Michelangelo Antonioni-The Marxist-intellectual film director from Italy

On September 29, 2012, Michelangelo Antonioni's 100th birthday , a film director who is one of the key figures in modern cinemas . Antonioni made the decision very late to "dedicate his life to the film": The son of a manor owner was intended for a classic bourgeois life, he initially studied economy at the University of Bologna and, after the diploma in his hometown Ferrara, took up employment in the finance.

But even in his childhood, Antonioni felt alone in his home -style environment, he made architectural drawings in some cases absurd buildings, built and decorated entire miniature cities from building blocks, cardboard and wood, for the residents of which he devised complete life stories, and preferred to peek in the windows of foreign apartments.

Already during his work in a bank he wrote film reviews for Ferrara's local newspaper, when the traditional social career did not appear to him temporarily towards the end of the third decade of life, it was only logical when he went to Rome in 1939 to prescribe the latest medium of time.

Antonioni now wrote the first designs for scripts , but also wrote for the magazine L'Italia Libera, the illegal party magazine of the Action Party, a liberal social opposition to fascism in Italy. He soon started studying film technology at the “Centro Sperimental di Cinematographia”.

This film school was actually openly opened by the "Direzione Della Cinematographia" , a institution created by the fascist regime for the political coordination of film policy: just like the Cinecittà, based on the model of the Moscow film school, this school should serve the goal of doing political cinema within directly controlled structures.

However, Luigi Chiarini was used as director of the new institution, the philosophically educated film artist made an ideologically unable and professional film school of high level with his foresight and intelligence from the Centro.

The regime was not served at the Centro, but promoted new developments with a lot of openness and willingness to experiment, in contrast to the intentions of the fascist rulers. The Centro did not form “fascist intellectuals”, but promoted the free exchange of ideas and thoughts that a “school of anti -fascism” , right down to active resistance to the regime.

At this place, Antonioni now got to know the filmmaker, here he met contemporaries with whom he later worked. Like Roberto Rossellini , for whom he worked on a film script in 1942, after which he was able Marcel Carné in his film “Visiteur du Soir”, “the night with the devil”. Certainly an educational experience, Carné's next film was “Children of Olympus” , who is classified as one of the best films at all.

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

Therefore, benevolent reviews of loathe -worthy propaganda films such as “Jud Süß” or “Hitler boy Quex” appeared here, and Antonioni later had to justify himself for the job at this magazine. However, Antonioni was by no means inclined to this political opinion, which is why he was soon released due to political differences.

He now began to make films himself, the first of which are often attributed Italian neorealism But already in these first films (“Gente del Po” = “Mensch am Po”, 1943-47, “Chronica di Un Amore” = “Chronicle of a Love”, 1950, 1950, “Il Grido” = “Der Schrei”, 1957), this drought was only the metaphor for him, to give his films that his films treat.

Antonionis films question life, it is about post -war society, the break with conventions and isolated people who are lost in this society. Antonioni is not like neorealism about the external estrangement of the traditionally arrested person from his environment, but on the contrary about the inner perspective of man and the influences of the area on this inner condition.

In the early 1960s, he created three films that deal with the loss of meaning and the split of members of the upper layers of a newly emerging society, “who play with love” (1960), “Die Nacht” (1961) and “Dear 1962” (1962). These provocative works and their representation of nudity were able to win several prices at the most important international film festival.

In 1966 Antonionis “Blow Up” one of the most important films of the 1960s, which was given the main prize at the Film Festival in Cannes and is still worshiped as a cult film. At that time, the film caused a scandal, but more because of the first cinematic illustration of female pubic hair than because of the terrifying topic.

Antonioni, like many other artists of his time, refers to the ability of the media that have just become aware of the critical spirits of the time not only to map reality in their work, but also to question, and also to manipulate.

In 1975 Antonioni resumed the topic in his psychodrama “Profession: Reporter” with quite misanthropic under tones in which he traces the correction of a reporter.

Even more vertebrae than “Blow Up” initially caused the 1970 film “Zabriskie Point”, a tribute to the 1968 movement, in which a new-piritual and an ordinary employee are motivated to break out of the consumer society by the student pollution, but fail as well as the reference of the students. Although he was not successful, there were several processes against him in the United States because he rumbles “left -wing radicals and anti -American statements”.

Several projects had now failed financially, but Antonioni curiosity about humans, but with “Chung Kuo Cina” = “Antonionis China” he made a documentary again for the first time after 20 years, with a clear view, which was later to bring him into trouble.

In the film Eil Mistero di Oberwald ”=“ The Secret of Oberwald ”, 1980, an adaptation of a play by Jean Cocteau's, he shows an unusual concentration on experimental aesthetics, because there is no narrative when technology is celebrated as progress.

In the film “Identificazione di Una Donna” = “Identification of a woman”, 1983, he returns back to the people and describes the inability of men to understand women. That was the last film that Antonioni completed alone, in 1985 he had a stroke, the consequences of which severely restricted him in language and movement.

Nevertheless, he took over the episode about Rome in the film ““ 12 Registi Per 12 Città ”, in which 12 famous Italian directors presented the visitors of the 1990 World Cup in 1990 12 Italian cities and in 1995, with the support of Wim Wenders goes.

He still provided his last work in 2004, the episode “Il Filo Pericoloso delle Cose” (which means "dangerous chain") in the episode film Eros, in the opinion of many critics, a work of extraordinary brilliance and ease. Antonioni died in Rome in 2007, at the age of 94.

In addition to Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the great ones who have shaped the Italian film in the post -war years. In his visionary aesthetics, the analytical accuracy and its severity when crossing borders, however, Antonioni is rather close to the French exceptionist Jean-Luc Godard .

However, Antonioni's topic was only and always man , which is why the work of the “Marxist Intellectual” (Antonioni about himself), who, with his pessimistic perspective, has been understood as a chronicler of life, and still nothing of their topicality and urgency.

In the following video you can see the original trailer (in English) of his masterpiece "Blow Up":