antonioni

i've only seen one early funny one, 'chronicle of a love' -- it's okay, but i need to see it agane. sam rohdie (ex screen editor) says the early ones are best.

best writing i've seen on antonioni is noel burch 'theory of film practice' (1967).

more later...

this does kind of tie in to antonioni but i have to check on a reel of film so i'll leave it to others...

I think this is probably a hypocrisy the film is very much aware of--everyone in the film is in some ways a victim of base sexuality. the film defines the women that way because antonioni believes they feel that way themselves. "eros is sick" is what antonioni says right? it's too tied to dying, decaying matter. all the sexy, kittenish behavior by the women in the film feels either hollow or evasive.

er, i can't quite get at what i'm feeling, but what's base?

-psycho and l'avventura = lead disappears early
-the lady vanishes -- well! obviously
-rear window = blow up
-north by northwest = the passenger

perhaps the scene where vitti becomes surrounded by lecherous men is meant to make plain one theme of the film, and it does play that way to some extent, but it's still telling that he chose one of the view scenes fea. non-rich people to make the point, and the men are clearly working-class "types." also dont forget the scene where the singer is mobbed by fans screaming horrifically...this was my least favorite part of the film by far.... it felt like a didactic little sideline about decadent celebrity and the masses blah blah blah...the sort of tone-deaf "observational" material that makes up the bulk of "zabriskie pt" and "blow up". just notice the precise way the main characters are choreographed, the EROTIC way (even if the film distances itself from eros in different ways) compared to the unseemly sulking and surging of the riffraff...

tracer why did you know it was my thread?

I agree completely--L'avventura definetly works best as a mood piece.

at the time sight and sound said:

'film is about human relationships, not about spatial relationships' w/r/t antonioni. but of course the way cinema expresses human relationships is spatial -- and the themes of his films are very much of their times, you could call him an 'existentialist'. the blankness in his films corresponds to what he thinks are shallow characters.

the "spatial relationships" comment i believe came from lindsay anderson or one of the S&S crowd in reaction to a perceived formalism taking hold...it might have even been robin wood's work at the time that sparked that comment (wood has since psuedo-renounced his earliest film writing).

i tend to be sympathetic to the formalist tendency b/c i think art has its own imperatives sometimes, certain abstract patterns and formal designs that have an appeal in themself--but even more b/c i think the notion of what "human relationships" means is this context is impoverished and didactic.... things that would seem hopelessly abstract and unengaged to a self-proclaimed humanist seem the very stuff of life--or one part of it--to me. granted too many critics skip over the interesting part--the observation of how films are put together and how they achieve certain affects--right to the airy theorizing, which is perhaps what anderson et al were reacting against, but i think it was the wrong (and a much too defensive) reaction...

ok back to antonioni.

i dont know exactly what it "does well" - that's partly why i am using such vague terms. what i like about antonioni, and other filmmakers with similarly sleepy styles, is the emphasis on time. there is a feel of waiting, lingering, or even a vigil. thats something im not sure is in other art forms.

and the thing about speed in film is that it is conveyed through editing, etc. but with long takes the time is literally there, and it's not suggested through artistic means.

i honestly don't really know what i am getting at here, just making some observations.

But the very heavy deliberate laboriousness with which it was constructed put me off from whatever immediate striking effect it was supposed to have. There's a sense of imbalance that's almost comical, putting such narrative and emotional weight on what is a fairly casual gesture, in addition to the obviousness of the wall/vista split-screen. This is a general aesthetic bugbear of mine, not specific to Antonioni, but watching L'Avventura definitely set it off.

Antonioni's conceptual sequel to Blow-Up is an Italian leftist's goofball cinematic view of late '60s American counterculture. It features a long sequence with nude couples making love in the desert, for which Antonioni wanted Fahey to do the music. When Fahey arrived in Rome, Antonioni showed him the segment in a screening room. "Antonioni says, 'What I want you to do is to compose some music that will go along with the porno scene.' I kept saying, 'Yes, sir.' Then he starts this, 'Now, John. This is young love. Young love.' I mean, that's young love? All these bodies? 'Young love. But John, it's in the desert, where's there's death. But it's young love.' He kept going, 'Young Love/Death' faster and faster. I was sure I was talking to a madman. I'm still sure I was.

