A few years ago (2007), headlines were made when two legendary filmmakers died within one day of each other: Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, respectively.\u00a0 They, including Federico Fellini (who died in 1993), had dominated European filmmaking during the late 1950\u2019s and throughout most of the 1960\u2019s.\u00a0 Most people, whether cinema lovers or not, were familiar with the names of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, while Antonioni, who had continued to make films into his nineties (he died at the age of 92), was largely forgotten.\u00a0 I have often asked myself why his name has faded while those of his two illustrious contemporaries have survived.\u00a0 Sometimes I think the reason is to be found in the fact that none of his films have ever been made into Broadway musicals: Fellini has had two musicals based on his films and Bergman has had one.\u00a0 I often wonder why someone has not adapted Antonioni\u2019s L\u2019avventura<\/i> into a musical, although I am sure someone has at least thought of it.\u00a0 What I am really saying here is that for an average audience, Antonioni was probably the least accessible of the three.\u00a0 Let us now review Antonioni\u2019s long and distinguished career and his contributions to film as art and “the screenplay as literature.”<\/p>\n
Although Antonioni had worked on the fringes of Italian film production for many years, he did not make his first feature film until the age of thirty-eight in 1950.\u00a0 The plot of his first feature, Cronaca di un amore<\/i>, a sordid melodrama, is not important for us.\u00a0 But what are important are the discoveries he was to make in filming it.\u00a0 For example, his habit of shooting rather long scenes was born spontaneously on the very first day of filming.\u00a0 Soon he began to follow his characters until he felt the need to move on to another exercise.\u00a0 For Antonioni this was the best way to be real, to be true:\u00a0 that is to be inside the scene, exactly as in life.\u00a0 But it was not just in the use of the camera that Antonioni was to make discoveries in the making of his first film, but in storytelling as well.\u00a0 After Cronaca di un amore<\/i>\u00a0 opened in Paris in 1951, one French critic observed that the film \u201cspins no plot; on the contrary, it draws a discursive tale to which the word \u2018End\u2019 is written only after the play of events has dispersed its three characters.\u201d<\/p>\n
I vinti<\/i>\u00a0 (1952), La signora senza camelie<\/i> (1953), Le amiche<\/i> (1955) and Il grido<\/i> (1957)<\/p>\n
In his next four feature films following Cronaca di un amore<\/i>, Antonioni continued to make important discoveries and develop new techniques.\u00a0\u00a0 This was particularly true with regard to the subject of pictorial composition (e.g. the framing of the shot).\u00a0 In this regard he went far beyond what had been the accepted conventions at the time.\u00a0 For example, it had long been known in theater, and subsequently recognized in film, that the position of the actor\u2019s body in relation to the audience (e.g. full face and profile) affected the intensity (strong, weak, etc.) of the dialogue delivered by him.\u00a0 \u00a0However, Antonioni discovered that\u00a0\u00a0 \u201ca line spoken by an actor in profile doesn\u2019t have the same meaning as one given in full-face.\u00a0 Likewise, a phrase addressed to the camera placed above the actor doesn\u2019t have the same meaning it would if the camera were placed below him.\u201d\u00a0 Thus, pictorial composition in Antonioni\u2019s films came to serve as a means of conveying meaning\u2014and sometimes meaning not directly expressed in the script\u2014as well as feeling, intensity and mood.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most important discovery about cinema that Antonioni made during this early period was concerned with plot and story construction.\u00a0 \u201cThus I have rid myself of much unnecessary technical baggage,\u201d he related, \u201celiminating all the logical narrative transitions, all those connective links between sequences where one sequence served as the springboard for the one that followed. . . cinema today should be tied to truth rather than to logic.\u201d\u00a0 And how would Antonioni accomplish this?\u00a0 By structuring his films according to the rhythm of everyday life, and not according to dramatic conventions\u2014that was what would come to be known as The Cinema of Antonioni<\/i>.<\/p>\n
