MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Chronik einer Liebe [de] • Story of a Love Affair [en])

Italy 1950
d: Michelangelo Antonioni
No Shame (Region 0 us)

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Michelangelo Antonioni's "Story of a Love Affair" is ripe for American film noir treatment. But in his first feature, made in 1950 (ten years before "L'Aventura" brought him international recognition), Antonioni already shifts our focus to his preoccupations, which are James M. Cain's (or Tay Garnett's) without the melodrama. His distanced camera and seeming dispassion are already in evidence, turning a torrid love story into a tale of inevitable corruption and betrayal in postwar industrial society. Set in Milano five years after the war, the story involves a wealthy industrialist who hires a private eye to investigate his young wife, Paola's past. The investigation turns up a former lover, Guido, and the possibility of both lovers' implication in the death of Guido's girlfriend. They renew their affair, but with her new status, Paola cannot sustain an affair on love alone. A plot hatches to sacrifice the industrialist's life for his money.
— PFA
•••••
The narrational structure of a search with competing urges of desire and death surfaces in "Cronaca di un amore" (1950). Antonioni will consistently return to this structure in his later works. The film’s protagonists are doomed past lovers who find their romance renewing and repeating itself with the same tragic ends. Their wish for the destruction of an intervening third-party twice comes true but on each occasion something unidentifiable is also lost between them. All that remains is an individual, separated existence. (An immediate, violent, desire-quenching version of the wish-device occurs, imaginarily, at the end of "Zabriskie Point" [1970].) Cronaca is suggestive of film noir, but Antonioni sidesteps traditional plot conventions to focus on the interior feelings of the lovers. He utilises a mobile camera, composes roomy frames, and follows the performers in deep-focus long takes. Key dialogue is highlighted by centrality, symbolism, frontality, unexpected movement, and cutting: a range of methods that define Antonioni’s precise emphasis of narrative by particulars of style. This approach occupies Antonioni’s formalism until more comprehensive analytical cutting techniques and less character-dependent camera movements arise first in "Le Amiche" (1955) and then more definitively in his first widescreen film, "L’Avventura" (1960).
— James Brown, Senses of Cinema

Le Amiche

(Die Freundinnen [de])

Italy 1955
d: Michelangelo Antonioni
Image Entertainment (Region 0 us)

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L'Avventura

(Die mit der Liebe spielen [de])

Italy / France 1960
d: Michelangelo Antonioni
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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Though once compared to "Psycho", made the same year and also about a couple searching for a woman who mysteriously disappears after featuring heavily in the opening reel, Antonioni's film could not be more dissimilar in tone and effect. Slow, taciturn and coldly elegant in its visual evocation of alienated, isolated figures in a barren Sicilian landscape, the film concerns itself less with how and why the girl vanished from a group of bored and wealthy socialites on holiday, than with the desultory nature of the romance embarked upon by her lover and her best friend while they half-heartedly look for her. If it once seemed the ultimate in arty, intellectually chic movie-making, the film now looks all too studied and remote a portrait of emotional sterility.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The film unfolds against Anna's very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna's pain ("I don't feel you any more") is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost. (Anna may have escaped.) Stunning love scenes between Claudia and Sandro prepare us for those in "The Passenger" fifteen years later: love as a stand-off, a sizing-up as before a bullfight, played out-of-doors. "L'Avventura" is rich in Antonioni's visual architecture, wicked humor, and, finally, youth: a shot of Vitti, hair blowing in the wind while village bells answer one another, may be unmatched in these films for its spirit of hope.
— PFA
•••••
With this simple, elusive tale, director Michelangelo Antonioni launched himself into the forefront of the new emerging European art cinema. At the time of the film’s premiere he was 46 and had directed five previous features, all of them interesting but none of them able to massively capture the public’s attention. The premiere of "L’Avventura", at Cannes in May 1960, was a disaster, with catcalls erupting throughout the auditorium. But the critics loved it and so—when it went on international release—did the public. With "L’Avventura" Antonioni’s career was made and the film is now an acknowledged classic. ... More than any other film "L’Avventura" seems to define the spirit of a time in cinema when anything seemed possible and there was no territory into which it could not venture. Above all what it seeks to capture is the world of fleeting emotion, feelings which are unstable and crystallize only momentarily in the camera’s gaze.
— Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
•••••
The first and only time 'l'avventura' is uttered in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 masterwork, it's a small but shattering revelation. For what at first seems like an ironic reference to something good, gone bad – on a jaunt to an ominously inhospitable rock in the Aeolian Sea called Lisca Bianca, Anna (Lea Massari) mysteriously disappears – is, finally, something bad, gone worse. Uttered in passing during forlorn fornication between Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), 'l'avventura' is also impertinent Italian parlance for the serial sexual adventures of one-night stands, the terra incognito of strangers feigning intimacy as they try to find love without moral compasses.
Surely Antonioni recognised his contemporaries as another lost generation. Indeed, among Anna's possessions – given to her father as a symbolic bequest contrasting the old and the new testaments of truth – are a Bible and F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragedy "Tender is the Night", the most stirring and deeply felt memoir of an earlier lost generation scarred by war.
“A new man is being born…” Antonioni explained after L'avventura had been jeered and shouted down at its premiere in Cannes. “This new man immediately finds himself burdened with a heavy baggage of emotional traits which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but, rather, unsuited and inadequate”.
... Antonioni sees the future through his deep understanding of emotional truth. Antonioni's gift/curse is that of an artist seeing so far into the future, it's as if he were picking through the shards of world to come as an ancient ruin of civilisation.
— Gregory Solman, Senses of Cinema March 2004

