Michelangelo Antonioni:Forty-seven years ago, in May 1960, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventurawas the sensation of the Cannes film festival. The screening was one of the noisiest and most uncomfortable on record. The second half played to an angry accompaniment of shouts from sections of the audience. Affronted critics leapt to the director's defence.
In 1962, the work was runner-up in Sight and Sound'spoll of the Top 10 films, coming closer than anything else in four runnings of the event to toppling Citizen Kanefrom its decennial perch. In 1972 it held fifth place, in 1982 seventh and by 1992 and 2002 it was out of the money.
This seemed a fair enough reflection of altered attitudes, the eclipse of the European art-house cinema that Antonioni exemplified. In the 1960s, a handful of directors looked to be taking films across new frontiers of expression. A cinema dominated by Hollywood special effects - dinosaurs and aliens in space - no longer expects to deliver that kind of adventure, though in 1995 Tinseltown itself made amends by awarding Antonioni an Oscar for lifetime achievement. He was among the risk-takers of cinema, at a time when the risks were there to be taken.
Antonioni, who has died in Rome aged 94, was born in Ferrara, northern Italy. He read economics at the University of Bologna, then sidled his way rather gradually towards his eventual career. In the 1930s, he wrote film reviews for the local newspaper, Il Corriere Padano, did some theatre work and played tennis. In 1940 he moved to Rome and began writing for Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine directed by Mussolini's son Vittorio. He briefly attended the Centro Sperimentale, the film school in Rome, and was given the odd assignment of working with Marcel Carne on Les Visiteurs du Soir.
In 1943, he made the first of several documentaries, Gente del Po. It was 1950 before Antonioni found "a man from Turin" who was willing to finance a feature film for him. The result was Cronaca di un Amore, a cool, elegant study in betrayal and regrets, not at all an apprentice work. As with several films of the time, it seemed to carry echoes of the American The Postman Always Rings Twice, though here the inconvenient husband died without help from the lovers.
Antonioni's films of the 1950s included I Vinti(1952), a study of juvenile crime in which Fay Compton was improbably done to death on Banstead common; La Signore Senza Camelie(1953), about an unhappy actress; and the morose, fatalistic Il Grido(1957), about a factory worker's journey away from home, through various liaisons and back again, with Steve Cochran.
His outstanding movie of the decade, however, was Le Amiche(1955), based on a novel by Cesare Pavese, in which a gaggle of airlessly gossiping women, their husbands and lovers, were watched from the viewpoint of a young woman of more independent spirit. Already the elements of this fastidious craftsman's style were locked in place: the awareness of landscapes, usually melancholy, the sense of people drifting through time and space, but held always under the tightest control, the persistence of vision.
With L'Avventura, he had found his leading lady, Monica Vitti, and a setting, the Aeolian Islands and Sicily, to which even his north Italians came as foreigners. He was back in the north for La Notte(1961) and L'Eclisse(1962), completing a loose trilogy of immensely influential films. For a while, the Antonioni look, with his increasing interest in the abstraction of space, seemed to be creeping up on us, in other films, in fashion photographs, even in life. The final sequence of L'Eclisse, in which dusk comes to a street corner in Rome, had a tantalising, ominous sense of finality. Antonioni had perhaps gone as far as he could with the bruised sensibilities of people in stalemate situations.
He found his change of direction with colour: first the neurotic, overpainted The Red Desert(1964), in which Vitti still sought salvation, and then Blowup(1967), which brought him to London in its swinging days. Colour is integral to this film about displacement and uncertainty, in which the photographer hero (David Hemmings) begins to doubt himself and his confident mastery of his world when his camera spots something he himself had missed - evidence, perhaps, of a murder among the green leaves of a London park.
Antonioni's A to Z of that era ended with Zabriskie Point(1970), a gallant attempt to penetrate the dreams and despairs of America's Vietnam generation. The film was perhaps a failure, but of a kind that has certainly not become less interesting with the years.
Curiosity took him to film in China, before, in 1975, he made his last major film, The Passenger. Antonioni had always left his characters open to the influence of chance encounters and unfamiliar places. In The Passenger, his hero (Jack Nicholson) allows chance to take him into another man's life - and to his death in a hotel room while the camera prowls the car park outside. This single shot, lasting seven minutes, rates as one of the most remarkable in film history.
The Oberwald Mystery(1980) and Identification of a Woman(1982) were less distinguished. There were other projects, too, which failed to materialise; Antonioni wrote short stories and painted. A stroke which left him almost literally speechless, dependent on his wife Enrica, 41 years his junior, as interpreter, seemed to rule out any possibility of another film. And then, in 1995, came Beyond the Clouds, made in collaboration with Wim Wenders. With an international cast - John Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, Irene Jacob and Fanny Ardant - the movie wove together three episodes based on Antonioni's book of short stories, Bowling on the Tiber, to explore the usual Antonioni themes.
His wife survives him.
Michelangelo Antonioni, born September 29th, 1912; died July 30 2007