Early film work In 1942, Antonioni co-wrote
A Pilot Returns with
Roberto Rossellini and worked as assistant director on Enrico Fulchignoni's
I due Foscari. In 1943, he travelled to France to assist
Marcel Carné on
Les visiteurs du soir and began a series of short films with
Gente del Po (1943), a story of poor fishermen of the
Po valley. When Rome was liberated by the Allies, the film stock was transferred to the Fascist "
Republic of Salò" and could not be recovered and edited until 1947. The complete footage was never retrieved. These films were
neorealist semi-documentary studies of the lives of working-class people. However, Antonioni's first feature
Cronaca di un amore (
Story of a Love Affair, 1950) broke away from neorealism by depicting the middle classes. He continued to do so in a series of other films:
I vinti (
The Vanquished, 1952), a trio of stories, each set in a different country (France, Italy and England), about juvenile delinquency;
La signora senza camelie (
The Lady Without Camellias, 1953) about a young film star and her fall from grace; and
Le amiche (
The Girlfriends, 1955) about middle-class women in Turin.
Il grido (
The Outcry, 1957) was a return to working class stories, depicting a factory worker and his daughter. Each of these stories is about
social alienation.
International recognition In
Le Amiche (1955), 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. Antonioni returned to their use in ''
L'avventura (1960), which became his first international success. At the 1960 Cannes Film Festival it received a mixture of cheers and boos, The third, The Passenger'' (1975), starring
Jack Nicholson and
Maria Schneider, received critical praise but did poorly at the box office. In 1966, 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. On the verge of production in the Amazon jungle Ponti suddenly withdrew support and the project was abandoned, with Nicholson and Schneider going forward to star in
The Passenger. 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 Antonioni's manuscript, were displayed in New York. One of these was the short film "Sweet Ruin", directed by
Elisabeth Subrin and starring
Gaby Hoffmann. Antonioni's widow
Enrica and director André Ristum announced plans to produce a film based on the screenplay, with filming in Brazil and Sardinia to begin in 2023. In 1972, Antonioni was invited by to China to film the achievements of the
Cultural Revolution. The resulting documentary,
Chung Kuo, Cina, was strongly condemned by the Chinese authorities as "anti-Chinese" and "anti-communist". It was first shown in China on 25 November 2004 in Beijing, with a film festival hosted by the
Beijing Film Academy to honour the works of Antonioni. The film is now well-regarded by Chinese audiences, particularly by people who lived during the Cultural Revolution. In 1985, Antonioni suffered a stroke that left him
aphasic and partly paralyzed. Despite his incapacity to speak or write, Antonioni continued to direct films including
Beyond the Clouds (1995), based on four stories from
That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, for which
Wim Wenders was hired as a back-up director to shoot various scenes. As Wenders has explained, "without someone else, no film of his would find insurers." During the editing, however, Antonioni rejected almost all of the material filmed by Wenders except for a few short interludes. They shared the FIPRESCI Prize at the
Venice Film Festival with
Cyclo. In 1994, he was given an Honorary
Academy Award "in recognition of his place as one of cinema's master visual stylists." Presented to him by Jack Nicholson, the statuette was later stolen by burglars and had to be replaced. Previously, Antonioni had received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay for
Blowup (1967). Antonioni's final film, directed when he was in his 90s, was a segment of the
anthology film Eros (2004), entitled
Il filo pericoloso delle cose (
The Dangerous Thread of Things). 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. 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. He was buried in his hometown of Ferrara on 2 August 2007. == Style and themes ==