Film Studies: Get 'em while you can - a master craftsman's work in full

Michelangelo Antonioni is alive still, yet in a condition that might have been created for one of his films. It's in The Passenger (1975) that the Jack Nicholson character, a journalist who has slipped out of his own life and into someone else's, tells Maria Schneider a story about a blind man who regained his sight at the age of 40. At first, he was elated. But then the sadness of life consumed him. He withdrew. He started to live in the dark, and then he killed himself.

Michelangelo Antonioni is alive still, yet in a condition that might have been created for one of his films. It's in The Passenger (1975) that the Jack Nicholson character, a journalist who has slipped out of his own life and into someone else's, tells Maria Schneider a story about a blind man who regained his sight at the age of 40. At first, he was elated. But then the sadness of life consumed him. He withdrew. He started to live in the dark, and then he killed himself.

Yes, that is a story, whereas in life some dozen years ago Antonioni had some kind of stroke. His speech is impaired - he does not speak: are they the same thing? He has made a few more films, in collaboration, usually with Wim Wenders, and in truth they are neither good Wenders nor good Antonioni. Still, Antonioni will be 93 this year, here and not quite here. Observing if not exactly participating? It reminds me of the feeling in L'Avventura (1960), after the young woman, Anna, has disappeared, that she is watching the rest of the film, and may even be its director, looking into the empty spaces - the emotional spaces as well as the physical - where once she was.

It has been said that Antonioni writes novels in the spirit of an architect or a map-maker. That's a better introduction to his very beautiful work than to say - as one could - that he is a neo-realist and a documentarian who has been led towards increasing psychological depth; or that he is a searcher after love, culture and identity who finds those very things disappearing. Time and again, the real way into his disturbing yet haunting atmosphere is to relax and be transported by the movements of the characters and to feel the frequently separate movement of the camera. The texture, rhythm and revelation of spaces in his films is the passing prose of a great novelist. I do not mean that the camera style is "like" the style of a writer - it is its equivalent. What is happening in the movie - both the immediate "plot" action and its layers of meaning - can only be felt through the closest identification with the screen.

And so, in both The Passenger and L'Avventura, there is an indissoluble mix of hope and fear in the way characters try to escape their limits. In the earlier, Italian film, Monica Vitti is the heroine who wants love and fulfilment but feels herself increasingly drawn to the despair that led Anna to vanish. And in The Passenger, Nicholson's character - disillusioned with the truth-seeking of his job - is drawn towards a lightness of identity so great that, at last, he seems to rise from his own body and float away.

I know, it's not Kill Bill, and it may sound very challenging.

But the degree of difficulty is increased by sudden, untrained exposure - and so Antonioni is exactly the kind of artist that the National Film Theatre should reprise every five years or so. You see, what it really amounts to with Antonioni - this is the challenge - is to see all the films, in the order in which they were made. What will amaze you, I think, is the discovery that they are all aspects of one film, and that early training leaves you not just comfortable with, but exhilarated by, the great works.

So trace the developing move in the Fifties from romantic style and a plain love of people to an increased interest in place and space: this is the line that includes Cronaca di un Amore, La Signora senza Camelie, Le Amiche and Il Grido. There was then a three-year pause, a raising of sights, and a meeting with Monica Vitti that led to the great trilogy of L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse - astonishing masterworks, rising to the finale of L'Eclisse where characters have melted away and the world prevails.

By then, Antonioni was an international figure and he began to move away from Italy with The Red Desert, Blow-Up (an unusually witty, sardonic picture, and a brilliant account of the London of that time), Zabriskie Point, a fateful encounter with America in a film that nearly destroyed MGM, which has many defects and a blazingly beautiful ending. There is then a documentary on China that is ravishing and the magnificent The Passenger.

There are later films, and there are the collaborations. But everything from Cronaca di un Amore to The Passenger is essential. I know, it sounds a lot, and sometimes it is possible to make a bargain with convenience and say, sure, see just two or three. You will be cheating yourself. This is one of the greatest artists in film, and here is the work. These days, you never know how reliably such an opportunity will come again.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

Michelangelo Antonioni season: NFT, London SE1 (020 7928 3232; www.bfi.org.uk/showing/nft/antonioni), Wednesday to 30 June