The Eclipse of Antonioni

The Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who died in Rome on July 30 at age 94, was one of the most perplexing of modern cinema masters. His most celebrated films, including "L'Avventura" (1960), "La Notte" (1961), "L'Eclisse" (1962) "Il Deserto rosso" (1964), and "Blow-Up" (1966), divided viewers. Ingmar Bergman, who died fewer than 24 hours before him, accused Antonioni in 2002 of being artistically "suffocated by his own tediousness." Bergman went on to admit that "Blow-Up" and "La Notte" were masterpieces, but complained about Antonioni's slow-moving style that bordered on inertia: "He concentrated on single images, never realizing that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement." The critic Andrew Sarris summed up similar feelings by coining a new word: "Antonioni ennui."

Antonioni was born in 1912 to a prosperous family in Ferrara, a city in northern Italy that was the stomping grounds for such artistic talents as Mantegna, Alberti, Pisanello, and Piero della Francesca. Small wonder that after studying economics at the University of Bologna, Antonioni became permanently devoted to visual art, as a film student and critic in Rome. He closely identified filmmaking with painting and related arts. Among his last creations were collages and mobiles that were displayed in a Rome exhibition last year.

This kind of visual acuity served Antonioni well in his earliest cinema work as assistant director to Marcel Carné for the 1942 filming of "Les Visiteurs du Soir" (The Devil's Envoys) an odd medieval parable filmed in Nazi-occupied Paris. Back in Italy, Antonioni was co-screenwriter of Roberto Rossellini's 1942 film "Un Pilota Ritorna" (A Pilot Returns), one of Rossellini's so-called "Fascist trilogy" in which a brave Italian flyer is captured by the British enemy. The following year, Antonioni began work on his first documentary, 1943's beautifully photographed "Gente del Po" (People of the Po Valley), which led to his first feature, "Cronaca di un Amore" (Story of a Love Affair) in 1950.

Antonioni continued to collaborate with other filmmakers, notably as screenwriter for Fellini's first directorial effort, "The White Sheik." Yet Antonioni's own sour view of modern society was best reflected in his own early films as writer and director, such as "La Signora senza camelie" (Lady Without Camelias, 1953) a bitter excoriation of actors' love lives and tasteless audiences. "Le Amiche" (The Girlfriends, 1955) is an equally incisive look at the frequently tragic destines of friends of a Turin dressmaker. By contrast, "Il Grido" (The Cry), a 1957 kitchensink drama about a worker in a Po Valley sugar refinery, climaxes with a pro forma anti-American demonstration against replacing the factory with a military airfield.

Antonioni's next feature, "L'Avventura" (The Adventure), would win him world fame, starting with a Special Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, despite a raucous screening during which viewers protesting the film's slow rhythm repeatedly yelled "Cut!" Some world-weary Northern Italian socialites go boating among volcanic islands off the coast of Sicily, and one disappears. The beauty of landscape and sea are juxtaposed with the vacuous lives of the rich, though the film never resolves the mystery of the vanishing traveler.

Much in the same vein of worldweary despair of meaningless, over-privileged people is "La Notte" (The Night) in which an author, played by Marcello Mastrioanni, repels his wife, played by Jeanne Moreau. Pessimistic about love, the film does not contain much outward action to speak of, concentrating instead on the inner lives of the protagonists. "God, I was bored," Moreau later told an interviewer about the making of the film. "But you can't argue with Antonioni. He never replies."

The third chapter in what has been called Antonioni's "barrenness and alienation trilogy," "L'Eclisse" (Eclipse) stars Monica Vitti as the fickle lover of a stockbroker, played improbably by the young, visually cool Alain Delon. Two years later, Antonioni innovated again with his first color film, "Il Deserto rosso" (The Red Desert), which makes for a visually vibrant but miserable story, centering on the emotionally disturbed wife of a Ravenna factory foreman. The factory pollution is expressed in glowing, toxic yellows and greens. Still, some critics, such as Pauline Kael, objected: "If I've got to be driven up a wall, I'd rather do it at my own pace, which is considerably faster than Antonioni's."

This period of acute sensibility — Antonioni was the proud owner of paintings by Bacon, Lichtenstein, and others — reached its apogee with "Blow-Up," his first English-language film. Although appreciated today for its glimpse at 1960s "swinging" London, "Blow-Up" is more about the frigid, often nasty world of fashion than any kind of youthful optimism. David Hemmings, who portrays a snide fashion photographer in the film, later told an interviewer that Antonioni "uses actors as part of his total composition, rather than simply as the subject of his camera. Antonioni cares about actors the way Van Gogh or Turner cares [sic] about the color yellow on his [sic] palette."

This obsession with colors would lead him to famous incidents during the filming of "Blow-Up," which have been parodied, but not invalidated, by Mike Meyers's Austin Powers films and Mel Brooks's "High Anxiety." Antonioni surprised the cast and crew by insisting that the grass at Greenwich Park be sprayed a more evocative shade of green before filming. Streets and pigeons were painted black, and even marijuana offered onscreen was reportedly tinted to please the director's critical eye.

In a rare misstep in a career that produced nearly 20 films of generally exceptional quality, Antonioni next chose to film "Zabriskie Point" (1970) in America. This anti-Establishment mood piece suffered because of the filmmaker's unfamiliarity with this country, which may explain his casting of a Boston carpenter and non-actor, Mark Frechette (1947–1975), in the lead role. Frechette would later die in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk, while serving a sentence for bank robbery, after a 150-pound weight fell on his neck.

Equally reflective of modern malaise, but more successful artistically, "Chung Kuo / Cina" (China), was Antonioni's 1973 documentary, which Chinese authorities decried as "despicable" because it showed scenes of rural poverty. "The Passenger" (1975) stars Jack Nicholson as a reporter in North Africa who assumes the identity of a dead man, only to share his fate. Nicholson's co-star was Maria Schneider, who had recently acted in Bertolucci's notorious "Last Tango in Paris," a film that seems sadly dated today, whereas "The Passenger," released on DVD last year by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, is as bafflingly intriguing as ever.

Antonioni's career was impeded in 1985 by a stroke which left him almost without the faculty of speech, and his last collaborative film efforts, such as 1995's "Beyond the Clouds" with co-director Wim Wenders, and especially 2004's weak "Eros," are hardly representative and will be soon forgotten. Yet Antonioni's most incisive work, bolstered by his superb artist's eye, will long be remembered. He was a director of permanently surprising willfulness, defying expectations and innovating at every turn. Antonioni did not die in bed, according to press reports, but in an armchair, perhaps trying to experience one last "avventura."

Mr. Ivry last wrote for these pages on the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman.