SOURCE: “Introduction,” in The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 1–27.

In the following essay, Brunette surveys Antonioni’s career and various critical responses to his work.

Michelangelo Antonioni, who first gained prominence on the international cinema scene in the 1960s, has become the very symbol of that increasingly rare form, the art film, and of all that the cinema has ever sought to achieve beyond mere entertainment. Along with the films of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, the directors of the French New Wave, and a few others, Antonioni’s films were, during the 1960s, absolutely essential to the cultural life of the educated elite around the world. His work, especially, has carried both the cachet and the condemnation of being particularly “artistic”—that is, symbolic, indirect, metaphysical, and even downright confusing.¹

Antonioni’s early interpreters saw his films primarily as an expression of “existential angst...