MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI DOCUMENTARIES

DIRECTOR: Michelangelo Antonioni

SUMMARY:

Before gaining fame for his films L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962), Blow-Up (1966), and The Passenger (1975) Michelangelo Antonioni began his career making documentaries.

From The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni by Peter Brunette:

...it is during this period that Antonioni's special fascination with vision and the nature of the look seems to have ripened. (Significantly, his Cinema article, "Toward a Film on the River Po," contained nine photographs, four of them half-page in size, even before the film was shot; in the finished documentary itself, information is often conveyed in purely visual terms, rather than through the more conventional means of the voice-over.) Antonioni later told an interviewer that once he began looking at objects with the intention of making a film, everything changed:
"The things themselves were claiming a different attention, acquiring a different significance. Looking at them in a new way, I was taking control of them. Beginning to understand the world through the image, i was understanding the image, its force, its mystery.
As soon as it was possible for me to do so I returned to those places with a camera. This is how People of the Po Valley was born. Everything that I did after that, good or bad as it was, started from there."
Immediately after the war, Antonioni worked for a while as a translator, film critic, and scriptwriter (he wrote two unproduced scripts for Visconti) and made a magnificently photographed nine-minute documentary called N.U. - Nettezza Urbana. A study of the men who clean the streets and gather the garbage in Rome, the film poetically documents the magnificence of the early morning in the city. It won an important critics' prize in 1948.
Next followed several other shorts such as L'amorosa menzogna (Lies of love, 1948-9), a film that humorously and ironically describes the gap between the glamorous lives of photoromance stars - all the rage at the time - and their real lives, and Superstizione (Superstition, 1949), which documents the superstitious customs still to be found among rural folk. About the same time, he wrote a treatment for Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), based on the same idea L'amorosa menzogna, which was made into a film by Fellini in 1952. Three more made-to-order shorts came in 1949 and 1950, including a documentary on the production of rayon, another on the cable car that runs to Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Dolomites skiing area, and the third on the Villa dei Mostri, a Renaissance garden featuring grotesque figures carved in the rocks.
The urge to document everyday life that appears in all of these films is not surprising given the fact that Antonioni came into his cinematic maturity during the heyday of neorealism, the most famous movement in Italian cinema history.

VIDEO:

Gente del Po (1947)



Superstizione (1948)



Sette canne, un vestito (1949)



REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:

• The Eclipse of Antonioni (Article on the life of Michelangelo Antonioni from The Sun)
• Essay on the work of Antonioni by Senses of Cinema
• A talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on his work (1962 interview from Film Culture)
• Documentaries directed by Antonioni:

1. Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley) (1947)
2. N.U. - Nettezza urbana (Sanitation Department) (1948)
3. Superstizione - Non ci credo! (Superstitions) (1948)
4. L'Amorosam menzogna (Lies of Love) (1949)
5. Sette canne, un vestito (Seven Reeds, One Suit) (1949)
6. La Villa dei mostri (The Villa of the Monsters) (1950)
7. La Funivia del Faloria (The Funicular of Mount Faloria) (1950)
8. Chung Kuo Cina (Chung Kuo China) (1972)
9. Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (Return to Lisca Bianca) (1983); segment of Falsi Ritorni (Fake Returns)
10. Kumbha Mela (1989)
11. Roma (1990); segment of 12 Autori per 12 Città (12 Authors for 12 Cities)
12. Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale (1992)

NOTES:

• Before he moved to Rome (sometime around 1940), Antonioni attempted to make a documentary at a local insane asylum. When the set was lit, the patients suddenly responded with convulsions and the film was aborted.
• Antonioni's first documentary concerned the inhabitants of the Po valley region near Ferrara. Shot in 1943, Gente del Po was not released until after the war in 1947. In the interim, the bulk of the footage was lost through degradation, accident, and, possibly, deliberate tampering. Still, he displayed an early resilience and determination to complete the film, a trait that would resurface on numerous occasions in the future.
• On the strength of his documentaries, Antonioni secured financing from Vallani Film to make his first fictional feature in Milan.