"So I experimented. I had instrumentalists come in and told them just to play whatever they felt like. They had to pretend to understand what I was talking about, especially if Antonioni came in the room. That was fun. They were very cooperative. I came up with some sections of music that sounded more like death than young love. It was actually pretty ominous. I played it for Michaelangelo and he thought it was great. So he took me out to dinner at this really fancy restaurant and started telling me how horrible the United States was. We were drinking a lot of wine and I don't remember which one of us started cussing. It started real fast and ended in a fistfight. You have no idea how much that guy hates the United States. What a jerk. I did like 20-25 minutes, but they only used about two minutes. Somebody's driving along in the car and the announcer says, 'And now some John Fahey.' And that's it -- young love and death."

(I'll take Antonioni over Fahey anyday.)

I've also had problems with Red Desert, though I'm told that it really needs multiple viewings to turn out. I don't know about that...I mean, it's been four months since I last saw it, and I was drinking some gin at a bar last night and thinking...I should see Red Desert again. It could comfort me, and I shouldn't have left it like I did - you see, it put me on the spot, and since then I've been just watching lots of other Italian New Wave directors, mostly one at a time, trying to prove to myself that I don't need Red Desert. Should I go back to it?

(I've definitely earned someone's undying hatred with this one.)

I love La Notte too! And Girolamo, Red Desert is far from my favorite of his, but I think it does reward repeated viewings. Anyway, I think he's my favorite director, and L'Eclisse probably my favorite film. Or at least I considered them as such at one point, i'm finding it hard to think in terms of favorites these days. I've seen everything he's done, including the early shorts, save for his 4 hour China documentary and Identification of a Woman (I actually own the latter on VHS but I'm waiting to see it on the big screen; someplace near me, screen the damn thing already!)

I want to scribble more thoughts but I've been kinda busy today ... hopefully tonight I can add some more.

(apologies...)

what do people think of "blow up"? who else has read j. hoberman's piece on its enormous success?

do you mean gillian hills or jane birkin????

we've dealt with this, upthread.

no it's not getting a release. someone copied me the japanese dvd.

i will have to look into this.

:P

This wins!

For sure. Also Rossellini's General Della Rovere. Um, and Along Came Jones, I suppose.

I'm just in love with the SOUND and COLOR of the film. All those clanging and wheezing oil rigs and freighters, that industrial machinery interrupting everybody's conversations at every turn. That big belch of steam that erupts at the beginning of the film, when the two men are trying to have a conversation. The juxtaposition of the idyllic story of the tropical island that the Vitti character tells her son at the end of the movie, with the ugly gaseous drilling fields she leads him past. The grey colors of the cityscape (physically painted to look that way - no filters here). The fog.

His whole thing in that classic string of mid-60s films is basically good ol' bourgeois alienation and pretense -- how banal, right? -- but I think he's basically the master. His characters have a bit more depth and range of emotion than, say, the Bergman depressoids.

i guess a semi-exception is in red desert, where vitti's character makes several abortive attempts to explain her feelings (to her husband's friend and to a stranger IIRC). these scenes were difficult for me. the monologues have the unconnected quality of genuine desperation and confusion, and i experience feelings similar to when a certain friend pours out her angst for the umpteenth time... i wanted to be sympathetic but i was more pitying and a bit fed-up. i say "semi-exception" because while the character is unusually talkative for antonioni, it's not clear she's communicating anything at all.

ok, so antonioni's "theme" is the difficulty of communication between human beings in the modern world. well that's how many people have chosen to read it, anyway. it's become cant. i think people see an antonioni movie now expecting it to be "about" this. but i suspect that this "reading" is just a reduction, just an attempt to fill in spaces left by the elliptical narration and presentation of character. a way of reducing the film to an assimilable statement abt modern life. when--as i noted above--for me antonioni films are more (to be vulgar) mood pieces than anything else. if such visual phenomena as characters bobbing in and out of frame in patterns that have no obvious thematic meaning but tons of graphic dynamism can be considered contributors to mood.

fellini is always pretty obvious. take la strada. please.

I can't tell you many tiny little mini-scenes - devoid of dialogue - have permanently wormed there way into my consciousness. I can't be standing underneath a tree at midnight, as the wind loudly rustles the leaves, and not think of those park scenes in Blow Up. Or, the sound of clanging of ropes against flagpoles instantly transports me to that little shot in L'Eclisse where the Vitti character is running along after her friend as the flagpoles do just that...

actually, I should qualify that "weird-ass modernism" thing; modernist architecture strikes me as anything but weird -- the cellular structure and all that. But with Antonioni it's all in the framing; that's the thing -- he makes the mundane seem weird by isolating certain of its aspects. Like in that shot mentioned above, i'm assuming it's some standard multi-level living structure, but he frames the character standing on the roof in a cutaway -- this guy standing atop this strange geometric shape pointing at the sky -- which really just sort of emphasizes the odd character of contemporary life and our relationship with our physical envirmonment.

