Antonioni, Michelangelo (1912- ), Italian avant-garde film director and screenwriter, whose films are known for their haunting images of human isolation. Antonioni was born in Ferrara and educated at the University of Bologna. In 1939 he went to Rome, where he worked as a film critic and for a short time attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He entered the film industry in 1942 as a screenwriter and then became an assistant director. In 1943 Antonioni began work on a documentary film of his own, Gente del Po (People of the Po, which he was unable to complete until 1947). From 1947 to 1950 he directed six brief documentary films.
Antonioni's first feature film was Cronaca di un Amore (Story of a Love, 1950). Antonioni's best-known films, all of which were released internationally, are his trilogy on the theme of alienation, formed by L'Avventura (The Adventure, 1960); La Notte (Night, 1961), and Eclipse (1962); Red Desert (1964), his first color film; Blowup (1966), his first English-language film; Zabriskie Point (1970), filmed in the American West; and The Passenger (1975), a return to his earlier enigmatic style. Later he directed The Oberwald Mystery (1979), an experimental film shot on videotape, and Identification of a Woman (1982). Antonioni wrote or cowrote the screenplays of most of his films, which deal in highly personal terms with themes of alienation, boredom, loveless eroticism, and human failure to communicate.
Antonioni is known-especially in his work of the early 1960s-for a unique cinematographic style that often employs lengthly tracking shots that transfix human figures against a barren natural landscape or a scene of urban sterility, or that otherwise emphasize human isolation. The narrative line is so vague and mysterious that his films sometimes seem virtually plotless, using characters more as visual objects or symbols than as real people.
Antonioni's reputation diminished considerably in the 1980s and few of his later films were released in the United States, but in 1994

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