49 Fun Facts About Michelangelo Antonioni

Which film festival jeered Antonioni's L'Avventura in 1960, then gave it a jury prize days later?

Cannes: the catcalls were so fierce that Antonioni and his leading actress were reduced to tears, and there was more booing when the prize was announced.

Which three films make up Antonioni's so-called 'alienation trilogy'?

L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse came out in three successive years; the first was jeered at its premiere, and within two years critics were voting it the second-greatest film ever made.

Which 1974 thriller was conceived as Blowup moved into the world of surveillance?

The Conversation: Coppola wanted to fuse the idea of Blowup with audio surveillance, a tape in place of a photograph, and Brian De Palma paid his own homage seven years later with Blow Out.

In which city was Antonioni born?

Ferrara's local paper printed his first film reviews before he left for Rome at twenty-seven to work in films himself.

Where was Antonioni filming when he abandoned an early documentary because the floodlights terrified its subjects?

In a mental asylum: the patients had helped him set up, but when the lights came on they panicked, and it was the asylum's director who shouted for them to be switched off.

In what subject did Antonioni take his degree at the University of Bologna?

Economics: he took the degree in 1935, but his student years went on writing and staging plays and on film reviews for his local paper.

The film magazine Cinema, which hired Antonioni in Rome in 1940, was edited by whose son?

Benito Mussolini's son Vittorio ran Cinema, the regime's official film magazine; from its staff Antonioni moved on to Rome's film school, where he lasted only a few months.

With which director did Antonioni co-write A Pilot Returns in 1942?

Roberto Rossellini directed it; soon afterwards Antonioni was sent to France to assist Marcel Carné on Les Visiteurs du soir, his last apprenticeship before a film of his own.

What was the subject of Antonioni's first film, a documentary short begun in 1943?

Poor fishermen of the Po valley were the subject of Gente del Po; most of the footage was lost in the war, and the surviving scraps were not shown until 1947.

What was Antonioni's first feature film, released in 1950?

Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore) has two lovers plot against her husband, who then dies before they can act, and it turns from the crime story to what the plan has done to them.

Which Antonioni film about a factory worker and his daughter won the top prize at Locarno?

Il Grido (The Outcry) cast the Hollywood actor Steve Cochran as a mechanic who leaves home with his small daughter, drifts through other liaisons and finally comes back to where he began.

What did fellow filmmakers do the day after L'Avventura was jeered at its 1960 premiere?

Signed a statement praising it: a group of leading directors and critics declared themselves appalled by the hostility and anxious to express their admiration, and the film went on to win a jury prize.

What happens to Anna in L'Avventura?

She vanishes on an island and is never found: the search simply fades out as her lover and her best friend drift into an affair, and the film never says what became of her.

Where was L'Avventura shot on location?

Rome, the Aeolian Islands and Sicily: on the island shoot the money ran out, two crews walked off and Antonioni carried the camera himself until a new producer appeared.

In Sight & Sound's 1962 critics' poll, L'Avventura finished second to which film?

Citizen Kane: two years after its jeered premiere, L'Avventura finished runner-up, then slipped to fifth in 1972 and seventh in 1982.

Which actress starred in all four films of the extended trilogy and was Antonioni's partner?

Monica Vitti was a young stage actress when they met in 1957; when L'Avventura was jeered at its premiere she thought her career was over, and instead it made her an international star.

Which two stars led La Notte (1961)?

Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni play a wife and her novelist husband across a single day and night, which ends at dawn with her telling him she no longer loves him.

Which prize did La Notte win at the 1961 Berlin festival?

The Golden Bear went to La Notte in 1961, the one top festival prize among the three films of his trilogy; the other two had to settle for jury prizes.

Which was Antonioni's first colour film?

Il deserto rosso (Red Desert): he said he wanted to paint the film as one paints a canvas, and had the ground, the trees and even a barrow of fruit sprayed to get his colours.

Which producer gave Antonioni a three-film English-language deal for MGM?

Carlo Ponti, husband of Sophia Loren, produced Blowup, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger for MGM; the first was the biggest hit of Antonioni's career and the second one of the studio's worst flops.

Who plays the fashion photographer in Blowup?

David Hemmings got the part after Sean Connery turned it down because Antonioni would show him only a short treatment, never the full script.

Whose short story inspired Blowup?

Julio Cortázar's 'Las babas del diablo' follows a translator in Paris whose enlarged snapshot seems to reveal a different story; it was later retitled 'Blow-Up', and its author appears briefly in the film as a tramp.

Which band is seen performing 'Stroll On' in a Blowup club scene?

The Yardbirds were not the first choice: Antonioni wanted The Who for their guitar-smashing act, so he had Jeff Beck wreck a guitar on camera instead, with Jimmy Page playing alongside.

Who scored Blowup?

Herbie Hancock wrote his first film score for it, and his jazz is mostly heard as the characters hear it, from records playing in the photographer's studio.

What do the mime troupe play in Blowup's closing scene?

An imaginary tennis match: the photographer fetches the invisible ball and throws it back, and then we hear it being hit; Antonioni had been an amateur tennis champion in his youth.