L'Eclisse

(Liebe 1962 [de])

Italy / France 1962
d: Michelangelo Antonioni
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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With "L'Avventura" and "La Notte", "L'Eclisse" completes an Antonioni trilogy on doomed relationships in a fractured world. This time, Vitti has a traumatic bust-up with the bookish Rabal, and apathetically lets herself get involved with brash young stockbroker Delon. At first glance it's a more formally innovative movie than its predecessors (witness the ending: a long montage that doesn't show the principal characters), but it's underpinned by the same hackneyed symbolism: dawn and nightfall, construction sites, the Bomb, 'ethnic' spontaneity and the rest. Anyone disenchanted with the vacuity of later Antonioni will find the seeds of their dissatisfaction well-rooted in the mannerism and facile anguish evident here.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"L’eclisse"—beginning with the termination of one love affair and ending with the apparent scuttling of another—appears at times to consist of nothing but narrative drift, and the fact that none of the film’s characters, including the two leads (Vitti and Alain Delon), appear during the final sequence only adds to the impertinence. Some U.S. exhibitors were in fact so troubled by this ending that they lopped off the entire seven minutes—perhaps the most powerful sequence in Antonioni’s work. ...
Paradoxically, though Antonioni is rarely viewed as a director of actors, I would argue that "L’eclisse" features the most expressive and exuberant performances of Vitti and Delon in any movie, and the achievements of this highly structured masterpiece would be unthinkable without them. This even applies to the last sequence, constructed around both their absence and a recapitulation of motifs associated with them. Their intense physical chemistry already starts to feel remote once the objects around their favorite meeting place are deprived of their company—a development that virtually recapitulates the transition from a twist to anxiety-ridden modernist music behind the film’s opening credits. ...
It’s almost as if Antonioni has extracted the essence of everyday street life that serves as a background throughout the picture, and once we’re presented with this essence in its undiluted form, it suddenly threatens and oppresses us. The implication is that behind every story there’s a place and an absence, a mystery and a profound uncertainty, waiting like a vampire at every moment to emerge and take over, to stop the story dead in its tracks. And if we combine this place and absence, this mystery and uncertainty into a single, irreducible entity, what we have is the modern world itself—the place where all of us live, and which most stories are designed to protect us from.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum
•••••
The opening sequence is a masterclass in cinematic technique. As the credits scroll across a black background we are alerted to the director's intentions when a catchy pop song is abruptly replaced by the strident notes of an atonal piece of music. The film then begins with a long sequence during which the camera probes objects and people in a room, accompanied only by the unnerving buzz of an electric fan. The preference for long, static takes could suggest a link to Antonioni's past as a neorealist, but a closer look reveals that the slow pace of the narrative is counterbalanced by a fragmented editing of the scene. We are presented with snapshots of reality and thus made aware of the centrality of the mise en scène. Attention to detail is paramount as an abundant amount of information and symbolic references are presented visually to the point where the characters' dialogue becomes redundant. The dark pyramidal obelisk standing next to the male protagonist acquires full meaning when compared with the objects Vittoria (Monica Vitti) is rearranging behind a propped-up empty frame. The end of their love affair is communicated by her removing one of the two objects from the frame, while at the same time this gesture works at a meta-cinematic level to remind us of the director's careful arrangement of objects within each shot. ...
L'eclisse is also a study in how modern culture defines our perception of reality. However mannered his representations, there is no doubt that Antonioni was tapping into a sense of unease that a few years later would explode in the students' and workers' protest movement and subsequently in acts of terrorism. The depiction of the stock market has a surreal, documentary feel: millions of Lira are made and lost in the space of seconds and Vittoria's incapacity to comprehend it shows capitalism as an oligarchy where a few pull the strings while the rest look on in amazement. Similarly her encounter with third-world culture – during a visit to a friend who used to live in Kenya – only produces embarrassing misunderstandings. All Vittoria and her friend can think of doing is to improvise a childish party where they dress up as African warriors and dance around the flat. This sense of unease, of a lack of understanding, spectacularly takes over in the final scene of the film.... Banishing the main characters allows Antonioni to frame his vision of modern society as the camera slowly scans the streets and fills the screen with urban details juxtaposed with a few signs of the natural world: birds perched on a geometrical roof; water trickling from a barrel; a horse trotting down a deserted avenue. The relation of industrialised society to nature evoked in this collection of silent, documentary-like shots is at the centre of "Il deserto rosso" to the extent that it has been hailed as the first ecologically minded movie of world cinema.
— Guido Bonsaver, Sight & Sound July 2005

