Antonioni: Documents and Testimonials

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To Monica Vitti who,

with her role in Miller's play After the Fall

has added new, delicate balance to her widely acclaimed qualities

as a screen actress and is now considered

among the greatest Italian actresses of all times.

His commitment to researching new expressions

through cinematic language has made him

one of the best-known directors in the world.

Tonight we have the honor to have with us

Michelangelo Antonioni.

ANTONIONI:
DOCUMENTS AND TESTIMONIALS

After having been awarded the Golden Lion in Venice

and honored at several international film festivals,

Antonioni receives a new prize,

this time in front of a noisy carnival crowd in Montelpulciano, Tuscany.

Antonioni's art has broken free from its confinement

to the intellectual circles and is now embraced by everybody.

Antonioni is a poised, reserved and demanding northern Italian.

Like his movies, he's quite unfathomable at first.

He doesn't believe that any director's statement about himself

or his work, will help in the understanding of the work itself;

the path traveled by a director to realize a movie is filled

with doubts, mistakes, faults,

and the strangest thing we might ask him to do, is to talk about it.

Let's, let's make it a dolly.

Let's keep it open 'till the sixth mark.

-Where the painting is. -Right,

before the painting there's a square. You get rid of that.

That's though.

You have to move toward the bookshelf, exactly.

We will follow Antonioni; we will watch him shying away;

we will try to observe the slightest sign he might give us,

even though it might simply be a vague conscience

of that intangible interior reality, that is his artistic creation.

We will talk to his friends and his collaborators.

We aren't trying to create a portrait of the artist;

rather, our survey is an approach,

a starting point.

Let's put all the myths of cinema aside;

under the stark light of the projectors,

the magic happens only within one's psyche.

In the realm of fantasy rules the ex-empress Soraya.

Now walk ahead and sit down.

Slowly, slowly... right. Just like this...

look at the phone as if it were a strange object.

Antonioni spent a quiet, bourgeois youth in Ferrara,

studying, playing tennis, surrounded by friends,

and girls, by the sea;

his was a provincial youth, tainted by a certain romanticism that

will leave him with an inclination for certain themes, certain

problems, certain sentimental or psychological conflicts.

We find his friends from Ferrara

have changed indeed from those photographs!

When did you meet Antonioni?

FRANCESCO AGUIARI artist from Ferrara I met Antonioni in 1932 or 33...

Back then, had he already founded that theater company...

Who? Antonioni? Yes,

it was Bologna University's Theatrical Society,

and we produced several one act plays by Pirandello.

Then, we staged Interessi Creati by Giacinto Benavente,

Antonioni directed this one.

He was so talented, he took over and I encouraged him

and told him to go ahead and direct it himself.

So I ended up acting.

From director of the company I became one of the actors

and Antonioni went ahead and directed several other pieces...

and among them a drama he wrote, now I don't remember the title...

I think it was La Signora... I'm not sure.

I also remember that for the Ariosto centennial celebration

we staged a vaudeville called: Ludovico.

It was really a lovely piece and popular,

so much so, that in Ferrara we had 27 performances all sold out!

Antonioni played in the vaudeville and he was well received,

still as an actor he was just passable and he knew it.

And it's after this experience that he decided to become a director.

He was a college student, then.

He was a university student then.

He was an excellent one, and clever,

and he was very likable, actually extremely so.

And always very private about his own business. Who knows,

it must have been his natural inclination,

and you can see it running in his work, always...

a vein of sadness, I'd say.

Ferrara is a small old silent city in the Po' plain...

seemingly inviting to pleasure and dissipation.

Not far from here, on the banks of the river Po',

Visconti shot Obsession ; a few miles from here,

on the banks of this same river over a two-year period

Antonioni shot his first documentary Gente del Po',

about the fishermen and their boats,

with images foreshadowing the coming of neorealism.

"ln starting to understand the world through the image" he wrote,

"l understood image itself, its strength, its mystery."

"Rome, the fourth day of the street sweepers' strike.

A meeting at the Circus Maximus of a thousand silent,

orderly, men in blue shirts, waiting for we don't know what.

An orgy of abstract images.

A figurative violence never seen before."

From this vision comes a documentary

that wins the Silver Medal at the Venice film festival.

Antonioni has completed his apprenticeship.

He has been a student at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia,

Carne's assistant and co-script writer with Visconti and De Santis;

he has written film reviews, directed shorts.

In 1950 he shot his first feature Story of a Love Affair.

MARCO FERRERI director I met Antonioni working for Documento mensile;

he was one of the writers for this film magazine.

We became good acquaintances

and he was already thinking of shooting Story of a Love Affair.

We discussed the film, and we looked together for a producer

but had no luck.

We had a mutual friend in Milan

and I asked him if he was still interested in producing the movie,

and over the phone he told us he was.

As soon as we started scouting for locations,

we started incurring expenses

and I found myself bound to sign

I.O.U.s for forty million lira.

They were these enormous, huge, pieces of white paper

and they were my first ones ever.

When I came back and met this guy I told him:

Listen I'm already knee-deep into this project,

I have given my word and signed forty million worth of I.O.U.s

and assumed after our phone conversation

we had an understanding.

But he said that wasn't the case,

that we must still talk things over

and that I was wrong to have signed the I.O.U.s.

Eventually we found this gentleman in Turin, Mr. Villani,

that joined me in the first part of the project.

Finally, we started production.

The cast and crew met Antonioni in Milan

where the movie ended the way everybody knows.

We were all very happy. Antonioni because he made his movie.

Villani because he'd produced an important picture.

I was happy because I'd helped a friend

and because I had paid back my 40 million lira worth of I.O.Us...

In Story of a Love Affair, Antonioni transfers

the principles of neorealism into a bourgeois environment,

adding introspection to the dramatic witness role.

"Already then" he wrote, "l needed to see the characters,

even in their most simple gestures, after all had been said,

after all the lines had been exhausted

and when in everybody's soul nothing was left

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