Michelangelo Antonioni – The Marxist-intellectual film director from Italy

September 29, 2012, marked the 100th birthday of Michelangelo Antonioni , a film director considered one of the key figures of modern cinema . Antonioni only decided relatively late in life to "dedicate his life to film": the son of a landowner was destined for a traditional bourgeois career, initially studying economics at the University of Bologna and, after graduating, taking up a position in finance in his hometown of Ferrara.

But even in his childhood, Antonioni felt alone in his bourgeois surroundings; he made architectural drawings of sometimes quite absurd buildings, built and decorated entire miniature cities out of building blocks, cardboard and wood, for whose inhabitants he invented complete life stories, and he liked to peer into the windows of strangers' apartments.

Even while working at a bank, he wrote film reviews for Ferrara's local newspaper; when the traditional social career still did not seem appealing to him towards the end of his third decade, it was only logical that in 1939 he went to Rome to dedicate himself to the most current medium of the time.

Antonioni now wrote his first drafts of screenplays , but also contributed to the magazine L'Italia libera, the illegal party journal of the Action Party, a liberal-social opposition to fascism in Italy. He was soon able to begin studying film technology at the “Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia”.

This film school was actually opened by the “Direzione Generale della Cinematografia” , an institution created by the fascist regime solely for the political coordination of film policy: Just like Cinecittà, this school, modeled after the Moscow Film School, was intended to serve the goal of making political cinema within directly controlled structures.

However, Luigi Chiarini was appointed director of the new institution; the philosophically educated film artist, with his foresight and intelligence, transformed the Centro into an ideologically unbound and professional film school of a high standard.

At the Centro, the regime was not served; instead, new developments were fostered with great openness and a spirit of experimentation, in stark contrast to the intentions of the fascist rulers. The Centro did not produce “fascist intellectuals,” but rather promoted the free exchange of ideas and thoughts , creating a “school of anti-fascism” that even led to active resistance against the regime.

It was in this place that Antonioni first became acquainted with filmmaking, meeting contemporaries with whom he would later work. Among them was Roberto Rossellini , for whom he worked on a screenplay in 1942. Subsequently, he was able to Marcel Carné on his film "Visiteur du soir" (The Night with the Devil). Certainly an instructive experience, Carné's next film was "Children of Paradise ," which is still considered one of the greatest films ever made.

Antonioni could not completely escape fascist Italy, however; during this time he also wrote for the magazine Cinema, an official film magazine published by Mussolini's son Vittorio.

Therefore, favorable reviews of abhorrent propaganda films like "Jud Süß" or "Hitlerjunge Quex" appeared here, and Antonioni later had to defend his work for this magazine on numerous occasions. However, Antonioni was by no means inclined to share these political views, which is why he was soon dismissed due to political differences.

He now began to direct films himself, the first of which are often attributed to Italian Neorealism . But even in these early films, set in the impoverished landscape of the Po Valley (“Gente del Po” = “People of the Po”, 1943-47, “Chronica di un amore” = “Chronicle of a Love”, 1950, “Il Grido” = “The Scream”, 1957), this barren Po Valley was merely a metaphor for him, a framework to frame the existential questions his films addressed.

Antonioni's films question life itself; they deal with post-war society, the break with conventions, and isolated individuals lost within it. Unlike Neorealism, which focuses on the external alienation of traditionally bound individuals from their environment, Antonioni's films are quite the opposite: they explore the inner world and how the environment influences this inner state.

In the early 1960s, he created three films dealing with the loss of meaning and the inner conflict of members of the upper classes in a newly emerging society: "Those Who Play with Love" (1960), "The Night" (1961), and "Love 1962" (1962). These provocative works and their depiction of nudity each won numerous awards at major international film festivals.

In 1966, Antonioni's "Blow-Up" one of the most important films of the 1960s, winning the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and still revered as a cult film today. At the time, the film caused a scandal, though more because of the first cinematic depiction of female pubic hair than because of its disturbing subject matter.

Antonioni, like many other artists of his time, refers here to the ability of the media, which was only just becoming apparent to the critical minds of the time, not only to depict reality in their work, but also to question and even to manipulate it.

In 1975, Antonioni revisited the theme in his psychodrama “The Profession: Reporter” with decidedly misanthropic undertones, in which he traces the corruption of a reporter.

Even more of a stir than "Blow-Up" was initially caused by the 1970 film "Zabriskie Point," an homage to the 1968 movement in which a neo-spiritualist and an ordinary office worker are motivated by the student unrest to break free from consumer society, but fail just like the students themselves. Although it was not a commercial success, it led to several lawsuits in the USA for allegedly spreading "left-wing radical and anti-American views.".

Several projects had now failed financially, but Antonioni's curiosity about humanity remained unbroken; with "Chung Kuo Cina" = "Antonioni's China" he made his first documentary film in 1972 after 20 years, with a clear vision that would later cause him trouble.

In the film "El mistero di Oberwald" = "The Mystery of Oberwald", 1980, an adaptation of a play by Jean Cocteau, he shows an unusual concentration on experimental aesthetics, because no narrative material can be found when technology is celebrated as progress.

In his 1983 film "Identificazione di una donna" (Identification of a Woman), he returns to the theme of humanity, depicting men's inability to understand women. This was the last film Antonioni completed on his own; in 1985 he suffered a stroke, the effects of which severely limited his speech and movement.

Nevertheless, he took on the episode about Rome in the film “12 registi per 12 città”, in which 12 famous Italian directors present 12 Italian cities to visitors of the 1990 FIFA World Cup, and in 1995, with the support of Wim Wenders, the episodic film “Al di là delle nuvole” = “Beyond the Clouds”, which again deals with the relationship between man and woman, love and its finiteness.

His last work was in 2004, the episode “Il filo pericoloso delle cose” (which translates to “Dangerous Intertwining”) in the anthology film Eros, considered by many critics to be a work of extraordinary brilliance and lightness. Antonioni died in Rome in 2007 at the age of 94.

Alongside Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni is among the great directors who shaped Italian cinema in the post-war years. However, in his visionary aesthetic, analytical precision, and vehemence in pushing boundaries, Antonioni is more closely associated with the exceptional French director Jean-Luc Godard .

However, Antonioni's theme was always and exclusively man ; therefore, the works of the "Marxist intellectual" (Antonioni about himself), who saw himself as a chronicler of life with his pessimistic outlook, have lost none of their relevance and urgency even today.

The following video shows the original trailer (in English) for his masterpiece “Blow Up”: