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Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni redefined the concept of narrative cinema, challenging the accepted notions at the heart of storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large; 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. Haunted by a sense of instability and impermanence, his work defined a cinema of possibilities, a shifting landscape of thoughts and ideas devoid of resolution; in Antonioni`s world, riddles were not answered, but simply evaporated into other riddles.

Antonioni was born on September 29, 1912, in Ferrara, Italy; as a child, his interests included painting and building architectural models (an interest which continued in the design and decor of his films). After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Bologna, where he initially studied classics but later emerged with a degree in economics. While he was at college, his interest in the theater blossomed, and he also began writing short fiction and film reviews for a local newspaper, Il Corriere Padano, often running afoul of the motion-picture community for his savage attacks on the mainstream Italian comedies of the 1930s. Antonioni`s initial attempt at filmmaking was a documentary profiling a nearby insane asylum; the project was aborted because the inmates would lapse into fits of panic each time the lights of the camera were turned on.

By 1939, Antonioni had chosen the cinema as his life`s work, and he soon relocated to Rome, where he accepted a position at Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Mussolini`s son, Vittorio. After being dismissed over a political disagreement, Antonioni enrolled at the Centre Sperimentale to study film technique. By age 30, he was working professionally in the film industry; his first screenplay went unproduced, but he was soon hired to co-write Roberto Rossellini`s Un Pilota Ritorna, followed by a stint as the assistant director to Enrico Fulchignoni on I Due Foscari. In 1942, Antonioni traveled to France to work with Marcel Carné on Les Visiteurs du Soir. Antonioni was soon called back to Italy for military service, where he managed to wrangle funding from the Luce Institute for Gente del Po, a documentary portrait of the impoverished lives of the fishermen along the Po River.

The Allied invasion of Italy brought film production there to an end for some time, forcing Antonioni to earn his living as a book translator; he also wrote prolifically for a number of magazines, including Film Rivista and Film d`Oggi. Additionally, he was commissioned by Luchino Visconti to write a pair of screenplays, Furore and The Trial of Maria Tarnowska, neither of which was ever produced. Finally, in 1948, Antonioni was able to return behind the camera, and over the course of the next two years he directed no less than six documentary shorts; among them, Nettezza Urbana, L`Amorosa Menzogna, and Superstizione hinted most strongly at the work still to come, their style of photography Spartan and unadorned, forgoing strong contrasts to focus on the middle range of gray tones.

After completing the short subject La Villa dei Mostri, Antonioni was able to secure financing for his 1950 feature debut, Cronaca di un Amore. Here he turned away from the neorealism so much in vogue, employing professional actors and focusing on interpersonal relationships instead of social crit