What effect did Blowup's US release have on Hollywood?

It helped end the Production Code: refused a seal, MGM put the film out through a subsidiary, and its success showed the Code could be ignored; a ratings system replaced it in 1968.

Which bands feature on the Zabriskie Point soundtrack?

Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones all feature; Antonioni turned down one Pink Floyd piece as too sad, and the band later reworked it as 'Us and Them' on The Dark Side of the Moon.

Where is Zabriskie Point?

Death Valley gave the film its title and its desert love scene; the ending, a house blown apart in the heroine's imagination, sends the trophies of consumer society flying into space.

Which future star has an uncredited role as an arrested student in Zabriskie Point?

Harrison Ford has no lines as one of the students held at a police station; unhappy with such parts, he taught himself carpentry to support his family.

Which playwright did Antonioni hire to write the Zabriskie Point script?

Sam Shepard was an Off-Broadway prizewinner still in his twenties; the plot he worked on grew from a news item about a young man killed while returning a stolen plane.

Which actress plays the unnamed young woman who joins the reporter's flight in The Passenger (1975)?

Maria Schneider, three years after Last Tango in Paris, plays a traveller known only as the Girl; when she asks who he is, the reporter says he used to be somebody else but traded him in.

In The Passenger, whose identity does journalist David Locke assume?

A dead arms dealer's: Locke swaps passport photographs with a hotel neighbour who has died of a heart attack, then finds himself keeping the man's appointments with gun-running rebels.

In The Passenger's penultimate shot, the camera exits the room through what?

The window bars were hinged and swung aside out of frame; a crane then took the camera off its ceiling track for a slow sweep of the square and a look back in from outside.

Who owned the rights to The Passenger and kept it out of video circulation for years?

Jack Nicholson received the film from MGM in a settlement after another project of his collapsed, and kept it off the market until Sony persuaded him to allow a restored re-release in 2005.

Which country invited Antonioni to make a documentary in 1972, then condemned the result?

China: the authorities who had invited him denounced Chung Kuo, Cina as anti-Chinese and anti-communist, and the film was not shown publicly in China until 2004.

On which Jean Cocteau play is Il mistero di Oberwald (1980) based?

The Eagle With Two Heads, about a widowed queen and the poet sent to kill her, was shot on video for television so that he could alter its colours electronically, then transferred to film.

What happened to Antonioni in 1985?

A stroke left him aphasic and partly paralysed, yet he went on directing for two more decades, with his wife Enrica interpreting his wishes to casts and crews.

Which director was hired as back-up so that Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds (1995) could be insured?

Wim Wenders shot the linking scenes, but Antonioni cut almost all of that footage in the edit; Wenders said afterwards that his presence on set had been a formality.

What happened to Antonioni's Honorary Oscar statuette?

It was stolen by burglars and replaced: thieves took it from his home a few months after the 1995 ceremony, along with several of his other film prizes.

Which other great director died on the same day as Antonioni, 30 July 2007?

Ingmar Bergman died hours earlier on his Swedish island; he had singled out Blowup and La Notte for praise while complaining that Antonioni's other films bored him.

Which Italian writer's story of a circle of Turin women did Antonioni film as Le Amiche in 1955?

Cesare Pavese's story became Le Amiche, a prizewinner at Venice; Pavese never saw it, having died in 1950, shortly after winning Italy's Strega Prize.

In which industrial city is Red Desert (1964) set?

Ravenna appears mostly as factories, fog and polluted water, yet Antonioni insisted he was not condemning the industrial world: even factories, he said, can be beautiful.

Which Irish actor played the engineer Corrado in Antonioni's Red Desert?

Richard Harris found the shoot miserable under a director who spoke little English, and the film was finished without him; accounts differ on whether he walked out or was fired.

Which festival prize did Red Desert win in 1964?

Golden Lion: the Venice jury placed Red Desert ahead of Pasolini's film of St Matthew's Gospel, which had to share the special jury prize.

Which French star plays the young stockbroker Piero in Antonioni's L'Eclisse?

Alain Delon's restless stockbroker vanishes from his own film seven minutes before the end, which plays out as a wordless montage of the Rome street corner where the lovers used to meet.

In which city is La Notte (1961) set and filmed?

Milan: the film opens on the city's new towers and building sites, and the wife's long solitary walk takes her out to the shabby edge of town where the couple lived when first married.

Which actress, then nineteen, plays the blonde teenage would-be model in Blowup?

Jane Birkin, billed only as the Blonde, had made her first film appearance a year earlier in The Knack; real stardom came later, and in France rather than Britain.

Where in London were Blowup's famous outdoor mystery scenes shot?

Maryon Park, in Charlton: unhappy with the real thing, Antonioni had the grass painted a stronger green before he filmed the scenes that the photographer later enlarges.

Which Hong Kong director shared the 2004 anthology film Eros with Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh?

Wong Kar-wai said he took part to pay homage to Antonioni and show his gratitude; his segment, The Hand, follows a young tailor's long devotion to a call girl.