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Michelangelo Antonioni.
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The Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni (born 1912) demonstrated in such compelling and original films as L'avventura and Blow-Up his belief that the failure of human feelings is the cause of...
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Critical Essay by Richard Roud
Unlike the first works of many directors (Bresson, for example), Cronaca di un Amore can be seen today not only as a fully realised work but also as a virtually complete...
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Critical Essay by Marsha Kinder
[In L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, and Il Deserto Rosso, Antonioni] does not imply that the new world is totally negative, but recognises it has many i...
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Critical Essay by John Francis Lane
[Antonioni] doesn't try to push any political message [in Chung Kwo]—and indeed it seems a pity that in Shanghai for example we get a tourist view of ...
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Critical Essay by Roy Armes
Chung Kuo, in many ways a reaction to [the interiority of Antonioni's previous films], presents a surface view of people and settings. Aside from a couple of referen...
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Critical Essay by Harlan Kennedy
[Il Mistero di Oberwald] begins like a horror extravaganza, with Gothic-lettered credits leaping out from a blood-red mountain-scape. Soon Antonioni turns all the noto...
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Critical Essay by Penelope Houston
[The Eclipse] begins, as L'Avventura and La Notte ended, at dawn. Outside the window a water-tower looms like some futuristic mushroom; inside, a man sits rig...
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Critical Essay by Peter Cowie
One of the most fascinating aspects of Cronaca di un amore is its objective study of the clash of social standards. The glossy bars, the elegance of Paola's clothe...
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Critical Essay by Geoffrey Nowell-smith
Empiricism has always been the agnostic's epistemology, and Antonioni is a radical agnostic. In his films there is never any certainty, any definite or a...
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Critical Essay by John Russell Taylor
In each of [Antonioni's early films N. U. (Nettezza Urbana), L'Amorosa Menzogna, and Superstizione] the accent is, far more than in most documentari...
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Critical Essay by Pauline Kael
[What] would we think of a man who conducted a leisurely tour of "swinging" London, lingering along the flashiest routes and dawdling over a pot party and ...
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In the following essay, Kelly analyzes the moral decadence of Antonioni’s characters in Identification of a Woman.
Speaking of Red Desert, Antonioni once said that it was not a result but resea...
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In the following essay in praise of L’eclisse, Peck selects several sequences which show Antonioni’s ability to convey the subtleties of alienation, uncertainty, and dread which characte...
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In the following essay, Moore discusses Antonioni’s exploration of alienation in his films.
Talk of alienation in Antonioni’s cinema is more often than not negative. Despite Peter Bondan...
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In the following essay, Nowell-Smith argues that Antonioni not only created a new cinema, but that his films, even as they age, stay fresh.
The early 1960s was a great time for cinephiles. There was t...
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In the following review, Harrison argues that this collection of Antonioni's writing illuminates the filmmaker's objectives and emphasizes the limitations of theory.
It is difficult to o...
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In the following review, Chatman draws on Antonioni’s writing to describe how the filmmaker worked as a director.
Antonioni was an active cinema critic in the 30s and 40s, but stopped writing a...
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In the following essay, Chatman analyzes how Antonioni explores “the modern condition” in L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, and Il deserto rosso, using plots “libera...
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In the following interview, conducted in 1980, Chatman discusses with Antonioni the filmmaker's body of work.
I recently unearthed the tape of an interview I had with Michelangelo Antonioni in ...
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In the following essay, Brunette surveys Antonioni’s career and various critical responses to his work.
Michelangelo Antonioni, who first gained prominence on the international cinema scene in ...
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In the following essay, Schwarzer analyzes the metaphorical use of architecture in Antonioni’s films.
In day-to-day experience, the sight and feel of buildings is subject to extreme shifts of a...
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In the following essay, Cole argues that Pirandello’s 1916 novel Shoot! provided more inspiration for Blow-Up than the Julio Cortazar story which is its credited source.
Although the credits fo...
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In the following essay, Wagstaff argues that in Blow-Up Antonioni confronts the theme of ethical perception and the process involved in separating the “signal,” which ought to be paid at...
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In the following review, eleven years after Identification of a Woman premiered, Brown calls the film “beautifully made … bewitching and exhilarating.”
Antonioni’s last fea...
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In the following essay, Rudman meditates on the world of Antonioni’s films and themes such as creation, obsession, isolation, time, and perception which recur in the works.
Summer, 1993. The wo...
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Michelangelo Antonioni
Critical Essay by Richard Roud
