him to look back over his life. “In a world without film, what would you have made?” he was asked.

Mr. Antonioni replied: “Film.”

Christine Hauser and Graham Bowley contributed reporting for this article.