Films that follow out the theater

Word was out: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy’s master of alienation, could be as difficult as his films. Yet on a drizzling January day -- perfect Antonioni weather -- during production in 1969 on “Zabriskie Point,” his only film shot in the U.S., he proved to be unfailingly gracious, open and friendly, and has remained so over the years even though a stroke has impaired his speech.

Yet the impact of the tenacity required for his kind of filmmaking was immediate and forceful upon meeting him that day in Culver City, where he was shooting at the Police Administration Building. Five minutes on an Antonioni set was all it took to see that his working conditions would be the envy of most every director in Hollywood at the time. Not only did he inspire a protective devotion and an awesome respect from his hand-picked “Zabriskie Point” crew, but also he had complete artistic freedom and could work at his own pace, taking time to make the most minute adjustments in camera and setting.

Antonioni is a proud man of quiet reserve -- with a wry sense of humor. What fun it was to sit with him and the late Lita Grey Chaplin, Charlie’s vivacious second wife, at a 1993 party in his honor. He didn’t need to say a word, for his eyes and face said everything, amused and delighted to meet a woman associated with a genius of a stripe so different from his.

On that soggy day in 1969, the slender, patrician Antonioni described what it meant to him to be an artist.

“Everybody does everything for himself -- because he believes in what he is doing. The biggest responsibility is in front of my conscience. Since I’m a man and living in this time I’m trying to do something not useless. But I’m not really aware of that responsibility -- it works in the subconscious. I never think of the audience. I try to think of what is right for the film. What is right for the film is right for the audience.

“A film is more and more a personal thing, something between you and me,” he said. “Something should happen. If it does, the film is good. More and more the audience is going to be involved. A film is not just something happening upon on the screen. It goes ahead and follows you out of the theater.”

“Unfortunately,” said Antonioni with the slightest trace of a smile, “we don’t know if a thing is going to happen like that.”

Antonioni, now 92, will return to Los Angeles to appear at a screening Thursday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of a newly restored version of “The Passenger” (1975), starring Jack Nicholson, one of his finest films. It is a highlight in the current Antonioni retrospective that begins tonight at LACMA with his first film, “Cronaca di un amore” (“Story of a Love Affair”), and “Il Deserto rosso” (“Red Desert”), and continues through Sept. 30 at the museum.

The Saturday after his appearance at the motion picture academy, Antonioni will appear with his wife, Enrica Fico Antonioni, for the 7:30 p.m. screening of her new documentary, “Being With Michelangelo,” which will be followed by “La Notte” (1961) and “La Signora senza Camelie” (“The Lady Without Camellias”) (1953).

The level of Antonioni’s accomplishment has been so consistently high, so distinctive and so frequently demanding it is hard to get a purchase on his oeuvre. He has an uncanny ability to capture the undercurrents of a particular time and place -- for example, of mod London in the swinging ‘60s in “Blow-Up,” the American Southwest in the waning hippie era of “Zabriskie Point” or, in his early Italian films, vapid upper bourgeois existence and its stifling effects on women of the ‘50s. But beyond such specificity, Antonioni evokes in his work the spirit of modern life as a whole, and he does this through his endless exploration of the capacities of the camera to relate the individual to his or her environment and to other people and thereby express through memorably striking images and sequences emotions and yearnings that lurk beneath and between words.

Antonioni’s understanding of his medium, its potential and its techniques is arguably equal to Hitchcock’s -- the famous seven-minute through-the-window-grille-and-back tracking that concluded “The Passenger” is precisely the kind of virtuoso moment the master of suspense relished. As with Hitchcock, such flourishes, are never merely for their own sake but serve some larger purpose or meaning. One of the most unforgettably revealing shots in all his films occurs in “L’Avventura” (1960), the film that made his international reputation. Gabriele Ferzetti, playing one of Antonioni’s characteristically insecure men, has through a new love affair (with Antonioni muse Monica Vitti), rekindled his desire to be a serious architect and not just work for the money. But a setback follows, and when he notices a young architect working on a drawing he knocks over the man’s ink bottle; spoiling his work; the viewer realizes he did it on purpose, out of jealousy -- no explanation is needed.

Antonioni shows the modern world to be an impersonal, often cold place in which people are made to feel so isolated they have trouble connecting with others and trouble finding meaning in their lives. There’s a great deal of restlessness and despair in Antonioni films, which are often marked by shots held for what seems a very long time and by scenes of people walking aimlessly, unable to find themselves or each other. Some viewers find it difficult to sit still through some Antonioni movies, but he generates cumulative, often profound emotional impact as a reward for the attentive and patient.

“The Passenger” is an excellent choice with which to honor Antonioni in person. At once a suspenseful adventure, a parable on the inescapability of responsibility and a tender love story, the film, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, is a masterpiece of visual beauty and rigorous artistry that is tantalizing and hypnotic. Nicholson plays a well-known journalist attempting to get some film on an elusive guerrilla war in an African dictatorship. Overcome by despair in the midst of a desert wasteland, he on impulse assumes the identity of a guest (Chuck Mulvehill) who has died in their bleak hotel, and is thereby propelled on an odyssey of danger and self-discovery. That notion of the inescapability of responsibility is but a philosophical point of departure for Antonioni to explore the enigma of personality and finally of life itself, revealing in the process the director’s characteristic preoccupation with spiritual inertia.

Of the ending of “The Passenger” Antonioni said at the time of its release, “It is as ambiguous as life itself. I don’t know what’s going on behind my shoulder. Words are symbols, images are what they are. I am someone who is successful -- I don’t know, perhaps -- with something to show, not something to say. I can’t find the right words, I’m not a writer.” As for his ideas for films, Antonioni shrugged. “How can I say it? It’s one of my failings. Everything I read or see gives me an idea for a film. Fortunately, I can’t do them all. If I could, maybe they would be very bad.”

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Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, except “The Passenger,” which screens at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills

When: 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays (except “The Passenger,” 8 p.m. Thursday)

Ends: Sept. 30

Price: $9; $6 for museum and AFI members, seniors (62+), and students with valid I.D.

Info: (323) 857-6010 or www.LACMA.org