Theses Bachelor's

How did Italian documentario narrativo influence Michelangelo Antonioni’s early films?

Pires, Valerie

This thesis will explore how Antonioni made documentaries before and during the evolution of Neorealism, blending fiction and nonfiction in cinematic exposés. More specifically, it proposes to answer how the documentario narrativo forged a path for the Italian filmmaker to produce extraordinary studies of a time, place, and people. By closely analyzing two of Antonioni’s short documentaries—Gente del Po/People of the Po Valley (1943) and N.U. (Netezza Urbana)/N.U. (Urban Sanitation) (1948)—and granting the director’s early films “the status of autonomous works, minor only in the sense of their (intrinsic) brevity” (Quaresima)—one learns what influenced the young Antonioni. Ultimately, this paper examines how the master of subjective narrative crafted his groundbreaking cinematic vision and artistic illusion that would later influence many generations of filmmakers worldwide.

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More About This Work

Academic Units
Film
Thesis Advisors
Insdorf, Annette
Degree
B. A., Columbia University
Series
Pat Anderson Prize in Film Criticism
Published Here
May 13, 2024