Michelangelo Antonioni
Director
In 1940, he embarked on the adventure of making films in Rome. After an apprenticeship as a critic and screenwriter, he began his activity as a director with the documentary "People of the Po River", in which he depicted the humble and poverty-stricken life of the population that lived on the river. His debut in full-length films came in 1950 with "Story of a Love Affair". It was followed by others including "The Cry", in which the director returns to the Po Delta as the setting for the existential anguish and eventual defeat of a working class man. The setting is an integral part of the tale; Antonioni transfigures the actual landscape into an abstract one, a landscape of the conscience or the memory. He achieved international recognition with his set of four films made in the Sixties: "The Adventure", "The Night", "Eclipse" and "The Red Desert" in which the director handled colour for the first time in a totally original and innovative way. For years Antonioni's last film remained Identification of a Woman. This forced inactivity, due to precarious health, finally came to an end in 1995 with the film "Beyond the Clouds", once again filmed in and around Ferrara and directed in tandem with the German director Wim Wenders. Antonioni, the undisputed leader of our film-making for forty years, stands out for his style and exact, unmistakable precision that have made him one of the masters of contemporary cinema.
