Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni made a film in which a woman disappears and nobody finds her, and the audience at Cannes jeered. He came from a middle-class family in Ferrara, wrote criticism, worked briefly with Rossellini and Marcel Carné, and made documentaries before his first feature in 1950. L'Avventura in 1960 sets up a search for a missing woman on a volcanic island and then simply loses interest in her as the survivors drift into an affair; it was booed at its premiere and a group of critics signed a statement defending it the same week. What he was after is the opposite of plot: architecture dwarfing people, long silences, characters photographed from behind or at the edge of the frame, and a sense that modern prosperity had removed the reasons people used to have for doing things. Blow-Up, made in English in London, turns on a photograph that may show a murder and refuses to say. He had a stroke in 1985 that took his speech, and directed for another twenty years without it. L Avventura won a special jury prize at Cannes the same week it was booed, and the defenders statement was signed by thirty-five critics and filmmakers. With La Notte and L Eclisse it forms a trilogy about the same emptiness. Blow-Up won the Palme d Or and made money, which none of the Italian films had. Zabriskie Point was a commercial disaster and the FBI took an interest in its making. Chung Kuo, his 1972 documentary on China, was denounced by the Chinese government for years and only screened there in 2004. He shared an honorary Oscar year with Ingmar Bergman and died the same day as him.

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