I mean, there's a laundry list of memorable scenes where he does this -- in Il Grido (those weird-ass spool things. wtf?), in the Red Desert stuff I mentioned, in La Notte when the Moreau character goes off by herself to explore the city .. even the relatively poor Zabriskie Point is just FILLED with this shit .. the Rauschenbergesque framings when the lead male character flees the campus and drives his truck through the city, the silly interlude with the development firm that "Daria" works for, and of course that odd cottage which explodes in a Wonder Bread frenzy at the end..

Fuck, I dunno .. Yeah, I love the guy for his striking imagery above all. But I do think in that halting dialogue, that inability to communicate -- he presents a sort of alternate "depth of character". or something.

yes, i agree completely. to some extent, this is what most art does. more specifically, i think antonioni is good at exploting the geometries of urban architecture in ways that render them unfamiliar (often excitingly so)..

ozu is another who does this. he manages to make even the most mundane office building strange and beautiful. in fact, when i saw an inn in tokyo (1935), with its boldly framed shots of hulking, derelict industrial equipment in a barren suburban landscape, i thought "antonioni!"

Formed thoughts forthcoming. I didn't think about my fingernails -- I can say that much already. The music was quite sticky.

london has an antonioni season on now. because of soime fuxoring american cousins who have decided to ruin my life, i'm missing half of it, but i did see 'la notte' saturday. i love antonioni.

but they aren't showing 'the passenger'. for some crazy reason, presumably rights-related, they could only show it IF MICHELANGELO HIMSELF ATTENDED. needles to say, this didn't happen.

I know I'm prone to gushing and over-effusion sometimes on these boards, but really, it was so very, very good.

I put off watching The Passenger for a long time ('cause Zabriskie Hurts) and when I finally saw it a few years ago I was completely blown away -- I need to see it again

I still haven't dared to see Zabriskie Point.

I also can't believe the Malaga scenes at the end of the film - that town is such a horrible tourist pit now. It actually used to look classy (or at least peaceful, in a desolate sort of way).

You can see the camera operator reflected in the french window. The man must be a brute.

(i don't know how much of a difference those extra six or something minutes they put back in really makes, though)

I haven't seen the early stuff in eons.

Forgot to look for this. I did notice the first time Jack says "What the fuck are you doing with me?" (under the tree), it's clearly dubbed as his lips aren't moving, which suggests it was done to make the line resonate in the last hotel scene.

Second time I'd seen The Passenger (first since mid to late '80s); hadn't remembered hardly anything but the famed next-to-last shot ... I do think it stands with Blowup at a minimum; i'll probably work my way backwardish through his oeuvre now. Nicholson's probably never given a more somber and natural performance, even in his '69-75 Arthouse Bogart run (which this capped). I though Maria Schneider was speaking English phonetically, but her movements seem similarly stilted (when she puts her hand on Jack's shoulder, elbow stiff).

My brain was asleep early on -- what was Jack burning in his yard in the flashback, besides tree limbs, if anything?

I thought that was the reflection of the assassain.

I see Ebert upgraded the pan from his original review, so he is getting smarter (in some cases).

Still, I wanna see it again.

Tracer Hand otm. The filmmaker can't expect us to do his work for him PLUS give us the most somnolent raw materials.

i don't think it's a boring film, and i also don't tend to try to remake "boring" into a superlative, a positive quality. certain films may displaced my interest from the sort of things you ususally focus on in films (character psychology/goals, etc.) onto other things (milieu, intricacies of visual and sound design) but that doesn't make them boring, just compelling in different ways from the norm.

ok, well i'm not sure what needs to be filled in as to why he "does what he does." it's pretty clear at the beginning that he's just had it with his assignment, and his life. as for the identity he assumes, if everything was revealed as or during he assumed it, it'd be an incredibly boring movie. most (tho not all) about the dead guy is revealed to the viewer in the same way that nicholson's character receives it, and thus, there's a story (a thriller, even).

the schneider character is a total blank in terms of psychology--she doesn't even have a name, a backstory, anything.

