In his heyday in the 1960s, after the appearance of his masterpiece L’Avventura, the film director Michelangelo Antonioni was for some years as fashionable and influential as any film-maker in the world.

With a poet’s intuition, his work sensitively mirrored a certain spiritual malaise that was especially to be found among the class of wealthy Italian that he knew so well. In film after film he conveyed his uncompromisingly bleak view of human relationships, believing that solitude and emotional paralysis were inevitable in an age of dehumanising technology.

Yet the gloom of this “poet of ennui”, as he was nicknamed by some, was relieved by a translucent beauty, notable in his depiction of the melancholy poetry of urban landscapes. His philosophy may have been facile, but as a visual stylist he was highly original, one of modern cinema’s great innovators and truest poets. This was admitted even by those critics who found his rich, bored, self-centred characters to be tiresome and trivial. So potent was his vision that he influenced his age almost as much as he was influenced by it.

In recent years, as Italy has become both more aware of its need to change and less sure of itself, his work had gained renewed lustre, and Antonioni was regarded as one of the few commentators of the Sixties whose films retained much of their charge today.

Michelangelo Antonioni was born into a wealthy family in Ferrara in 1912. At Bologna University he took a degree in economics, but his early interests were art and theatre, and he often said that he would have been a painter or architect, had he not turned to cinema. He was briefly a film critic, then studied as a film technician, worked as assistant to Rossellini, Visconti and (in wartime France) Marcel Carné and fought in the Left-wing Resistance in Italy.

His early “shorts”, Gente del Po (1943, People of the Po, about fishermen on the River Po) and Nettezza urbana (1948, about Rome street-cleaners), showed real social concern. He was a life-long Marxist. But his full-length documentary I Vinti (1953, The Vanquished), a three-part study of modern youth in Rome, Paris and London, was a poor film. Despite his sincere leftism, Antonioni was always less at ease with social subjects than when exploring his characters’ inner lives — as in his first feature, Cronaca di un amore (1950, Chronicle of a Love) a baleful love-story that prefigured his later themes.

He matured relatively late. His first important film was Le Amiche (1955, The Girlfriends), adapted from Cesare Pavese’s poignant novel Tra donne sole, about the empty lives of a group of rich people in Turin. This was fertile ground for Antonioni who made of it a superbly moody film. Il Grido (1957, The Cry) told of a manual worker in the Po valley whose inner desolation leads to suicide — a typical Antonioni subject, beautifully executed, and oddly enough the only occasion that he portrayed spiritual anguish in a working-class, rather than wealthy, milieu.

Neither of these two fine films won box-office success or wide acclaim for their maker. However, L’Avventura (1960, The Adventure) caused wonder and amazement — and some consternation — at the 1961 Cannes Festival and turned Antonioni into a cult figure. To this day, in polls of international critics’ preferences, it is still generally rated as one of the ten greatest films ever made, to be mentioned in the same breath as Citizen Kane and La Règle du jeu. Its almost plotless story concerns some wealthy Romans on holiday in Sicily. A girl disappears on a boat trip to an island — was it an accident, or suicide in face of her fiancé’s bleak incapacity for love? The brooding landscape harmonised magically with the characters’ inner desolation to yield a work of great intensity of feeling, as subtle as a novel.

In Antonioni’s oeuvre, L’Avventura forms a kind of trilogy with his next two films, La Notte (1960, The Night) and L’Eclisse (1962, The Eclipse), all studies in despair among the Italian beau monde. La Notte, probably his second finest film, with Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, told of the spiritual void of a successful Milanese novelist and the breakdown of communication in his marriage; the concrete jungle of modern Milan was effectively used to heighten the sense of alienation. L’Eclisse was also about the eclipse of feeling in modern society. Its central role went to Monica Vitti, for many years Antonioni’s common-law wife and an important inspiration in his work (she acted in five of his films). Deserto rosso (1964, The Red Desert), set in an industrial landscape near Ravenna, was his first film in colour, and in it he used colours — somewhat artfully — to express the varying moods and neuroses of his characters.

After this Antonioni entered a new phase. He turned to making films abroad and in English, for big companies such as MGM — films now concerned less with people’s emotional lives than with the barrenness of their social environment. His work became less subjective, more clinical, less intense. Blowup (1966) used the backdrop of the “swinging London” of the mid-1960s to examine the shifting frontier between illusion and reality, as witnessed by a cynical fashion photographer. Zabriskie Point (1970) was an apocalyptic assault on materialism in California, allied to the modish theme of youth protest.

His later work was sparse and its inspiration intermittent. A long documentary shot in China in 1972 was denounced by Peking for its distortions, though in truth it was quite sympathetic. The Passenger (1975), marking a return to Antonioni’s earlier introspective themes, followed a TV reporter (Jack Nicholson) on a grim odyssey across Spain and North Africa in a vain search for a new identity. Il Mistero di Oberwald (1981) was an ill-judged version of Cocteau’s L’Aigle à deux têtes (1948).

Antonioni suffered a stroke in 1985, which left him partially paralysed and unable to speak. Nevertheless, he continued to work, and despite a delay of a decade, in 1995 he completed Beyond the Clouds with the help of the German director Wim Wenders. That same year he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime’s achievement. A decade later, when in his nineties, he directed Il filo pericoloso delle cose (2004), an episode in a portmanteau film about love, though most critics considered the music by Caetano Veloso to be rather better than the picture itself.

Antonioni’s personality had some of the same austerity as his work. He was tall and thin, with a nervous, reserved manner, and when working he could be arrogant and difficult, flying into a rage with anyone who crossed him. Often he would clear the set for up to 20 minutes before a take, in order to brood alone. He was a fastidious perfectionist, as is clear from his mise-en-scène at its best. He was a master of the slow panning shot and the long uneasy silence; or he would allow the camera to linger motionless on a building or hillside long after the actors had moved out of frame. Landscape, especially urban, was crucial to him: he said that he first chose the visual setting for a film, then let this dictate its theme, rather than the other way round.

Indeed, some critics found his landscapes more real and memorable that the sad figures projected against them. In 1963 The Times film critic called him a “shallow bore”. He had many such detractors, but his admirers saw him as a true humanist in his own fashion, patently sincere in his belief that man’s emotional and moral being had been stifled by the new world of science. Maybe this bleak view of life sprang in part from his Jansenist background with its stress on guilt and retribution; certainly his films were personally felt.

Antonioni’s philosophy may well have been less original than his manner of expressing it, and it is true he was weak on intellectual analysis. But essentially his was a poet’s intuitive and emotional response to life, and this was his strength. His four best films, from Le Amiche to L’Eclisse, are likely to stand the test of time for their searing poetic vision and for a beauty that is no mere decoration but — as with Keats or Van Gogh — is integral to the melancholy outcry of an anguished soul.

Antonioni is survived by his wife, Enrica Fico.

Michelangelo Antonioni, film director, was born on September 39, 1912. He died on July 30, 2007, aged 94