Michelangelo Antonioni

Author: Liu Tianshu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-02-01
Features: The cinema is regarded as a "phenomenon of (human) fantasy" in The Image House. "Image" () is more focused on psychological and physiological sensations than "imaging" (), as it builds a complete form in conjunction with life. Here, "image" replaces the perception and impression of the projector's projection of images at the birth of cinema. "Image" also carries a certain "ideological" presupposition. The Image House is a series of books that systematically organizes the works and creations of contemporary cinematic masters. To be precise, it is a record of texts and images showing respect to the "author" directors. It is not an exploration of the vast history of cinema; this scope may be relatively unfamiliar to what people commonly know as "film directors." Therefore, the target audience for The Image House was destined to be narrow from the beginning. The creation of The Image House stems from the passionate and enduring love for cinema held by a few people. It is hoped that an effective and healthy language environment can be established, forming a focus and scrutiny on the "aesthetic value" of cinema beyond its "entertainment function," as well as placing it above the conventional "reception" of watching films. Moreover, in the current era of rapidly expanding visual information and a lack of specialized research materials for in-depth film studies, if The Image House can simplify the complexities and serve as a "reference tool" in the process of "understanding" cinema, this would be one of its values.
On September 29, 1912, Michelangelo Antonioni was born into a middle-class family in Ferrara, northern Italy. After graduating from the University of Bologna, he wrote some theater and film reviews for the magazine Cinema. At the age of 27, he studied at the Experimental Film Center in Rome for a period. In the early 1940s, Antonioni began his film career as a screenwriter and assistant director. He wrote the script for The Return of the Pilot, which was highly praised, for the elder master of neorealism, Rossellini. In the mid-to-late 1940s, during the heyday of classic neorealism cinema, Antonioni created six distinctive short documentaries, establishing his unique position in the neorealist movement.