The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 266

Movies Reality and Vision Meet for- Anton i on i BY. WILLIAM HALL 2 fSf ix 1W, 15 SC LONDON tOn 'paper, Antonioni, comes over as an ogre, a megalomaniac who puts the fear of God (and Anto-nionWa close relative) into anyone "Who happens to cross his path. On, celluloid, comes over as a weaver of stylish imagery. A neo-real-ist witha symbolism all his own. A master puppeteer who uses his actors as playthings to get the precise effects he wants from them.

In the flesh Michelangelo Antoni'dni is all of these things, and more. The 60--year-old master of the Italian cinema is slim, saturnine, graying, with an austere authority that mixes oddly With an Old-World charm. His attitude to actors is well known. He once summed it up in majestically simple terms: "In the cinema an actor must make the effort to follow what the director tells him as a dog does his master. If you change your direction and take a different street from usual, your dog will raise his head and look at you in surprise.

But at a sign he will' come along-behind you It has been like that for 16 weeks on 'the latest Antonioni film, "Profession: Reporter," starring America's Jack Nicholson, France's Maria Schneider, and Ian Hendry and Jenny Runacre from Britain. Antonioni leading. The rest and that includes the unit, and the financiers trotting one step behind. Antonioni dears the set before eachjake to sit alone brooding on the atmosphere. "I am a person who has things he wants to show rather than things he wants to say," he says.

jacket and slim "dark in the back of a fast limousine speeding from his hotel to the airport. Feet on his luggage four leather suitcases, one' tape recorder, one gunmetal briefcase. His thoughts on that lone remaining shot and after that, on the five months'' hard labor of editing that lies ahead in-Rome. Antonioni stared out at the gray London dawn sharpening the silhouettes of the buildings, at the early workers scurrying through the hazy, streets like lemmings to bunch together in static heaps at the bus stops, and said he wished he had his camera with him to photograph it. "I love the city," he said.

"Most of all, the urban landscape appeals to me, Progress goes on in the cities. "But unfortunately it i is becoming more and more difficult to shoot there. In America particularly, you can't shoot what you want because you need the permission of so many people. Too many people. In France, Aug.

15 is the best day to shoot. The date of Napoleon's birth. There's no one out in. the streets at all. "I wish.

I could clear these streets, they are so beautiful. I am always aware that there are two worlds facing each other the real world and the visual world. When they impact, there's a kind of osmosis. If I can capture that moment, I'm happy." He has captured those moments with varying degrees of success in a variety of controversial, always interesting," movies ever since his earliest doc umentary, "Gente del Po," made in 1942 close to his home town of Ferra-ra, became the first Italian film to show real people at work. The real world, for Antonioni, is the world of emotion, of feeling, of cause.

The visual world, the effect, is comprised of the images he uses to reflect and comment on the state of mind of his characters. The subjects he puts into harsh or soft focus are the wealthy leisured classes. His characters are usually articulate and self-aware. It enables him to probe with an extraordinary sensitivity into their boredom, their lack of purpose, their failure to communicate or whatever other personal or social malaise afflicts them. "Profession: Reporter." The aura of mystique has- hardened around him like a shell, "helped by tributes from his stars of the kind voiced by Jeanne Moreau after her experiences on "La "He gave me no direction, he rarely spoke to me, and he drove us all beyond, the point of exhaustion." And David Hemmings after' said in bewilderment: "He never" talked to me." It is all quite deliberate, of course.

Antonioni, hunched into his suede smiled faintly. "I don't think I'm an ogre." A pause, while he considered further. "No, that's not justified. As far as I know only one actress claimed I was Moreau. Yet I had no problem with her, and I was astonished when she said all those things about me.

I usually end the best' of friends with my ac- rZ" HI. il. pilgrimage to Rome and a new life, hob-', nobbing with the emergent post-war names like Fellini and Rossellini and Viscontl He wrote film reviews and to keep above the bread-line even sold his prized tennis trophies won as a youngster. After a series of documentaries he branched out into feature films with "Cronaca di un Amore" (1950). From' then on it was a continuous struggle for him to make the kind of films he wanted.

