Michelangelo

With the popular and critical success of L'Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni achieved the position he always deserved. He now stands in the forefront of the cinema of the future: a cinema from which only the future will be able to tell us what to expect. He is one of the outstanding directors in the world today, both because of the innovations he has brought to his art-making concrete and orderly what had in other hands been no more than confused, wavering aspirations-and because of the beautiful quality of his work.

Long unappreciated, if not unknown, attacked, misunderstood or neglected by numerous critics, Antonioni had to wait ten years for people to be aware that his work has an entirely new ring. Today we can also appreciate the internal unity of his whole production, a production which, although limited in the number of films comprising it, includes practically no waste and is marked from beginning to end by an entirely personal style and set of themes. Andre Gide once wrote a sentence which might be applied with great accuracy to Antonioni's work: "He carries within himself what is needed to disorient and to surprise, that is to say, what is needed to endure."

To understand the importance of Michelangelo Antonioni's work, we must glance back over the history of the motion picture. During the first thirty years, it strained to become an autonomous art form. With the addition of the spoken word, it became a different form which was purified and rationalized over the next thirty years. In its latest stage, it suffered a hardening of the arteries. It took Antonioni to make clear the necessity for a further renovation, which had already been bubbling in the creative crucible for several years.

Michelangelo Antonioni was born in Ferrara , on the border between Emilia and Venezia, on September 29, 1912. He is a man of the north-calm, reserved, demanding; with a sharp profile, a steady eye, the silhouette of an aristocrat, and a character as complex as his films. He stands as far from Rossellini's fiery enthusiasms as he does from Fellini's dreamy nonchalance; he measures his words and never gives himself away. The seriousness with which he treats everything he deals with, the gravity of his speech, all contrast with the usual image we have of his countrymen. But his external calm hides an extreme sensitivity and a nervousness which is occasionally betrayed by a tic that plays across his face. His character is a collection of contrasts: "A modest man of passion, a classical lyricist," as one critic has written. Tall, thin, pale, with a sad smile, a friendly glance.

His childhood and early youth were spent in Ferrara , "a marvelous little city on the Paduan plain, antique and silent." When he was about ten years old, Michelangelo Antonioni began to design puppets and stick figures, but not in the way most children do. He sketched architectural settings for them, with portals and columns, then daubed these very precise drawings with spots of violent color. He also amused himself by building towns of cardboard or wood, or from his Erector set, and then filling them with little people about whom he made up stories.