26 Facts About Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni is best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents", L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse ; the English-language film Blowup ; and the multilingual The Passenger.

Michelangelo Antonioni's films have been described as "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces" that feature elusive plots, striking visual composition, and a preoccupation with modern landscapes.

Michelangelo Antonioni received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Blowup.

Michelangelo Antonioni was born into a prosperous family of landowners in Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna.

Michelangelo Antonioni was the son of Elisabetta and Ismaele Antonioni.

In 1940, Michelangelo Antonioni moved to Rome, where he worked for Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Vittorio Mussolini.

Michelangelo Antonioni was drafted into the army, and survived being condemned to death as a member of the Italian Resistance.

In 1942, Michelangelo Antonioni co-wrote A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini and worked as assistant director on Enrico Fulchignoni's I due Foscari.

Michelangelo Antonioni continued to do so in a series of other films: I vinti, a trio of stories, each set in a different country, about juvenile delinquency; La signora senza camelie about a young film star and her fall from grace; and Le amiche about middle-class women in Turin.

In Le Amiche, Michelangelo Antonioni experimented with a radical new style: instead of a conventional narrative, he presented a series of apparently disconnected events, and used long takes as part of his style.

Michelangelo Antonioni returned to their use in L'avventura, which became his first international success.

Michelangelo Antonioni then signed a deal with producer Carlo Ponti that would allow artistic freedom on three films in English to be released by MGM.

In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni drafted a treatment entitled "Technically Sweet", which he later developed into a screenplay with Mark Peploe, Niccolo Tucci, and Tonino Guerra, with plans to begin filming in the early 1970s with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider.

In 2008, "Technically Sweet" became an international group exhibition curated by Copenhagen-based artists Yvette Brackman and Maria Finn, in which the creations of artists, working in multiple mediums and based on Michelangelo Antonioni's manuscript, were displayed in New York.

In 1972, Michelangelo Antonioni was invited by to China to film the achievements of the Cultural Revolution.

In 1980, Michelangelo Antonioni directed Il mistero di Oberwald, based on Jean Cocteau's play, L'Aigle a deux tetes.

In 1983, Michelangelo Antonioni published the book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, which contains sketch stories and musings he described as "nuclei" for possible films.

In 1985, Michelangelo Antonioni suffered a stroke that left him aphasic and partly paralyzed.

Previously, Michelangelo Antonioni had received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay for Blowup.

Michelangelo Antonioni's final film, directed when he was in his 90s, was a segment of the anthology film Eros, entitled Il filo pericoloso delle cose.

The short film's episodes are framed using a series of enigmatic paintings by Antonioni, a luxury sports car that has difficulty negotiating the narrow lanes and archaic stone bridges of the provincial town setting, a bikini-clad women performing a cryptic choreography on a beach, and the song "Michelangelo Antonioni", composed and sung by Caetano Veloso.

Michelangelo Antonioni died in Rome, aged 94, on 30 July 2007, the same day as renowned Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.

Michelangelo Antonioni lay in state at City Hall in Rome, where a large screen showed black-and-white footage of him among his film sets and behind-the-scenes.

Michelangelo Antonioni was buried in his hometown of Ferrara on 2 August 2007.

You could say that Michelangelo Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul.

Michelangelo Antonioni gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road.