Biography for
Michelangelo Antonioni More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

29 September 1912, Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Date of Death

30 July 2007, Rome, Lazio, Italy

Height

5' 10" (1.78 m)

Mini Biography

Michelangelo Antonioni was born in 1912 into a middle-class family and grew up in bourgeois surroundings of the Italian province. In Bologna he studied economics and commerce while he painted and also wrote criticism for a local newspaper. In 1939 he went to Rome and worked for the journal "Cinema" studying directorship at the School of Cinema. As he was indebted to neorealism his films reflect his bourgeois roots like in his first movie Story of a Love Affair (1950) or The Lady Without Camelias (1953) or Le Amiche (1955). His biggest success was the trilogy L'Avventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L'eclisse (1962), with which he won several prizes. This success allowed him to go abroad and to work on international scale in English: e.g. Blow-Up (1966) in London and Zabriskie Point (1970) in the USA as well as The Passenger (1975). A stroke in 1985 severely inhibited his productivity until his death in 2007.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Volker Boehm

Spouse

Enrica Antonioni	(1986 - 30 July 2007) (his death)
Letizia Balboni	(1942 - ?)

Trade Mark

Frequently his films are centered around an attractive, damaged (and often adulterous) man and woman who go on a talky journey together which ends ambiguously yet grimly.

His films frequently starred Monica Vitti or other statuesque actresses

Trivia

Burglars stole an Oscar, awarded for career achievement, from his Rome apartment during the Christmas holidays. [December 1996]

In 1940, he worked as an editorial secretary for "Cinema", an entertainment magazine published by the Fascist Entertainment Guild, and edited by the son of Benito Mussolini.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 59-69. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

In 1985 he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on his right side and virtually unable to speak. He communicated through drawings (learning with his left hand), a few words and body language. He was unable to finish any film project until 1995, when he released Beyond the Clouds (1995), co-directed by German director Wim Wenders.

Son of Elisabetta and Carlo Antonioni.

Was fluent in French.

Member of a circle that revolved around the magazine "Cinema", who developed the Italian neorealism, reflecting the changes in Italian everyday life during the postwar period.

Considered himself a Marxist intellectual.

He was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to film culture.

The great Italian director is noted in Oscar history for delivering the shortest acceptance speech when he received his Honorary Award in 1995: "Grazie".

After his death, Antonioni's body lay in state at the City Hall in Rome. His funeral was held in the cathedral of San Giorgio in his home town of Ferrara. He is buried next to his parents in the Certosa cemetary in Ferrara.

Personal Quotes

I feel like a father towards my old films. You bring children into the world, then they grow up and go off on their own. From time to time you get together, and it's always a pleasure to see them again.

Actors are like cows. You have to lead them through a fence.

Reality changes so rapidly that if one theme is not dealt with, another presents itself. Allowing one's attention to be attracted by each little thing has become a vice of the imagination. All one has to do is to keep one's eyes open: everything becomes full of meaning; everything cries out to be interpreted, reproduced. Thus, there is no one particular film that I would like to make; there is one for every single theme I perceive. And I am excited by these themes, day and night. However, opportunity and other practical considerations limit and direct the choice . . .

A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.

I am not a theoretician of the cinema. If you ask me what directing is, the first answer that comes into my head is that I don't know. The second, all my opinions on the subject are in my films.

When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it. My technique, which differs from film to film, is wholly instinctive and never based on prior considerations.

I always try to follow a certain pattern and work without thinking of the audience. It is not that I dislike my audience; I am not an intellectual, but I believe that films should not be made to entertain the audience, earn money or achieve popularity. I think that films should be made to be as good as possible. And it seems to me that this is the best way to work and to be trustworthy in the world of cinema.

The Color of Pomegranates, by Sergei Parajanov, in my opinion, one of the best contemporary filmmakers, strikes with its perfection of beauty.

