The Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni (born 1912) demonstrated in such compelling and original films as L'avventura and Blow-Up his belief that the failure of human feelings is the cause of modern tragedy.

Born into an upper-middle-class family in Ferrara, Michelangelo Antonioni took a degree in political economics at the University of Bologna. Having decided on a film career, he worked with the directors Roberto Rossellini and Marcel Carné, among others. The first films Antonioni directed were three notable documentary shorts: Gente del Po (1947), La funivia del Faloria (1950), and La villa dei mostri (1950).

Antonioni's first full-length dramatic effort, Cronaca di un amore (1950), was distinguished by its disavowal of the fundamental precepts of Italian neorealism as practiced by the directors Vittorio de Sica and Rossellini and later modified by Federico Fellini. Antonioni's next work, I vinti (1952), proved an unsuccessful attempt to lend thematic unity to an episodic and discursive...