Editing Michelangelo Antonioni (section)

== Style and themes ==

{{quote box|quoted=1|quote=It's too simplistic to say—as many people have done—that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention ... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable ... There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date.|source=—Antonioni, interviewed about ''Red Desert'' (1964).<ref name="chatman">Chatman, Seymour Benjamin, and Paul Duncan. ''Michelangelo Antonioni: The Investigation''. [[Taschen]], 2004, pp. 91–95. {{ISBN|3-8228-3089-5}}</ref>|width=40%|align=right|style=padding:8px;|border=2px}}

Critic [[Richard Brody]] described Antonioni as "the cinema's exemplary [[modernist]]" and one of its "great pictorialists—his images reflect, with a cold enticement, the abstractions that fascinated him."<ref name="Michelangelo Antonioni at 100">{{cite magazine |last1=Brody |first1=Richard |title=Michelangelo Antonioni at 100 |url=https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/michelangelo-antonioni-at-100/amp |magazine=The New Yorker |access-date=20 September 2019}}</ref> [[AllMovie]] stated that "his films—a seminal body of enigmatic and intricate mood pieces—rejected action in favor of contemplation, championing image and design over character and story."<ref name="allmovie-ma" /> Stephen Dalton of the [[British Film Institute]] described Antonioni's influential visual hallmarks as "extremely [[long take]]s, striking modern architecture, painterly use of colour, [and] tiny human figures adrift in empty landscapes," noting similarities to the "empty urban dreamscapes" of [[surrealist]] painter [[Giorgio de Chirico]].<ref name="bfi">{{cite web |last1=Dalton |first1=Stephen |title=What Antonioni's movies mean in the era of mindfulness and #MeToo |url=https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/michelangelo-antonioni-modernity |website=[[British Film Institute]] |date=16 January 2019 |access-date=20 September 2019}}</ref> Film historian Virginia Wright Wexman notes the slowness of his camera and the absence of frequent cuts, stating that "he forces our full attention by continuing the shot long after others would cut away."{{sfn|Wexman|2006|p=312}} Antonioni is also noted for exploiting colour as a significant expressive element in his later works, especially in ''[[Il deserto rosso]]'', his first colour film.{{sfn|Grant|2007|p=47}}

Antonioni's plots were experimental, ambiguous, and elusive, often featuring middle-class characters who suffer from [[wiktionary:ennui|ennui]], desperation, or joyless sex.<ref name="bfi"/> Film historian [[David Bordwell]] writes that in Antonioni's films, "Vacations, parties and artistic pursuits are vain efforts to conceal the characters' lack of purpose and emotion. Sexuality is reduced to casual seduction, enterprise to the pursuit of wealth at any cost."{{sfn|Bordwell|Thompson|2002|pp=427–428}} ''[[The New Yorker]]'' wrote that "Antonioni captured a new [[bourgeois]] society that shifted from physical to intellectual creation, from matter to abstraction, from things to images, and the crisis of personal identity and self-recognition that resulted," calling his 1960s collaborations with Monica Vitti "a crucial moment in the creation of cinematic [[modernism]]."<ref>{{cite magazine |title=Antonioni's Coldly Luminous Vision |url=https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/antonionis-coldly-luminous-vision |magazine=[[The New Yorker]] |access-date=20 September 2019}}</ref> Richard Brody stated that his films explore "the way that new methods of communication—mainly the mass media, but also the abstractions of high-tech industry, architecture, music, politics, and even fashion—have a feedback effect on the educated, white-collar thinkers who create them," but noted that "he wasn't nostalgic about the premodern."<ref name="Michelangelo Antonioni at 100"/>

Wexman describes Antonioni's perspective on the world as that of a "[[irreligion|postreligious]] [[Marxism|Marxist]] and [[existentialist]] intellectual."{{sfn|Wexman|2006|p=312}} In a speech at Cannes about ''L'Avventura'', Antonioni said that in the modern age of reason and science, mankind still lives by <blockquote>"a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice and sheer laziness [...] We have examined those moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones."</blockquote> Nine years later he expressed a similar attitude in an interview, saying that he loathed the word 'morality': "When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them."<ref name="euro-screenwriters-samuels" /> Critic [[Roland Barthes]] claimed that Antonioni's approach "is not that of a historian, a politician or a moralist, but rather that of a [[utopian]] whose perception is seeking to pinpoint the new world, because he is eager for this world and already wants to be part of it."<ref name="Caro Antonioni">{{cite journal |last1=Barthes |first1=Roland |title=Caro Antonioni |journal=Cahiers du Cinéma |date=October 1980 |volume=311}}</ref> He added that his art "consists in always leaving the road of [[meaning (semiotics)|meaning]] open and as if undecided."<ref name="Caro Antonioni"/>