An Introduction to Michelangelo Antonioni's Visual Technique



Michelangelo Antonioni is one of cinema's most important innovators and a champion of the idea that film is an art form on par with the classic disciplines such as painting. Known as "The Maestro" by many of his admirers, including Jack Nicholson, he is an auteur with all the connotations that word entails, in control of virtually every aspect of his filmmaking. Perhaps in part for that reason his work has almost always been met with a unique mixture of popular acceptance and outright rejection. His 1960 film L'Avventura, for instance, was booed at its initial screening at the Cannes Film Festival, but was named the next year to S ight and Sound's top ten films of all time, where it remained for thirty years. Subsequent films have vacillated between those two extremes. His 1966 film Blow-Up was a resounding success critically and commercially, while Zabriskie Point, shot three years later in America, was a disaster at the box office and is given little consideration by all but Antonioni's most loyal admirers.

Amazingly, Antonioni, who suffered a massive stroke in the early 1980s leaving him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, and who is now well into his 90's, is still making films. Eros, released in 2004, is a collaborative work in three parts, with Antonioni, Wong Kar Wai, and Stephen Soderbergh each directing an episode. That a film like this could even be made is a testament to Antonioni's influence and the credibility he has established with younger directors. His previous film, Beyond the Clouds (1995), was also a collaborative work—this time with the German director Wim Wenders. Wenders wrote a fascinating account of the making of Beyond the Clouds, called My Time with Antonioni. A search for the hard-to-find German hardcover edition of this book, Die Zeit mit Antonioni, will reward you with exquisite photographs taken on location by Wenders and his wife Donata.

Antonioni's influence as an artist is felt in other media as well, such as literature, where critics such as Roland Barthes and William Arrowsmith have felt compelled to pay homage to his vision. Musicians as diverse as Giovanni Fusco, Herbie Hancock, Jeff Beck, Jerry Garcia, Pink Floyd, and, more recently, U2, Brian Eno, and Caetano Veloso, have paid a kind of homage over the years by collaborating on Antonioni films. And today Antonioni's legacy is working itself out among new generations and in new media, as is evidenced by the many tribute sites on the web devoted to his work (see, as an example, http://littlerabbit.com/antonioni.html). Another example of this kind of influence is a video by multimedia designer Hillman Curtis called "MTIV" (Making the Invisible Visible), a promo for Flash MX, in which Curtis pays tribute to the artists who have shaped his own career. All the while during Curtis's interview for the piece, he is standing in front of a wall-size orginal poster from Blow-Up (http://www.hillmancurtis.com/hc_web/web_motion.shtml#).

Unfortunately, Antonioni's 2004 film Eros has been met harshly by many critics. Even indieWIRE's Peter Brunette, who wrote a book about Antonioni, encourages audiences to leave after the Wong Kar Wai episode (http://www.indiewire.com/movies/movies_040917eros.html). While the movie toured the festival circuit in 2004, it appears that's exactly what many viewers did, as a Google search of reviews for Eros will show. As of this writing (April, 2005), I have not yet had opportunity to see Eros.


Antonioni's Visual Technique

As part of an introductory film criticism course I taught at UNC-CH, I created a 20-minute video about Antonioni's work focused on elements of his visual style. It looks at his use of composition, framing, color, and mise en scene, and shows how Antonioni uses these tools to develop action and key themes in Blow-Up. It was made for students of English 42 at UNC-CH and contains copyrighted images I haven't received permission to distribute, so I can't make it available publicly. If you want to arrange to see it, please email me at the address listed at the top of this page. I would like to hear from you.