not entirely, she claims she's an architecture student. but it isn't really that important, she's basically the "mysterious female" type as in most thrillers/mysteries.

we can choose to fill in such blanks in many ways (or to interpret the blanks as having some greater metaphysical, political, etc. meaning) but the fact that the blanks are flaunted so obviously perhaps makes such activity seem a bit pointless, as far as a longtime critic is concerned.

there isn't much to "interpret," there's a lot there in the film. i think if antonioni had spelled out things more, it'd be a much weaker movie.

anyway, yeah, Passenger making the rounds finally. Jack finally let it loose again .. Saw it two weeks ago, after only seeing it previously on VHS .. absolutely blown away. so glad to finally see this sucker on the big screen (only have "I Vinti", "Identification of a Woman" and the China documentary left to see before I die!!) Started re-reading the Rohdie bfi book. too late right now to read this thread .. but .. The Passenger, god yes

http://www.sonyclassics.com/thepassenger/index_content.html

Also, Jack Nicholson reading two articles by Antonioni on L'Avventura's DVD is a hoot, esp the one that amounts to "A thinking actor is my enemy." (Jack haw-haws this during brief Passenger reminiscences.)

Dave Kehr in the NY Times:

Eros

This three-part film on sexual themes with segments by Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni received mixed reviews when it was released theatrically last April, but its DVD release is remarkable for the one great extra it contains: "Michelangelo Eye to Eye," a 19-minute short directed by Mr. Antonioni and included here out of the sheer goodness of Warner Home Video's heart.

Largely silent, with the exception of some choral music by Palestrina that rises slowly during the film's last five minutes, "Eye to Eye" depicts the 93-year-old Italian filmmaker (effectively rendered mute by a stroke in 1985) as he pays a visit to a work by another Michelangelo: the sculptor's marble statue of Moses, created for the tomb of Pope Julius II. No words are pronounced, and none need to be as Mr. Antonioni's slowly moving camera caresses the curves and textures of the monumental artwork while it closes in on his own aging, almost translucent flesh. Crosscutting between his own clouded eyes and the frozen, eternal regard of the sculpture, the director establishes a dialogue across time. The artist ages; the art does not. This wise, reverberating piece contains unspoken volumes. $27.98, R.

http://bam.org/film/series.aspx?id=83

I was kind of amazed that BAM sold out the big theater at 7 on a Sunday, and nearly did at 9:30.

I still have no idea where the hell folks saw the assassin reflected in something in penultimate shot.

it's a shadow on the wall, apparently.

now, the big q with the film is: is schneider daisy, and when she speaks to the assassin's driver, does she know him already?

the film was ineptly reviewed on re-release here.

the film was ineptly reviewed on re-release here.

It says "Robertson" on her passport!

holy fuck bro!

this is mega.

Reading a Manny Farber collection -- he refers to "Jeanne Morose" and "Monica Unvital."

-Alain Delon makes the movie. So much more personality then all the other guys (in this and L'Avventura)

-If it's not there already, the "Monica Vitti Pretends To Be African" sequence needs to be in the ILX 100 Most Racially Akward Film Scenes

-That last shot of the streetlight has gotta be up there with the lit cigarette in Two Or Three Things I Know About Her as the greatest 60s Art Film Closing Money Shots.

it does! i presume the joke's on vitti and her friend, right? at least, i hope.

Also: nice to see Bunuel regular Paco Rabal as Vitti's husband.

The Antonioni retro presented by Cinecittà Holding is gonna be in town (Houston) in September. However, the schedule won't go public for a couple of months. I'd like to ask anyone who's see this program what is exactly in it? Is it a complete works program, or just a sampling?

Sweet Jesus... now Antonioni is gone.

Now I truly am depressed. :(

The MFAH ran the restored version of Le Amiche as awards ceremony counterprogramming this weekend. An amazing piece of work and probably my favorite of his early films.

donna rouge & I saw Red Desert last night, and were both thinking of Safe (maybe my least favorite Haynes movie; that's no accident:

"When I was talking to Alex Nepomniaschy, the director of photography, the first time, he asked, 'Have you seen Red Desert? It's the first film that came to my mind when I read your script.' I hadn't seen it, and so he got me a tape and I looked at it. It's a beautiful film, but I was really inspired even more by the technical rigidity and control that you see in Antonioni. I knew that Safe would be done in long shot."

http://focusfeatures.com/article/film_is_images__todd_haynes_on_safe

donna rouge is in nyc?

briefly!

