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Michelangelo Antonioni ____________
Italy (1912- )
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 shot-on-video work featuring Vitti). His work no longer commands the international audience it once did, and his last few pictures did not get U.S. releases. The Crew, a project he was set to direct for Martin Scorsese's production company, has been put on indefinite hold. In 1995 he received an honorary Academy Award. (Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia. Copyright © 1994 Leonard Maltin)
A Viewer's Guide to Blowup. K. Skutski Lecture Notes My intepretation of the film and guide to key scenes.
Michelangelo Antonioni:
A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library This site includes a very thorough bibliography of books and articles on Antonioni, including a listing of about 30 articles on Blow Up.
Grønstad, Asbjørn. "Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up." The Film Journal. 2004. Brown, James. "Michelangelo Antonioni." Senses of Cinema. May 2002. Good overview of Antonioni's career as a filmmaker. Norton, Glenn. "Antonioni's Modernist Language." http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/3781/modernism.html Schliesser, John. "Antonioni's Heideggerian Swerve." Literature/Film Quarterly 26.4 (1998): 278-88. Good scholarly article on Blow Up, from a literary and philosophical perspective.
Gardner, Colin. "Antonioni's Blow Up and the Chiasmus of Memory." www.artbrain.org. Very "deep" but interesting discussion of the film--from the perspectives of hermeneutics, semiotics, and phenomenology.
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