[on 'Francois Truffaut'] I think his films are like a river, lovely to see, to bathe in, extraordinarily refreshing and pleasant. Then the water flows and is gone. Very little of the pleasant feeling remains because I soon feel dirty again and need another bath. His images are as powerful as those of Resnais or Godard, but his stories are frivolous. I suppose that's what I object to. René Clair told light stories too, but they touch me more. I don't know why Truffaut's leave me unmoved. I'm not trying to say that he has no significance. I only mean that the way he tells a story doesn't come to anything. Perhaps he doesn't tell my kind of story. Perhaps that's it.

I never discuss the plots of my films. I never release a synopsis before I begin shooting. How could I? Until the film is edited, I have no idea myself what it will be about. And perhaps not even then. Perhaps the film will only be a mood, or a statement about a style of life. Perhaps it has no plot at all. I depart from the script constantly. I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about.

My childhood was a happy one. My mother, Elisabetta Roncagli, was a warm and intelligent woman who had been a laborer in her youth. My father also was a good man. Born into a working-class family, he succeeded in obtaining a comfortable position through evening courses and hard work. My parents gave me free rein to do what I wanted: with my brother, we spent most of our time playing outside with friends. Curiously enough, our friends were invariably proletarian, and poor. The poor still existed at that time, you recognized them by their clothes. But even in the way they wore their clothes, there was a fantasy, a frankness that made me prefer them to boys of bourgeois families. I always had sympathy for young women of working-class families, even later when I attended university: they were more authentic and spontaneous.

What happens to the characters in my films is not important. I could have them do one thing, or another thing. People think that the events in a film are what the film is about. Not true. A film is about the characters, about changes going on inside them. The experiences they have during the course of the film are simply things that 'happen to happen' to characters who do not begin and end when the film does. In Blow-Up (1966), a lot of energy was wasted by people trying to decide if there was a murder, or wasn't a murder, when in fact the film was not about a murder but about a photographer. Those pictures he took were simply one of the things that happened to him, but anything could have happened to him: he was a person living in that world, possessing that personality.

We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. Hence this upset, this disequilibrium that makes weaker people anxious and apprehensive, that makes it so difficult for them to adapt to the mechanism of modern life. We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean. In the future - not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century - these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them. Sandro in L'Avventura (1960) is a character from a film shot in 1960 and is therefore entirely immersed in such moral problems. He is an Italian, a Catholic, and so he is a victim of this morality. Such moral dilemmas will have no right to exist in a future that will be different from the present. Today we are just beginning to glimpse that future, but in 1960 we lived in a country with the Pope and the Vatican, which have always been extremely important to all of us. There isn't a school in Italy still, not a law court without its crucifix. We have Christ in our houses, and hence the problem of conscience, a problem fed to us as children that afterward we have no end of trouble getting rid of. All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

Present-day people can't adapt to technology. Ravenna, near the sea, has a stretch of factories, refineries, smokestacks, etc on one side and a pine forest on the other. The pine forest is much the more boring feature. So you see, I'm an admirer of technology. From an outsider's view the insides of a computer are marvelous - not just its functioning but the way it is made, which is beautiful in itself. If we pull a man apart, he is revolting; do the same thing to a computer and it remains beautiful. In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), you know, the best things in the film are the machines, which are much more splendid than the idiotic humans. In Red Desert (1964), I also confronted this technology and these machines with human beings who are morally and psychologically retarded and this utterly unable to cope with modern life. In my films it is the men who don't function properly - not the machines.

You know what I would like to do? Make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters. Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance. I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space. [1969]

[on Identification of a Woman (1982)] I wanted to make a complete departure from any issues over colour or setting. This time, I wanted to focus attention on the characters. If there is some visual beauty, then it's due to the truth value of the emotions I have given the characters. Before this film, I gave too much importance to the setting. But now it's become too easy to make pretty movies. Everybody is doing it.

By developing with enlargers things emerge that we probably don't see with the naked eye. The photographer in Blow-Up (1966), who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blowup.

I detest films that have a "message." I simply try to tell, or, more precisely, show, certain vicissitudes that take place, then hope they will hold the viewer's interest no matter how much bitterness they may reveal. Life is not always happy, and one must have the courage to look at it from all sides.

People often ask us, "How is a picture born?" A picture probably has its birth in the disorder within us, and that's the difficulty: putting things in order.