My least favorite of the major Antonionis, although I'd love to watch it in a theatre.

i've watched red desert a lot and i'm convinced it's just vacant. that antonioni sets up this loose associations between industrial pollution, antiseptic environments, and monica vitti's malaise such that the audience can connect the dots in whatever "meaningful" way they want. i suppose this reads like a standard critique of art cinema in general but this film really seems to trade a little too much on this gesture.

J.Ro, I think, said Vitti plays it a little too 'crazy,' which I think is true.

I was a sucker for this kind of anomie in college but when I saw RD in '94 for the first time I found Vitti's performance a tremulous, teary bore (the sort of thing Carol Burnett might parody) and the setpieces laughable.

I do like her and Richard Harris, who should always have been dubbed in Italian. Also the wrapup of that sexually edgy scene in the eaterfront shack, with the fog and the car.

wow I forgot he was in it -- a bit like Jack Palance in Contempt.

My brain was asleep early on -- what was Jack burning in his yard in the flashback, besides tree limbs, if anything?
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Monday, December 5, 2005 9:14 AM (5 years ago)

he was burning the part of the script that explains what he was burning.
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Monday, December 5, 2005 10:23 AM (5 years ago)

i can't lie, i made a funny.

^^I actually think of that exchange every time I see that scene.

Contempt, another film Red Desert surpasses.

please, share more of your brilliant insights....

*stares into toxic smoking dump*

Contempt isn't a great movie either but at least there's something human in it and not friezes of beautiful people wreathed in fog on docks.

married people fighting, not the kinda humans I can endure for long (unless it's Albee dialogue)

I thought you loved screwball comedy?

l'avventura is the movie I watch when I'm feeling out of sorts, sometimes La Notte too. I usually fall asleep before it's over. It's one of the few films I never tire of repeated viewing. Contempt always gives me really bad nightmares about harsh arguments with my girlfriend, never fails.

Antonioni's films didn't age well.
parts of them look now like a parody of art-films where the overused images of alienation are often too obvious and the film take itself too seriously.

L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, and The Passenger are the only ones I can still watch.

same here, minus Eclisse

at least Godard was (sometimes) funny and took more risks

I went through a phase nineteen years ago when I loved him so much that I wrote a modern college take on L'Avventura.

nah Godard is grisly too.

i watched Weekend the other day and quite enjoyed it still

http://www.mrbongo.com/product/chung-kuo-china-1439

^Vaguely interested in this one.

http://pleasurephoto.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/antonioni-e-monica-vitti-sul-set-di-deserto-rosso-1964.jpg

From Geoff Dyer's ZONA:

"Antonioni's RED DESERT (1964) would, as the title suggests, be unimaginable without the colour. The colour - Monica Vitti's green coat - is what makes it wonderful but for the thirty-four-year-old Tarkovsky, interviewed in 1966, the year he completed his second feature, ANDREI RUBLEV, it was 'the worst of his films after The Cry.' Because of the colour, because Antonioni got so seduced by 'Monica Vitti's red hair against the mists', because 'the colour has killed the feeling of truth.'"

And Oshima banned Green from his movies...jeez guys its ok I know it signifies YES when you all should be about NEGATION but calm the fuck down its gonna be ok in the end.

maybe he just hated foliage, islam and panathanaikos

i like this pic of the maestro, too;

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0doinCwHo1qfziuio1_500.jpg

what is that tshirt supposed to say

i expect it explains what he was burning

'dull zizek' maybe?

new 35mm restoration of L'Avventura running in NY & LA

Might have to see it.

Want to go to this:
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/antonioni-show-cinematheque-francaise/?hpw&rref=t-magazine&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

http://shihlun.tumblr.com/post/123834842809/roland-barthes-michelangelo-antonioni-dear-antonioni

just had my first viewing of a 35mm print of Zabriskie Point in maybe 20 years... who the hell could call this a "bad" film? It's brilliantly made, whatever its flaws or coy mysteries. And one of the best climaxes ever.

You gotta see the 1970 Dick Cavett Show episode with the two Zabriskie leads, if you haven't already. Mark Frechette's real life story is crazy.

I know most of it... Daria Halprin is a more expressive performer, but i though they were both fine.

I never remember to look for Harrison Ford in the prison cell. Nor did I recognize Philip Baker Hall.

