Michelangelo Antonioni

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Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
Although he came from a different generation than the French and Italian filmmakers who created such a stir on the international scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Antonioni was often grouped with them anyway, mainly because his breakthrough picture, L'Avventura (1960), was released at the height of the cinematic New Wave. Unlike novice auteurs of the time such as Pasolini, Godard, and Truffaut, Antonioni was already a seasoned director with several documentary shorts and fairly conventional (albeit cerebral) features to his credit when he made L'Avventura This enigmatic and sometimes eerie character study, with its architectural rigor employed in the service of a plot that Antonioni refused to resolve (at least in any commonly accepted narrative fashion), created an immediate critical furor and forever attached to its creator's name the term "modern alienation." The director's work deals with a lot more than that, but the inability of his characters to communicate with each other is a constant in almost all of his films. La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962) followed, completing a trilogy on the alienation theme.
Antonioni showed particular sympathy to his female characters in the films that followed; his first color picture, The Red Desert (1964), which starred then-lover Monica Vitti (who had shared in the sensation created by L'Avventura can easily be read as a feminist film. Antonioni's second breakthrough picture was Blowup (1966), his first English-language film, which earned Oscar nominations for Best Director and Screenplay. A dazzling riddle on perception versus reality, it first captured audiences with its more superficial aspects, being in part a hip, up-to-theminute depiction of swinging London that contained a sexual frankness heretofore unseen in commercial cinema (it was the first major studio release to feature full frontal nudity-about a half-second's worth, but enough to get noticed).
The success of Blowup brought Antonioni to America, where in 1970 he made the disastrous Zabriskie Point a very misguided attempt to portray the student radical movement of the era. (In a disquieting case of life imitating bad art, the film's lead, Mark Frechette, was convicted after an SLA-style bank robbery and was killed in prison.) Taking a hiatus from commercial filmmaking (during which time he directed a documentary), Antonioni returned in 1975 with the breathtaking The Passenger Featuring one of Jack Nicholson's most finely modulated performances, and some of the most beautiful imagery Antonioni ever captured on film, the movie was widely misunderstood on release. After a number of abortive attempts to get another project entitled Suffer or Die off the ground (both Debra Winger and Mick Jagger were approached to star) Antonioni returned to Italy, where he continued directing sporadically (including Il Misterio di Oberwald a shoton-video work featuring Vitti). In 1995 he received an honorary Academy Award.
a scene from Blow-Up
L'Avventura statement at Cannes
by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960There exists in the world today a very serious break between science on the one hand, always projecting into the future and each day ready to deny what it was the day before, if that will enable it to advance its conquest of the future even by a fraction. . . . between science on the one hand and a fixed, stiff morality on the other, the faults of which are perfectly apparent to man, but which still continues to stand.From the moment. he is born, man is burdened with a heavy load of feelings. I do not say these feelings are old or out of date, but they are entirely unsuited to his needs; they condition him without aiding him, fetter him without ever showing him a way out of his difficulties.And yet man has not succeeded-so it seems-in unburdening himself of this inheritance. He acts, he hates, he suffers, impelled by moral forces and myths which were already old in the time of Homer. Which is an absurdity in our day, on the eve of man's first journey to the moon. But that is the way things are!Man, then, is ready to unburden himself of his technical or scientific knowledge when it proves false. Never before has science been so humble, so ready to retract its statements. But in the realm of the emotions, a total conformity reigns.
During the last few years, we have examined, studied the emotions as much as possible, to the point of exhaustion. This is all we have been able to do. But we have not been able to find any new emotions, nor even to get an inkling of a solution to the problem.I do not pretend to be able, nor would it be possible for me, to find the solution. I am not a moralist.
My film L'Avventura is neither a denunciation nor a sermon. It is a story told in images, and I hope people will be able to see in it not the birth of a delusory emotion but the method by which it is possible to delude oneself in one's feelings. For, I repeat, we make use of an aging morality, of outworn myths, of ancient conventions. And we do this in full consciousness of what we are doing. Why do we respect such a morality?The conclusion which my characters reach is not that of moral anarchy. They arrive, at best, at a sort of reciprocal pity. That too, you will tell me, is old. But what else is there left to us?For example, what do you think this eroticism that has invaded literature and the performing arts really is? It is a symptom, and perhaps the easiest symptom to discern, of the illness from which the emotions are suffering.We would not be erotic, that is, the sick men of Eros, if Eros himself were in good health. And when I say in good health, I mean just that: adequate to man's condition and needs.Thus, there is discomfort. And, as always happens when he feels discomfort, man reacts; but he reacts badly, and he is unhappy about it.In L'Avventura, the catastrophe is an erotic impulse of this order: cheap, useless, unfortunate. And it is not enough to know that this is the way things are. For the hero (what a ridiculous word!) of my film is perfectly aware of the crude nature, the uselessness, of the erotic impulse that gets the better of him. But this is not enough.Here then is another fallen myth, the illusion that it is enough to know oneself, to analyze oneself minutely in the most secret places of the soul.No, that is not enough. Each day we live through an "adventure," whether it be a sentimental, a moral or an ideological one.But if we know that the old tables of the law no longer offer anything but words too often read out and repeated, why do we remain faithful to those tables? There is a stubbornness here that strikes me as pathetic.Man, who has no fear of the scientific unknown, is frightened by the moral unknown.If you have an enemy, do not try to beat him up, do not insult him, do not curse him, do not humiliate him, do not hope that he will have an automobile accident. Wish, quite simply, that he may remain without work. That is the most terrible hardship by which a man can be struck. Any vacation, even the most marvellous of vacations, has meaning only if it forms a counterweight to one's fatigue.I consider that I am especially privileged in this matter - I do work that I enjoy. I do not know many Italians who can say as much.That work is the most important thing in my life. It would be superfluous to ask what it gives me. It gives me everything. It gives me the possibility to express myself, to communicate with others. Considering the difficulty I have in speaking, I would feel as if I were nonexistent without the cinema.
Still Images from The Eclipse
Memorable Quotes: All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks. Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space. I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.