WHO is he?
Italian screenwriter and director who made close to 15 feature and 20 short films between the late 1940s and the early 2000s. Antonioni travelled wide and made films in numerous countries, both in fictional and documentary modes. His 1961 film La Notte won the Golden Bear in Berlin Film Festival, while Red Desert (1964) fetched him the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
One of the central themes in Antonioni’s body of work is the alienated nature of modern urban existence, in which the moral evolution of man hasn’t caught up with scientific revolution. As a result, characters in these films go through personal and social rituals without any emotional connect. Meaningful communication between people becomes increasingly difficult and this frustrated desire manifests itself as an erotic malaise, wherein fleeting sexual encounters are expected to fill up the void left by the flushing out of genuine intimacy.
Style
There is an austere, digressional quality to the elliptical narratives of Antonioni’s films, which give the idea they could be anyone’s story and not necessarily some unique protagonist’s. The objects and buildings in these films are as important as the characters, if not more, and are filmed in ways that defamiliarise them for us. Restricted, geometric compositions that sever actors’ bodies from the frames, a non-emotive acting style, painterly use of colour, shifting narrative perspectives and high-pitched, anti-realist sound design are some prominent features of Antonioni’s cinema.
WHY is he of interest?
Lionised as one of the supreme exponents of the medium, Antonioni remains one of the few filmmakers whose works could demonstrate to a budding cinephile the full power of the art of cinema. Both the formal aspect of his movies, forming a bridge between non-narrative experimental cinema and mainstream neo-realist pictures, combined with their still-pertinent themes played a great part in forging the tradition of the European Art Cinema.
WHERE to discover him?
Shot in England with a snazzy score, Blow-Up (1966) revolves around a young, white photographer who believes he has accidentally captured a murder scene in one of his photographs. Antonioni’s metaphysical thriller allures us slowly into the story of a Modern Man who, disconnected from his existence, tries to narrativise and impart a meaning to it. The result is a film that is a comment on both spectatorship in cinema and life in modern times.
