MODERN LOVE: PASSION, LONGING AND THE FILMS OF MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

Ever since L’avventura was booed at its Cannes premiere in 1960, Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) has been renowned as one of the most challenging and divisive auteurs in the history of European cinema.

Emerging as a highly regarded figure of the 1960s avant-garde, Antonioni was one of the first postwar Italian filmmakers (alongside Federico Fellini) to challenge the formal limitations of neo-realism. Like so many other directors of his period, Antonioni branched out into completely new territory, forging a uniquely personal, radical and profoundly modernist approach to filmmaking, at once highly affected, deeply contemplative and boldly expressive yet full of ambiguity, play and digression. Antonioni remains one of the most revered, evoked and imitated figures of art cinema and one of the key influences – alongside Dreyer and Tarkovsky – on what is now (not unproblematically) termed “slow cinema” and the style of great contemporary filmmakers such as Tsai Ming-liang, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Pedro Costa.

Antonioni’s cinema is most commonly noted as conveying a palpable and psychological sense of time and space, particularly through his use of the long take, and his exquisite, lingering and existentially charged framings of characters against starkly imposing urban, industrial and natural landscapes. Less remarked upon is Antonioni’s recurrent concern with the figure of heterosexual lovers: intense, often emotionally subdued relationships between men and women beset by an overwhelming sense of passion, tension, mystery, uncertainty and unease.

This season of local and imported 35mm prints focuses on a series of films which bring this latter aspect of his filmmaking into clear focus, providing us with a brilliant panorama of the ever-shifting attitudes and poses of passion and longing in the director’s work.

Presented by the Italian Institute of Culture.

February 11

7:00PM – LA NOTTE
Michelangelo Antonioni (1961) 
115 mins PG

24 hours in the breakdown of a marriage. Following L’avventura, Antonioni further explores the trials and tribulations of an alienated and unfaithful couple marooned in an unresponsive and indifferent environment. The cold beauty of Milan’s modern architecture and the murky streets through which Jeanne Moreau’s character aimlessly wanders, provide the film’s pungently moody and gauzily lit background. The extended party sequence that concludes the film is one of the highpoints of Antonioni’s career and characterises his concern with the disconnections of contemporary life, the restless boredom of the bourgeoisie, the mystery of human relationships and the discomfiting freedom wrought by modernity.

With Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti and Bernhard Wicki.

35mm print courtesy of Cinecittà Luce.

CTEQ Annotation
‘La notte’. by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster.

February 18

7:00PM IL GRIDO
Michelangelo Antonioni (1957) 
116 mins

Antonioni’s first international production inaugurated and fully cemented his mature, modern, elliptical style. A sugar refinery worker (Steve Cochran) wanders with his young daughter through the wintry and desolate Po Valley landscape where the filmmaker grew up. Taking a characteristically “road” form, it is an elegy to one man’s mental disintegration when isolated from those he loves. In many ways a precursor to such later peripatetic works as L’eclisse, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, this transitional opus, combining the ambulatory landscapes of neo-realism with a more modernist vision, is probably the director’s most underrated film. With Alida Valli.

35mm print courtesy of Cinecittà Luce.

Trailer:

9:10PM THE PASSENGER
Michelangelo Antonioni (1975) 
126 mins PG

Jack Nicholson stars as a disillusioned journalist who makes the strange decision to exchange identities with a colleague he has discovered dead in his hotel room. Antonioni’s third English-language feature is an evocatively subdued thriller and road movie (taking in Barcelona, London and North Africa). Luciano Tovoli’s arrestingly scenic cinematography is harnessed to express psychological tension in pure and dynamic visual terms, relegating conventional dependence on drama and dialogue. The concluding sequence, a precisely executed seven-minute tracking shot, suspensefully delivers the film’s final, inexplicable shock. With Maria Schneider.

Trailer:

February 25

7:00PM – IDENTIFICATION 
OF A WOMAN
Michelangelo Antonioni (1982) 
128 mins R

Antonioni’s final incontestable masterpiece recalls his epochal films of social alienation and infuses their themes with 
a startlingly frank sexuality. In a daring 
and risky move, the main character is a film director himself, and the story of 
his ensuing affairs is a discomfortingly 
ambiguous expose of masculine desire and creative obsession. With surprising comic moments and typically audacious visual set pieces, the film is both a summation and development of Antonioni’s thoughts on modernity and the entropy 
in human relations. Brilliantly shot by 
Carlo Di Palma.

35mm print courtesy 
of Cinecittà Luce.

Trailer:

9:20PM – ZABRISKIE POINT
Michelangelo Antonioni (1970) 
110 mins M

Antonioni’s most visionary work is a massively expensive, impressionistic view of late ’60s American materialism culminating in one of the most extraordinary explosions ever captured on film. Featuring several audacious set pieces including a rhapsodic lovemaking sequence in Death Valley and an ambiguously staged university shooting, Antonioni’s characteristically abstract anti-establishment reflection on tumultuous times was co-written by Sam Shepard, Antonioni, Tonino Guerra and Clare Peploe and memorably scored by such acts as Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones and John Fahey. With Rod Taylor.

Trailer: