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Michelangelo Antonioni

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 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'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-the-minute 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.) 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

In 1996 Antonioni released Beyond the Clouds, his thirty-fifth film. Now aged ninety-one, he is still directing films. Keep your eyes out for Eros, to be released in 2004, which contains three short films - one each from directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai - that address the themes of love and sex.

In 2004 we screened L'avventura aka The Adventure, L'Eclisse aka The Eclipse, and Blowup.