Antonioni's slow, empty frames were booed at Cannes and then conquered world cinema
L'Avventura drew cheers and jeers in equal measure at Cannes in 1960. Michelangelo Antonioni had dropped conventional plot for drifting long takes and modern landscapes, and the gamble made him the first director to win top prizes at Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Locarno, shaping art cinema for decades.
Antonioni grew up in Ferrara, in Emilia-Romagna, in a comfortable landowning family; he was born on 29 September 1912. His mother had worked as a labourer when young, and his father had climbed out of the working class through night classes. The boy gave his first violin concert at nine, then dropped the instrument once he discovered film. Drawing lasted all his life: at eleven he built imaginary towns full of tiny figures and invented stories for them, which he later compared to little films.
After an economics degree from Bologna he became a film critic for a Ferrara paper in 1935. In Rome in 1940 he was hired, then fired within months, by Cinema, the Fascist film magazine run by Vittorio Mussolini, and quit film school after three months. Drafted into the army, he survived a death sentence imposed on him as a member of the Resistance. He co-wrote A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini and assisted Marcel Carné in France before shooting Gente del Po, a short about poor Po valley fishermen whose footage was partly lost in the war.
His first feature, Story of a Love Affair in 1950, turned neorealism's gaze toward the middle classes. With Le Amiche in 1955 he tried stringing together seemingly unrelated events in long takes, an approach he pushed further in L'Avventura, which took a Jury Prize and filled arthouses worldwide. La Notte, with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, and L'Eclisse, with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, completed what critics call the alienation trilogy.
The English-language Blowup in 1966 earned him Oscar nominations for directing and writing, and The Passenger followed in 1975. Only Jafar Panahi has since matched his sweep of the Palme d'Or, Golden Lion, Golden Bear and Golden Leopard. In 1995 the Academy gave him an honorary award as a master visual stylist. He died on 30 July 2007, having influenced the slow cinema movement.
Source: Michelangelo Antonioni