Il Deserto rosso

(Die rote Wüste [de])

Italy / France 1964
d: Michelangelo Antonioni
Kinowelt Home Entertainment/DVD (Region 0 de)

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Perhaps the most extraordinary and riveting film of Antonioni's entire career; and correspondingly impossible to synopsise. Monica Vitti is an electronics engineer's neurotic wife, wandering in bewilderment through a modern industrial landscape (the film is set in Ravenna) which Antonioni has coloured in the most startling and original way imaginable. The film is an aesthetic feast, but don't let that distract you from the haunting intricacy of the plot and the performances. Only Richard Harris, as Corrado, the mining engineer who becomes her refuge but who is just passing through, seems uneasy; despite what so many critics said at the time, Vitti's portrayal of the confused girl, alienated from the stark technological landscape around her, is among her very best.
— DP, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Antonioni's first color film, "Red Desert" was shot in the industrialized North of Italy. "The film was born on the spot and the color was born with it," Antonioni has said. With a beautifully restored print, we rediscover Antonioni, the painter on film; Antonioni, the abstract expressionist. Visually and thematically, Red Desert is nothing short of breathtaking for being extraordinarily ahead of its time. Its very beauty is hewn from an environmental apocalypse that is at once metaphor and reality: factories, pipes, yellow smoke trailing to the sky; figures lost in a poisoned fog, staring into a poisoned bog... A decade after the Independent Group's optimism for humanity in a postwar era of progress, Antonioni declared it a wash. In 1964, "Red Desert" is post-Promise. It is also proto-feminist, distilling psychology into a protracted reaction shot, just as Monica Vitti distills the ambivalence of her earlier performances into the figure of a woman so anxiety-ridden she is no longer sensual, at once overly sensitive and barely sensate. The textures of her world have become alien to her. (The wife of the factory owner, she suffers a nervous breakdown following an automobile accident.) Richard Harris is Antonioni's prototypical male: a wanderer, at home nowhere and thus everywhere, he drifts into her world and, just as easily, out again. "Everyone has [your] malady, in one form or another," he tells her. "You ask what you should look at, I ask how I should live." What was considered fashionable angst in 1964 today plays with astounding emotional currency. "Red Desert" asks the question the other films were not ready to ask: "What is Man's nature when there is no more Nature?"
— PFA
•••••
Marking Michelangelo Antonioni's entry into color film, "Red Desert" is a visually dense, metaphoric, and emotionally austere portrait of spiritual desolation, technological disconnection, and environmental malaise. Exploring similar themes of estrangement and ennui as his seminal trilogy of alienation ("L'Avventura", "La Notte", and "L'Eclisse"), Antonioni's color palette juxtaposes muted earth tones and bold, artificial (and often primary) colors to reflect the unnaturality and inherent competition between natural order and industrialization in a modern, and increasingly alienated, society: the automated rhythm of toxic, yellow fume emissions from the plant as Giuliana and Valerio pass nearby that bookend the film; the brightly painted, color-coded pipes that populate the interior spaces of the control facility as Giuliana pays a visit to the emotionally distant Ugo; the bright red, high power antennas that visually bisect the landscape during Giuliana and Corrado's walk (note Theo Angelopoulos' homage to Antonioni through a similarly framed horizon shot of telephone line technicians in "The Suspended Step of the Stork"). Antonioni further manifests the encroachment and toll of industrialization through disquieting ambient noise (modulated high frequency sounds and monotonous drone), bleak and polluted landscapes (the blackened desolate area where Giuliana consumes her appropriated sandwich and the fishing ban on the waters surrounding the disused shack), and the intrusion of man-made objects into the frame (the repeated image of ships traversing the horizon). Inevitably, the seeming cure to Giuliana's indefinable illness proves to be a resigned acceptance and emotional immunity to the irreconcilable chaos of her dehumanized and alienating environment.
— Acquarello

Blow-Up

(Blow-Up [de])

UK / Italy 1966
d: Michelangelo Antonioni
Warner Home Video (Region 2 uk)

