y work is like digging, it’s archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That’s how I understand my first films, and that’s what I’m still doing” -- Michelangelo Antonioni



Some idiot recommended L’Avventura to me when I was fifteen. I survived, though bewildered. When movies are slow and boring, I generally float in and out of awareness. Though both slow and boring (try having a career that tends to inspire the words “ineffable,” “elusive,” and “alienation”), Michelangelo Antonioni only made me edgy and nervous. Still, anyone from my generation (far more than Antonioni’s, I’d wager) would feel a twinge of recognition at the “story”—beautiful people roaming about an island, searching for a girl who, bored of life, has disappeared.

My interest sparked, I re-watched the movie with the commentary from the Criterion DVD release (best commentary ever). It literally changed the way I watched movies. The film historian explained Antonioni’s (enormous) influence on film aesthetics: how he used the shape of a nearby rock to offer psychological insight into his characters. A woman walks through a tiny hallway: either she dominates the corridor or the corridor dominates her—there is never any confusion as to which impression Antonioni meant to convey. Combine my first taste of hard-core mise-en-scène with a strong dose of political/social context, and a new world opened up. It was an inspiring place—this bottomless pool of half-imagined bullshit—and I never looked back. Everything I’ve since seen by Antonioni (and doubtless all I’ve yet to see—some recommended below) helped me think of the cinema as something more than escapism: as a brainteaser, a challenge to the intellect. Though I wasn’t around for the director’s peak, I was at least able to watch Eros—his last film—in theaters. Even for this much, I am thankful.
[Learned Foote]


STYLUS RECOMMENDS


La Notte (1961)

Set over a single night of exhaustive misery, La Notte is an intimate, brooding dissection of a couple who have fallen out of love with one another. Marcello Mastroianni’s cynical central performance has a destructive charm that makes the cannibalistic tendencies of the relationship all the more feasible and compelling. Jeanne Moreau, strangely drab when framed by the industrial skylines of Milan, traipses listlessly along, hoping this monumental night of confession, infidelity and turmoil will somehow reignite a distinguished romance.

Visually, the film is a masterpiece: each frame perfectly composed, even more so than the serene one-time lovers captured by the director’s artful eye. La Notte is a carefully constructed piece of work, beautifully written and inspired by the ritualistic emotional sacrifices of its characters. This is a quintessential Italian movie, an intense and revealing study of interiors that catches Antonioni in his superior prime.
[Paolo Cabrelli]


L’Eclisse (1962)

“It’s so nice here,” sighs Vittoria (Monica Vitti) as she sits quietly outside a mundane, underpopulated airfield café following a recreational small-plane jaunt—perhaps the only tranquil moment in L’Eclisse. In the white heat of a Roman summer, Vittoria rebounds from a wounding breakup by drifting from a neighbor’s spontaneous party (where she goes exotica by dancing in full-body blackface) to halfheartedly circling a seductive, go-getting stockbroker (Alain Delon).

Signaled by the vertical column that rises in the opening credits, walls and barriers isolate people and inhibit intimacy; Antonioni contextualizes the insignificance of the leads’ courtship by miniaturizing them in extreme long shot and, in the celebrated closing sequence of his Alienation Trilogy, eerily removing them from the film’s landscape altogether. Rain barrels disgorge, bus passengers disembark, and streetlights flicker on ominously… This is as honest and relevant a (non-)catharsis as the Maestro can supply where the alternative is dwelling on the transient, anxious coupling of two flailing humans.
[Bill Weber]


Red Desert (1964)

Red Desert is Antonioni's most defiantly experimental film, one that makes great demands of its viewers. It places Antonioni's alienated muse Monica Vitti in a nightmarish world of factories, naval yards, pollution, and dehumanization, set to a soundtrack of electronic dissonance, and filmed in smeared industrial browns. Antonioni famously had every prop and set painted in order to manipulate the palette of each frame; in one scene, a bushel of apples appear gray; in another, a room turns flaming pink after its inhabitants make love.

Like flesh or a wound. Red Desert, more than any of Antonioni's films, relies on abstraction—the fragmented mise-en-scène references modernists from Piet Mondrian to Mark Rothko—and suggests that only through art can we find a way out of alienation. Difficult as Red Desert can be to parse, there is a strident beauty to its ugliness: Antonioni admires his fragile characters—he sees the cracks in the modern world that they slip into, and reveals them to us, that we won't do the same.
[Patrick McKay]


Blow Up (1966)

Antonioni gives a poetic vision of murder in Blow Up, raising as many questions about art and its meaning as he does about the mysterious plot he’s imagined. What’s really powerful about the movie isn’t the murder that bleeds out slowly through two of the photographer’s hastily made images, but the pattern of apathetic negligence that follows it. There is a stark image of consensus reality in Blow Up. The corpse that the photographer obsesses over vanishes, just as the tennis ball appears between the two “merrymakers” miming a tennis game.

These things appear and disappear because people want them to be that way, existent or irrelevant, depending on their whims. But Antonioni questions the same system by inserting the photographer in its midst, a man who’s employed to find the beauties and faults of the world and record both. Following him through Blow-Up, you start to see as he does. Everyone—the enigmatic group of mimes, the gorgeous and grotesque supermodels, the artist himself—all become specimens, just more clumsy models anxious to try on their costumes.
[Yannick LeJacq]


The Passenger (1975)

Instead of retrenching after the disastrous reception for Zabriskie Point, Antonioni dug further into his current obsession with disaffected Americans assimilating unfamiliar landscapes. Thanks to Sony Picture Classics, The Passenger got its first DVD release last year, and it's never looked better. Watching it now, it's a nexus of referents and influences. Clair Denis has obviously paid close attention to the nonchalant juxtaposition of geography and psychological upheaval—in this case, David Locke (Jack Nicholson, restrained but sardonic) casually accepting the consequences of his identity-theft as he's photographed smoking with a Tuareg nomad in North Africa or dwarfed by an Andalusian mountain. A Borges-ian riddle, The Passenger is also—if not just—a swanky head-trip.

You can take the identity swap folderol seriously or not; Antonioni's distance is now so genial that while you're arguing about the film's metaphysical import he's already moved on to photographing the quotidian (a girl chewing bubble gum, a man pushing a bike up a mountain) with an affectless curiosity that David Lynch no doubt admired. Affectlessness does have its limits; we should be grateful that, despite Pauline Kael's ministrations, the zombie-like Maria Schneider never did become the international poster child for aging male anomie that Last Tango in Paris promised. The famous valedictory tracking shots are so effective that they remain Antonioni's most heartbreaking broken promise: why continue making movies after this?
[Alfred Soto]


Identification of a Woman (1982)

Antonioni’s last feature of his own is mostly forgettable (or, in my case, forgotten), with the exception of two scenes: the last, which at last confirms that Antonioni was at heart a sci-fi filmmaker (alienation, abduction, and amnesia were, after all, his great themes), and what might be the greatest chase scene in the history of movies. Fog was probably Antonioni’s favorite subject—in which, as in the whole of his films, everything disappears and dissipates—and his favorite belief held that you can only trust in the reality of what’s physically in front of you.

The two always go together nicely, but nowhere better than a 20-minute car chase in the mist, which finds the characters zipping around from one cloud of fog to another, as though they’re making no physical progress at all, while they’re not even sure they’re being chased. Existentialism always pairs well with action movies, and Antonioni’s only action scene may be his best: everyone is paranoid that they’re being watched, or worse, that they’re not, that they’ve literally got nowhere to go, or to come from.
[David Pratt-Robson]