It was Tonino Guerra's fate to become the scriptwriter of choice for a string of master directors whose status as auteurs – "authors" of their films – tended to diminish the status of the writers involved. Nevertheless, Guerra established himself as a major figure in Italian cinema during its golden period in the 1960s and early 70s, as well as venturing further afield to collaborate with the likes of Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos.
But it is the amazing string of films he made with Michelangelo Antonioni for which he will primarily be remembered. After spending time as a schoolteacher in his 20s, he broke into the film industry in his 30s, receiving his first credit aged 37 for Man and Wolves, by Bitter Rice director Giuseppe de Santis. But it was the first film he worked on with Antonioni, 1960s L'Avventura, which proved his breakthrough – as it was Antonioni's. Antonioni came up with the story idea – a group of bored rich kids take a yacht to a small island, where one of ther number mysteriously disappears – but Guerra and fellow writer Elio Bartolini gave it its layered, novelistic texture. But it wasn't simply about dialogue, as the wordless final scene, in all its elliptical mystery, demonstrates.
Guerra then in quick succession worked on three more films for Antonioni. La Notte, L'Eclisse and The Red Desert each secured a little more Antonioni's position as the key film-maker of the mid-60s. All of them featured Monica Vitti, and all seemed to evoke the lassitude and disconnect at the heart of the seemingly prosperous postwar boom time. La Notte, the second in a trilogy, had Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni as a jaded married couple whose friend is dying in hospital.
Next was L'Eclisse, which Martin Scorsese described as the "boldest" of this trilogy. "It felt less like a story and more like a poem." Alain Delon and Monica Vitti are the lovers pursuing an uncertain affair; like La Notte, its final scene is a masterpiece of emptiness and ambiguity.
1964 saw two contrasting projects for Guerra. Marriage Italian Style, directed by Vittorio de Sica and starring Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in their prime, was a sophisticated comedy playing on Italian gender stereotypes. It broke out into the international marketplace, earning Loren an Oscar nomination.
Meanwhile, he collaborated with Antonioni on another imagist masterpiece of despair and ennui, The Red Desert. Vitti, again, is superb as the isolated woman married to a petrochemical engineer; the clip above is virtually a lament for her character's lost childhood.
Guerra received an Oscar nomination in 1966 for the sex comedy Casanova 70 (and surely the inspiration for the Italian section of Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex), but presumably was prouder of the one he received a year later for yet another Antonioni collaboration, Blow-Up - even if Edward Bond wrote the English dialogue.
Guerra also worked on the screenplay for another of Antonioni's counterculture classics, Zabriskie Point, but appeared more comfortable working on radical Italian films like Francesco Rosi's Il Caso Mattei, about the Italian oil-industry administator who died mysteriously in 1962.
He would find a new collaborator in arguably the only serious challenger to Antonioni's status as Italy's premier director, Federico Fellini. Amarcord was their first film together, a nostalgic evocation of their childhoods in 30s Emilia-Romagna, and remains arguably Guerra's most fondly remembered.
In the 1980s Guerra found himself working with a new generation of Italian directors, notably the Taviani brothers. After adding to their 1982 film The Night of San Lorenzo, Guerra wrote the screenplay for Kaos, the 1984 adaptation of Pirandello stories.
In between those two films however, came perhaps Guerra's greatest film: Nostalgia, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky, filming in Italy and incurring the displeasure of the Soviet authorities, relied on Guerra as his guide; you can discern something of their relationship in the fraught dealings between writer Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) and his translator Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano).
Guerra's last great collaboration was with Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos, who himself died earlier this year. They first worked together on Voyage to Cythera, Angelopoulos's 1984 dreamlike fable about a film-maker attempting to tell the story of a political exile recently returned from the Soviet Union. Guerra won his only Cannes award, for best screenplay.
A string of Angelopoulos films followed, including Landscape in the Mist and Ulysses Gaze. But Guerra's loyalty to Antonioni remained, and though the 83-year-old director was incapacitated with a stroke, Beyond the Clouds was completed with the help of Wim Wenders, and became Antonioni's last feature film.
Guerra's last major credit was The Dust of Time – the film that was also Angelopoulos' final completed feature. The second of the trilogy started by The Weeping Meadow. here Willem Dafoe is a Greek-American film-maker whose film about his parents is also the story of the turbulent 20th century.
