MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI
Istituto Luce Cinecittà dedicates CIS 2017 to Michelangelo Antonioni, commemorating the 10th anniversary of his passing, by presenting the US premiere of the digital restoration of BLOW UP and RED DESERT at AFI FEST 2017 presented by Audi.
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Michelangelo Antonioni was born on 29 September 1912 in Ferrara, an old city in the Po Valley, North of Italy. In 1935, he graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in Economics, and in the early 1940’s moved to Rome to attend the prestigious film school “Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia”, which he had to abandon after only six months, to serve under the army for WWII.
He starts writing film reviews for the local paper, II Corriere Padano, which he quit for political issues with Mussolini’s nephew, who had a leading role in it, and later, when he was in Rome, for the important magazine Cinema. He collaborated on the script of Roberto Rossellini’s Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns). In 1942, the production company Scalera hired him as scriptwriter and assistant director for Enrico Fulchignoni’s I due Foscari (The Two Foscaris), then sent him to France as co director of the Italo-French coproduction of Marcel Carne’s film Les Visiteurs du soir (1942). Carné was not happy with the decision as it was the time of the German/Italian occupation in France, the relationship between the two never grew up and Antonioni came back before completing the film.
Returning to Italy to serve the army again, Antonioni shot his first documentary People of the Po Valley, completed only in 1947, after the war. After directing several other documentaries, in 1950 it was finally the time for his first feature film, Story of a Love Affair presenting topics that will be a constant presence in his works the “crisis of emotions and of moral values” within the Italian bourgeois society. With L’avventura (1960)–and the next two films: La notte (196I) and The Eclipse (1962), Antonioni established himself as one of the most talented and innovative Italian filmmakers.
He experimented the use of colour as a key element in the portraying of characters and landscapes in Red Desert (1964). From the mid-1960s on, he explored different cultures and societies. After the London success of Blow-Up (1966), he obtained an MGM contract for shooting Zabriskie Point (1970), then in 1972 he completed Chung Kuo: China, a documentary on Chinese society and in 1974 he shot The Passenger; an international coproduction starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider.
Antonioni’s interest in technical innovations brought him to The Mystery of Oberwald, (1980), a film based on a play by Jean Cocteau whilst with Identification of a Woman (1982), he returned to his homeland. In 1995, after years of silence due to illness, he co directed with Wim Wenders his “comeback” film, Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds). In the same year, he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime commitment to the cinema. Antonioni’s final film, made when he was in his 90s, was a segment of the anthology film Eros (2004), entitled “Il filo pericoloso delle cose” (“The Dangerous Thread of Things”).
Antonioni died aged 94 on July 30, 2007 in Rome. He was buried in his home town of Ferrara on August 2, 2007.