Often the struggle resulted in, compromises, like "I Vinti" (1952) or "La Signora Senza Carmelie (1953). -His most-mature works in-those tortuous days were "Le Amiche," which won a Venice Silver Lion in 1955, and "II Grido" (1957). But it was in 1960 with a cynical story about love among the affluent, that Antonioni became a-striking and controversial figure on the world's screens. a Back on the Road 'But now, at last, the long night's journey into day was almost over. It was the very, very last day of shoot- ing.

The very last day happened the previous week, but Antonioni remembered a pick-up shot he wanted in' Spain, a single angle in a particular alleyway in Barcelona which was crucial to the fabric of the movie, and that was good enough to set a whole unit back on the road once more. After four months and four countries the atmosphere was like final day at high school, with the pupils packed up and ready to go, waiting for the word from the teacher. They had gone from Germany to Spain, from Spain to Morocco, from Morocco to London, and now back to Spain again for one afternoon's work. An interview with Antonioni is more of an audience. Permission is sought, rejected immediately, resought, turned down again.

Over the weeks of shooting, delicate diplomatic moves go on behind the scenes to pierce the clouds of apprehension darkening the setwhich in London varied from dockland to a seedy immigrant area, and a studio which was actually a con- verted factory with yards of passages and tiny rooms like something out of "Alice in Wonderland." Finally, persistence prevails. The great man consents. But where, and when? now, that's different. He has agreed to let you see him work and to talk some time. But when, only the gods can tell.

But now at last he sat, confined, a half-willing prisoner in light suede. tors, i never nave a iignv wan mem. "But I like to provoke the mood I need from' them. I don't think they should know too much about what I want to do, otherwise the actor becomes the They overact in good faith, "of course, but it's still wrong. "Actors have Si personal filter.

They see life thrdugh the eyes of their characters. I am' forced to see it in its unity, and therefore I have to control all of them. "If I had become a director I would have been anarchitect, I sus-. pect; or perhaps a painter. I feel I am a person who has things he wants to show rather than things he wants to say.

There are times when the two concepts coincide, and then we arrive at a work of art. "But I have to control everything that happens. Nobody else does. On this one I had to treat each of my actors differently. Jack, he's such a great guy.

He is an extraordinary actor first of all he has that face, so expressive. And he is so professional I must say he trusted me. Sometimes he looked a little lost, but I wanted that. "I work by instinct with my actors too, just as I do with all my worfc I left, Please Turn to Page 51 A Swelling Image When "L'Avventura" was screened' at the Cannes Festival that year it was roundly booed. But it took off at its' public screening in Paris and from-that moment the Antonioni myth-or, monster image began to swell.

He followed with "La Notte" (1960); 'The Eclipse" (1961); "Red Desert" Hhis-first color film, with Monica Vitti who for some years was his "constant companion" and still lives in a neighboring-apartment in Rome); and "Blow-Up," his understated look at swinging London of the late 60s. As Antonioni's fame grew, the stories of his temperament and methods grew with it. He still clears the set for 20 minutes before each take to sit be-, hind the camera, alone, brooding on the shot and the atmosphere. He still screams at interlopers who catch his-eye, using his time-honored phrase: "I will not shoot another foot of film until the offense has been removed!" The stranger is hastily bundled off to have' his ruffled feathers smoothed while, the director, his temper bloWn away' like a sea squall, continues filming. It happens on every Antonioni film.

It happened, morp than once, on. An Antonioni movie is predictable for one factor only. It will remain a mystery in the making, and provoke enormous reaction when it is finally hatched, whether set against the intimate decadence of "La Notte" (Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni) or the huge canvas of "Zabriskie a costly and ultimately disappointing exercise. It has been that way ever since he first entered the arena. Yet his background in contrast is both modest and unremarkable.

The son of a successful industrialist, Antonioni grew up in the-prosperous Po Valley, and won a degree in economics and commerce that seemed to set him in line for a profitable middle-class merchant's life. But. his passion for the cinema led to a. SutyiZK, tYAOcsgc MOH'JA'i SIXTEEN.