Classic Art Films added 2 new photos — celebrating a birthday.
Happy Birthday to the legendary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni! Antonioni was a filmmaker who “redefined the concept of narrative cinema” and challenged traditional approaches to storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large. He produced “enigmatic and intricate mood pieces” and rejected action in favor of contemplation, focusing on image and design over character and story. Antonioni began experimenting with a radical new style: instead of a conventional narrative, he presented a series of apparently disconnected events, and he used long takes as part of his film making aesthetic.
His masterpiece L’ Avventura starred Antonioni’s favorite leading lady Monica Vitti and became his very first international success. Even though the film received a mixture of boos and cheers at the Cannes Film Festival, it was hugely popular in art house cinemas around the world. L’ Avventura was the first of a trilogy, followed next by La Notte in 1961 and L’Eclisse in 1962. All three stories explored the emotional alienation between a man and a woman within the contemporary world of modernization.
One of the recurring themes in Antonioni’s films are its detached characters whose lives are soulless, empty and meaningless, aside from the gratification of pleasure or the pursuit of material wealth. “Too shallow to be truly lonely,” critic Pauline Kael wrote, “they are people trying to escape their boredom by reaching out to one another and finding only boredom once again. The characters are active only in trying to discharge their anxiety. Sex is their sole means of contact.”
Antonioni’s films tend to have spare plots and dialogue, and much of the screen time is spent lingering on certain settings, such as the continuous seven minute take at the end of The Passenger(1975), or the ambiguous conclusion of L’ Eclisse in which the camera shoots half constructed architectural buildings, empty streets and the geometric lines on crosswalks. In his thriller Blow-up (1966) Antonioni gives us a philosophical conclusion involving a group of pantomiming mimes that play an invisible game of tennis with an imaginary ball.
Antonioni is also noted for exploiting color as a significant expressive element of his cinematic style, especially in his first color film Red Desert (1964), which many consider to be a fourth link in the trilogy. Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career while Bordwell explains that Antonioni’s films were extremely influential on subsequent art films stating: “More than any other director, he encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative”. ... See MoreSee Less
