Celebrity Biographies
Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the greats of Italian cinema, died at the age of 94 at his residence in Rome on July 30, exactly the same day that Ingmar Bergman, another of the great masters, left us. A born provocateur, hated by a part of the public for the long takes of his characters in silence, he himself was aware that he was making films for minorities. In his filmography, of enormous aesthetic value, he dealt with important issues such as lack of communication, uprooting and the existential void of man in modern society.
Born in Ferrara, in northern Italy, on September 21, 1912, into a middle-class family, Michelangelo Antonioni was an exemplary student from a young age, and graduated in Economics from the University of Bologna. Passionate about cinema, he initially dedicated himself to film criticism for Cinema magazine, an occupation that he would change in the early 1940s to that of a director, anticipating the critics turned directors of the French Nouvelle Vague by more than a decade. . First he was Marcel Carné ‘s assistant director on the memorable Night Visitors , and then he worked as a screenwriter, collaborating with Italian masters such as Rossellini, De Santis and Fellini. He shot several documentary shorts ( Gente del Po ,Urban sharpness , The loving lie , Superstition ) before making his feature film debut with Crónica del amor , a drama about adultery starring Lucía Bosé. After La dama sin camellias , Los vencidos and Amor en la ciudad , she established herself with Las amigas , a memorable adaptation of the novel ‘Las mujeres sola’, by Cesare Pavese, a writer who greatly influenced her filmography. Awarded the Silver Lion in Venice for best director in 1955, this drama deals pessimistically with the complexity of human relationships, through the friendship between the owner of a fashion store and her clients.
“My old movies have made me feel like a father with his children. They are born, you see them grow up and in the end they make their own life”, commented the filmmaker regarding his films from the 50s. At this time he directed El grito , about the bitter consequences of marital infidelity. He then began his famous trilogy on contemporary women, made up of The Adventure , The Night and The Eclipse , starring Monica Vitti , among other great performers, who became his fetish actress. In them he rehearses the formula of the anti-argument, since they are distinguished by their sparse plot. In 1964 he directed his first color film, The Red Desert ., in which Monica Vitti returns to his orders to play the wife of a factory manager in shock after suffering an accident. The filmmaker went to Great Britain to shoot in English Blow Up , a thriller inspired by the short story ‘Las babas del diablo’, by Julio Cortázar , about a frivolous London photographer who investigates a disturbing image captured by his camera. In the US, Antonioni shot the drama Zabriskie Point , and in co-production with France, Italy and Spain he filmed The Reporter , with Jack Nicholson .
Antonioni married Letizia Balboni in the 1940s, whom he abandoned for Enrica Fico, secondary in one of his films, who accompanied him until his death. It was she who helped him when in 1994 he decided to return to the cinema, despite the fact that a serious illness had left him a paraplegic, to carry out Beyond the Clouds , co-directed by Wim Wenders . His last work, from 2004, was the episode Il filo pericoloso delle cose , from Eros , a triptych that was completed with two other segments by Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai .