He is best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents",[1] L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962); the English-language film Blowup (1966); and the multilingual The Passenger (1975).

His films have been described as "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces"[2] that feature elusive plots, striking visual composition, and a preoccupation with modern landscapes.

"[7] Upon graduation from the University of Bologna with a degree in economics, he started writing for the Ferrara newspaper Il Corriere Padano in 1935 as a film journalist.

In 1940, Antonioni moved to Rome, where he worked for Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Vittorio Mussolini.

[8] In 1942, Antonioni co-wrote A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini and worked as assistant director on Enrico Fulchignoni's I due Foscari.

[9] However, Antonioni's first feature Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950) broke away from neorealism by depicting the middle classes.

He continued to do so in a series of other films: I vinti (The Vanquished, 1952), a trio of stories, each set in a different country (France, Italy and England), about juvenile delinquency; La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camellias, 1953) about a young film star and her fall from grace; and Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) about middle-class women in Turin.

At the 1960 Cannes Film Festival it received a mixture of cheers and boos,[10][11] but won a Jury Prize and became popular in arthouse cinemas around the world.

Antonioni then signed a deal with producer Carlo Ponti that would allow artistic freedom on three films in English to be released by MGM.

Set in Swinging London, the film starred David Hemmings as a fashion photographer and was loosely based on a short story by Argentine-French writer Julio Cortázar.

In 1966, Antonioni drafted a treatment entitled "Technically Sweet", which he later developed into a screenplay with Mark Peploe, Niccolo Tucci, and Tonino Guerra, with plans to begin filming in the early 1970s with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider.

On the verge of production in the Amazon jungle Ponti suddenly withdrew support and the project was abandoned, with Nicholson and Schneider going forward to star in The Passenger.

Identificazione di una donna ("Identification of a Woman",) a 1982 film shot in Italy, explores the recurring themes found in his Italian trilogy.

In 1983, Antonioni published the book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, which contains sketch stories and musings he described as "nuclei" for possible films.

Despite his incapacity to speak or write, Antonioni continued to direct films including Beyond the Clouds (1995), based on four stories from That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, for which Wim Wenders was hired as a back-up director to shoot various scenes.

The short film's episodes are framed using a series of enigmatic paintings by Antonioni, a luxury sports car that has difficulty negotiating the narrow lanes and archaic stone bridges of the provincial town setting, a bikini-clad women performing a cryptic choreography on a beach, and the song "Michelangelo Antonioni", composed and sung by Caetano Veloso.

[29] Antonioni lay in state at City Hall in Rome, where a large screen showed black-and-white footage of him among his film sets and behind-the-scenes.

Critic Richard Brody described Antonioni as "the cinema's exemplary modernist" and one of its "great pictorialists—his images reflect, with a cold enticement, the abstractions that fascinated him.

"[31] AllMovie stated that "his films—a seminal body of enigmatic and intricate mood pieces—rejected action in favor of contemplation, championing image and design over character and story.

"[2] Stephen Dalton of the British Film Institute described Antonioni's influential visual hallmarks as "extremely long takes, striking modern architecture, painterly use of colour, [and] tiny human figures adrift in empty landscapes," noting similarities to the "empty urban dreamscapes" of surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico.

[33] Antonioni's plots were experimental, ambiguous, and elusive, often featuring middle-class characters who suffer from ennui, desperation, or joyless sex.

"[34] Richard Brody stated that his films explore "the way that new methods of communication—mainly the mass media, but also the abstractions of high-tech industry, architecture, music, politics, and even fashion—have a feedback effect on the educated, white-collar thinkers who create them," but noted that "he wasn't nostalgic about the premodern.

"[36] Bordwell explains that Antonioni was extremely influential on art films: "More than any other director, he encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative.

"[4] The Guardian described him as, "in essence, a director of extraordinary sequences," and advised viewers to "forget plotting, characters or dialogue, his import is conveyed in absolutely formal terms.

American director Martin Scorsese paid tribute to Antonioni following his death in 2007, stating that his films "posed mysteries—or rather the mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time.

"[3] American directors Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma paid homage to Antonioni in their own films.