Mark Flechette sure was yummy!

Freudian slip?

wtf Zabriskie Point is amazing

everyone told me it was boring, avoid it, "see Blow-Up instead." Blow-Up sucks. this was incredible

good lord yes:

And one of the best climaxes ever.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Sunday, December 17, 2017 11:31 PM (seven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just starting to watch Antonioni films again. loved Le Amiche, but L'Avventura was baffling to me, for a second time

L'Avventura meant enough to me at 20 that I wrote my own script updated for the modern era. La Notte is what I re-watch.

The Other Side of the Wind has a sexier version of Zabriskie Point as its film-within-a-film.

sorry Orson, you didn't know arty sexploitation from Antonioni...

you don't know from passive screen boys

lol

planning to see La Notte and L'Eclisse next

haven't been able to watch Il Grido

interesting to see the progression from L'Avventura to La Notte to L'Elclisse. it seems that all his films about people talking about their feelings

*are* about

well you gotta either talk about em or not talk about em

love Alain Delon and Monica Vitti

and Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau

Vitti and Delon are remarkably blank and emotionally absent in L’Eclisse, and the depiction of their alienation feels more and more oppressive as the film goes along

still not sure what its title refers to, was thinking maybe it had something to do with what Rosenbaum referred to as “Antonioni’s preoccupation with objects and spaces overtaking and supplanting people”

really liked Il Grido, Antonioni’s “working class bummer” (to use morbs’ words). it has the themes of alienation and ennui of later films but with a more conventional, albeit meandering, story. loved every minute of seeing Steve Cochran on screen

Red Desert is next on my list. I remember seeing it in college and thinking of it primarily as a visual experience, as something to love just for its aesthetic appeal. If that's the only level I relate to it on at a second viewing, that will again be enough I think

at the moment I think I love Red Desert more than any other Antonioni movie

Bradshaw compared it to Alphaville and Solaris in it’s sci-fi eeriness and suggested that it may have been an inspiration for Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (which I *really* loved), but watching it again I’m wondering if Todd Haynes was influenced by it when he made Safe

the experience of alienation in modern society expressed as fear of environmental poisoning, filmed in a surreal manner and playing out as a horror movie

good call, I could see that. and the Solaris connection - particularly the fire juxtaposed against all the gray

I loved the juxtaposition of painted color and gray in the film

Can't think of any movies with the color palette of Red Desert. it's really startling, particularly that first shot of flames shooting out of the factory

re: Red Desert and Safe: it feels like there is something very deep about the spiritual malaise of the Monica Vitti and Julianne Moore characters in the two films

in my young adult life among my friends Blow Up was considered THE Antonioni film. I'm interested to see it and Zabriskie Point again. I loved both of them at the time

watching Blow Up again, I'm not sure I understand exactly what it’s about. I feel like I'm not giving enough of myself to it to really appreciate it

the mystery seems incidental, I read somewhere it's a film about someone waking up from a numbing life and living fully for a moment, that makes sense to me

liked the Ebert review of Zabriskie Point:

!https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/zabriskie-point-1970

"Michelangelo Antonioni is a fitfully brilliant director whose best, and basic, insight is that the fashionable cultivation of boredom can break down our ability to feel and love. In the 1950s, it seemed to him, people became so shy of spontaneity that they lost the knack. His characters were so alienated and spiritually exhausted they could hardly even get through breakfast together.

We loved it. "Eclipse" (1962) had us leaving the theater feeling deliciously betrayed and alone. "Blow-Up" (1966) was even better. It was set in swinging London and left us feeling betrayed, alone, and with-it. In between, Antonioni gave us "The Red Desert" (1964), possibly the most passive and empty serious movie of the decade."

"possibly the most passive and empty serious movie of the decade" also one of the best

saw The Passenger again. I had forgotten how amazing the ending was in the way it resolved the story, shot first through the bars of a window in a room at the Gloria Hotel looking outside, then moving through the bars to the courtyard, then looking back again through the bars into the room

What helluva film L'Avventura remains. My seventh or eighth viewing, this time with a superb Gene Youngblood commentary track.

Michelangelo Antonioni on the set of Zabriskie Point in 1968, photographed by Bruce Davidson. pic.twitter.com/0K7mW9TYTE

— 💜💜ค Ŧคภ๒๏ץ кภ๏ฬร ค ђคՇєг💜💜 (@NickPinkerton) April 23, 2020

That's so you don't catch him smiling.