When Michelangelo Antonioni was still a young film critic as well as a budding director dealing with his first short films – we are talking about the years between 1940 and 1947 – in the “Corriere Padano”, he maintained with conviction that the main problem of Cinema was that of color. The most urgent one, because it is destined to give back to Cinema, with its advent, its artistic dignity, to enrich it as a means of expression, giving it a stronger sense of adherence to reality.
Workbook de The red desert
The director from Ferrara launches into an ironic imaginary invective addressed to Samuel Goldwyn, the great Hollywood producer, proclaiming himself a “colourist” and begging him to let him make a film, without knowing that the color would not come from America, but from Europe , ideally called to take on the task of theorizing a cinematographic aesthetic from scratch. From this point of view, what Antonioni subsequently achieved with his first color work, i.e The red desert in 1964, with a memorable Monica Vitti, truly resembles a founding stylistic act, as if as a filmmaker he had literally managed to give substance to the visionary intuitions of the youthful theorist who lived within him.
Palme d’Or for best film at the Cannes Film Festival, 1967
Today, even sixty years after the release of the film – which was presented at the Venice Film Festival, and where it obtained the Golden Lion hands down – the revolutionary and experimental significance of those images remains undeniable, which moreover they deal with themes far ahead of their time, such as ecology, filtered through a powerful self-reflexive lens capable of including environment, mental illness and color in a single synesthetic architecture. His works have influenced generations of filmmakers and The red desert it is just one of the many important junctions of his existence, yet his life is not only made up of moving images, but also of objects, many objects.
The new Antonioni Space of Ferrara
And then perhaps there was a need for a museum to collect them, which, however absurd, hadn’t existed until today. His hometown took care of it. The project, curated by Dominique Païni, former director of the Cinémathèque Française, was created thanks to the commitment of the Municipality of Ferrara and the Ferrara Arte Foundation, with input from Vittorio Sgarbi in collaboration with the director’s wife, Enrica Fico Antonioni. The goal was to create a living museum, a place of education and discovery, where to explore evidence of Antonioni’s work and connections with other artists and intellectuals.
Michelangelo Antonioni on the set of Blow Up
The Antonioni Space, as it is called, hosts a selection of the extraordinary archive of over 47 thousand pieces, donated by the director and his wife to the Municipality. The archive includes films, posters, screenplays, photographs, drawings, paintings, books, records, awards and a rich collection of letters with cultural figures such as Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Federico Fellini and Andrej Tarkovsky. This treasure, enriched by the screening of sequences of the director’s films, also enjoys the support of an honorary committee that includes personalities such as Gian Luca Farinelli, Thierry Frémaux, Wim Wenders, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonas Carpignano, Walter Salles, Irène Jacob, Sophie Marceau and Giorgio Tinazzi.
The new Antonioni Space of Ferrara
Designed by the Alvisi Kirimoto studio by redesigning the two floors of the former Contemporary Art Pavilion of Palazzo Massari in the city center, the museum presents an exhibition itinerary that recalls certain sequence shots of the director, with monolithic vertical scores that mark the various junctions of the narrative. Like a sort of controlled labyrinth that imposes directions to follow. The immersive rooms dedicated to the director’s films culminate in a greyscale chromatic climax, evoking the atmospheres of his early films. On the first floor, a versatile room allows you to modulate the space according to different exhibition needs.
The new Antonioni Space in Ferrara
And following this path dictated by the exhibition, the seasons of his cinema are gradually revealed, spread over the course of the second half of the twentieth century: from the neorealistic beginnings to the overcoming of that phase with the films starring Lucia Bosè, up to the “trilogy of modernity” which links him to Monica Vitti with the iconic titles of The adventure, The eclipse, And The nightto then reach the advent of color in the aforementioned The red desertand then to the conquest of the West with Anglo-American films witnessing the explosion of pop and hippie culture as they certainly are Blow Up And Zabriskie Pointas well as the African escape into Profession: reporterto conclude with “the return to Italy” and the works that recover the connection with the roots.
A separate chapter is reserved for the director’s pictorial production and the spectacular dreamlike landscapes of the Enchanted Mountains. Finally, a large multipurpose space is dedicated to reviews, meetings and exhibitions in the spirit of dialogue between the arts. The first of which, specifically concerning the figurative arts, is already present in the exhibition: a daring dialogue between Giorgio Morandi, Cy Twombly and Antonioni himself, entitled Out of focusan exhibition that aims to highlight the different artistic translation of the naturalistic canon proposed by the three, albeit expressed with different nuances and each with their own very personal vision.
Out of focusa dialogue between the works of Giorgio Morandi, Cy Twombly and Antonioni himself
Works that are apparently distant in style and iconography are brought together which on the contrary, in their raison d’être, are extremely similar to the poetic vision of the filmmaker. Morandi’s paintings and Twombly’s “nature” photographs, combined with the archive materials exhibited in the museum and the conceptual legacy of the Ferrara director, underline the innovative exploration of the devices of vision carried out by the three artists. The exhibition thus allows us to rediscover the most intimate side of their research in the light of both the historical tradition that characterizes the genres, and the new feeling of their time, which manifests itself in a minimal alphabet, a language which is only apparently simple and which on the contrary expresses the essence of reality.
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