It was not until 1960, when his sixth feature film, L\u2019avventura<\/i> , was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, that Antonioni\u2019s cinematic techniques and discoveries were to achieve the world-wide recognition and attention they so rightly deserved (up until that time, Antonioni was little known outside his own country, and none of his previous five features had yet been released in the United States).\u00a0\u00a0 Antonioni referred to this peculiar love story as a \u201cmystery in reverse.\u201d\u00a0 A girl (Anna) vanishes and her friends conduct a search but never find her.\u00a0 \u00a0At the end of the film, the remaining characters go off in different directions, apparently forgetting about the lost girl.\u00a0 What infuriated many of those who first saw this quite remarkable film at Cannes was that they never did find out what became of the girl, Anna.\u00a0 This is not as illogical as it may seem, critic Pierre Leprohon observes:\u00a0 \u201cwhat concerns Antonioni . . . is the characters and their relation to themselves and to events.\u00a0 Why, then, should he sustain interest in facts that have ceased to interest the heroes of the story he is telling?\u201d\u00a0 This was indeed a revolutionary concept in 1960: for an author to concern himself with only those things that interest his characters\u2014and not his audience\u2014was akin to giving them a life of their own, something utterly unheard of in cinema at that time.<\/p>\n
While L\u2019avventura<\/i> did deviate significantly from previous theatrical traditions, it still contained one age-old dramatic element\u2014although perhaps unintentionally\u2014suspense.\u00a0 In Antonioni\u2019s next film, La notte<\/i> (1961), however, even this element is lacking: we are not so much concerned with whether or not the protagonists find a way out of their predicament, but with the magnitude of their problem and how they go about solving it (or perhaps their lack of concern about finding a solution).<\/p>\n
La notte<\/i> (\u201cThe Night\u201d) examines an intellectual crisis that is faced by an Italian writer, Giovanni; his relationship with his wife, Lidia: and the disintegration of his marriage\u2014all three of which are obviously inter-related.\u00a0 An American film of the same period and with the same subject matter would probably have concentrated on the reasons for the writer\u2019s mental state and the failure of his marriage\u2014a la<\/i> Freud\u2014relying heavily on the use of flashbacks.\u00a0 However, Antonioni does no such thing: he does not attempt to analyze the situation\u2014there are no flashbacks; he merely presents the situation as it exists for our examination, which covers approximately eighteen hours\u00a0\u00a0 in the life of the protagonists.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0This one day (and night) in the life of the protagonists is not, however, just any ordinary day; in fact, it is a very important day, when a great deal of self-knowledge is to be gained (the couple come to the terrible realization that they no longer love each other).<\/p>\n
In his next film, L\u2019eclisse<\/i> (1962), Antonioni continued to expand and perfect the techniques noted in La note<\/i> and L\u2019avventura.\u00a0 L\u2019eclisse<\/em> (\u201cThe Eclipse\u201d) is the third and final part of this trilogy examining the phenomenon of love (or lack of it) in our time\u2014a modern love story (ca. 1962).\u00a0 The film deals primarily with one character, a young career woman, Vittoria, and her new lover, Piero, a stockbroker; there is a strong implication that this relationship, like an \u201ceclipse,\u201d will be short-lived.\u00a0 New for Antonioni in this film\u00a0 are a very unusual documentary on the Roman stock exchange \u00a0and an Eisensteinian montage<\/i> at the end that in an abstract manner attempts to tie together all the narrative and thematic threads of the film into one unified statement.\u00a0 The rationale for this documentary digression into the world of money and banking is to illustrate the prison of investments and speculation that Vittoria\u2019s lover is trapped in, affecting his every aspect, including his love life.\u00a0 Antonioni\u2019s premise is that the \u201cworld today is ruled by money, greed for money, fear of money\u201d and that this \u201cleads to a dangerous passivity towards problems of the spirit;\u201d yet his premise becomes lost in this story where the two protagonists are so vibrantly alive.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The montage at the film\u2019s end, however, is more successful than the aforementioned premise.\u00a0 Here Antonioni juxtaposes several shots (fifty-eight in all) which show the places where most of the liaisons between the heroine and her lover took place and where they were, for brief moments, so happy, but shots in which the two lovers are conspicuously absent, perhaps a comment on the permanence of things and objects contrasted with the ephemeral nature of human relationships.<\/p>\n Antonioni\u2019s next film, Deserto rosso<\/i> (1964) is unquestionably his most masterful\u2014the culmination and total perfection of his previous cinematic techniques and discoveries, as well as his first experiment in the use of color.\u00a0 Deserto rosso<\/i> (\u201cThe Red Desert\u201d) is the story of the mental deterioration of a young, married woman.\u00a0 Here, Antonioni\u2019s use of color is a completely subjective one: the colors that we see are by and large exactly those that the characters see (Antonioni is reported to have painted a marsh gray for this film because that was the way his characters felt when they looked at it).<\/p>\n After Deserto rosso<\/i>, Antonioni made three films in English.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t find any of the three particularly distinguished, but I will recount them for you anyway.\u00a0 In 1966 Antonioni made Blowup<\/i>, a mystery about a fashion photographer set in the \u201cswinging\u201d London of the 1960\u2019s.\u00a0 In 1970, he made Zabriskie Point<\/i>, a film that dealt with the American \u201ccounter-culture\u201d movement of the 1960\u2019s.\u00a0 Finally in 1975 he made The Passenger<\/i>, another mystery film.\u00a0 The first one, Blowup<\/i>, was the most successful of the three, both critically and financially.\u00a0 However, as this was essentially a purely entertainment film, it did little to advance the art of film or Antonioni\u2019s reputation, although his mastery of his medium is certainly in evidence.\u00a0 Zabriske Point<\/i> was an unmitigated disaster, both critically and financially, although the film was meant to do more than entertain\u2014which it certainly did not.\u00a0\u00a0 The Passenger<\/i>, which starred Jack Nicholson, was, at least for me, the most interesting of the three.\u00a0 It contained a seven minute scene consisting of one take that is still talked about today.\u00a0 It is not easy for a filmmaker to transition from one culture and\/or another language to a new one:\u00a0 Antonioni\u2019s experience in this regard demonstrates why.<\/p>\n Antonioni was to make just three more feature films during his lifetime.\u00a0 They were Il<\/em> mistera di Oberwald<\/i> (\u201cThe Mystery of Oberwald\u201d), 1981; Identificazione di una donna<\/i> (\u201cIdentification of a Woman\u201d), 1982; and Al di la delle nuvole<\/i> (\u201cBeyond the Clouds\u201d).\u00a0 I have to admit that I have seen none of the three, so I cannot comment on them.\u00a0\u00a0 Furthermore, none of them received wide distribution in the United States . To Michelangelo Antonioni,<\/p>\n The greatest creative talent that the Cinema has ever known and the inspiration for this book.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Regrettably I never met up with him that year, or any time afterwards.\u00a0 By the way, I do not find that the passage of time has changed the validity of the above dedication.<\/p>\n Michelangelo Antonioni was ahead of his time.\u00a0 Even today he is still ahead of his time.\u00a0 Maybe in another fifty years Cinema will finally catch up with him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few years ago (2007), headlines were made when two legendary filmmakers died within one day of each other: Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, respectively.\u00a0 They, including Federico Fellini (who died in 1993), had dominated European filmmaking during the late … Continue reading
\nAntonioni was very supportive of my work on The Screenplay as Literature<\/i> and graciously gave me permission to quote extensively from his screenplays.\u00a0 One year when I was going to the Cannes Film Festival I had learned that Antonioni was also to be in attendance.\u00a0 I brought with me a copy of my book in which I wrote a dedication and which I intended to give to him.\u00a0 The dedication reads as follows:<\/p>\n