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As often with Antonioni, a film riddled with moments of brilliance and scuppered by infuriating pretensions; full of longueurs, it works neither as a portrait of Swinging London, nor as a bona fide thriller. But as it establishes its metaphysical mystery - Hemmings' vacuously trendy photographer discovers a purpose to his life when he enlarges a picture that may or may not prove that a murder has taken place - it does become strangely gripping, questioning the maxim that the camera never lies, and settling into a virtually abstract examination of subjectivity and perception. Deep stuff, then, though the surrounding dross - sex'n'fashion'n'rock'n'roll - makes it pretty hard to watch. Still, at least Carlo Di Palma's camerawork leavens the brew.
— Time Out Film Guide
•••••
In "Blow-Up", Antonioni manages to translate his particular vision into an English-language film and finds in swinging London of the sixties a local habitation for his metaphysics. David Hemmings's Thomas doubts his way into a mystery, and, in so doing, skeptically tests the ability of photography to represent reality. The seeming imperatives of au courant fashion dissolve in confrontations with the timeless, on the one hand, and the evanescent and transitory on the other. Tempo has everything to do with the film; this is perhaps best exemplified in the scene when Hemmings directs Vanessa Redgrave into beating time against a rhythm. Antonioni throws into question the objective, permanent, and fixed qualities of film as he alternates between realism and formalism, between art as an instrument of social reinforcement or of social change. "Blow-Up" is Antonioni's variation on the thematics of film from its beginnings. In the final moments, he gives a new reading to the special relation of artist to audience, to control, liberation, and make-believe.
— William Nestrick, "Apparatus Exposed," PFA
•••••
Antonioni masterfully taunts the audience with the grainy, obscure black and white prints, hanging from the walls, like Rorschach tests. Is there something in the photographs to prove murder, or is it merely topographic aberration? There is no definitive answer. He returns to the park and does indeed find the body...but there are no obvious signs of foul play. Inevitably, the cause of the man's death is immaterial. Like many of Antonioni's films, "Blowup" is a parable of answered prayers: the idea that the distraction of wealth and fame cannot fill the void of loneliness, nor substitute for a soul's unrequited passion.
— Acquarello
•••••
"Blow-Up", which was produced by Italians but made in English, was the first Euro-art film to have a mass success. That it was also the first movie released without the imprimatur of the Motion Picture Association of America's newly revised, soon to be obsolete, code and was further condemned by the National Catholic Office only added to its notoriety. Several scenes were objectionable - most upsetting, it was said, that in which fashion photographer David Hemmings cavorts around his studio with two naked teeny-boppers. The sequence is the Orgy in miniature. It opens with a dream of consumption as the two would-be models try on a closet full of dresses, proceeds through a moment of abandon and a bit of ecstatic destruction to climax in confused boredom. ...
Blow-Up's first-week grosses were a "wow" $30,000; by the second week, they were up 50 percent. Within a month, everyone in America was in on the scene. The Voice published two reviews: Andrew Sarris's rave ("a mod masterpiece") and Richard Goldstein's pan ("a lack of understanding that can only be called Parental"). "Blow-Up" opened as strongly in L.A., Washington, and Boston as it did in New York, while a Life picture spread covered the naked rompings that had cost the movie its MPAA seal. With smug wonderment, the French journal "Positif", reported that it was "not unusual to see Americans freezing in line over an hour before getting into the movie house" to see "Blow-Up". I remember waiting outside the Coronet myself, a college freshman home for vacation, arguing with some equally crazed classmate (now a screenwriter) that "Jules and Jim" was a thousand times better than "The Silence". After the movie, he triumphantly caught me in the lobby: "It doesn't matter if 'Jules and Jim' or 'The Silence' is better—this is the greatest movie ever made!"
Nor was he alone. Arthur Knight told his readers he suspected that "future historians will recognize ["Blow-Up"] as important and germinal a film as "Citizen Kane", "Open City", and "Hiroshima, Mon Amour"—perhaps even more so. " The newly organized National Society of Film Critics voted "Blow-Up" the best film of 1966 and Antonioni the best director. ... "Blow-Up" seemed the last word on camera-inflected reality. At least three early reviews connected Antonioni's murder mystery to the Zapruderized confusion around the Kennedy assassination.
These days, "Blow-Up" doesn't even rate a cult (academic or otherwise)—despite its supremely voyeuristic protagonist and its preservation of, as if in amber, the moment's easy affluence, ubiquitous pop, self-consciously casual sex, ostentatious lack of ties, valorization of impulse behavior, all-important put-on and druggy sense that reality is something individual and subjective, rather than social and objective. "Blow-Up" also offers a fairly extreme and largely uncritical representation of women as objects—an objectification that goes with the canonization of youth. Virtually the only middle-aged characters in the film are the sad-sack employees of an antique shop and Vanessa Redgrave's murdered lover—quite an embarrassment for a movie as instantly geriatric as this one.
— J. Hoberman, Village Voice, December 1991

Professione: Reporter

(The Passenger [en])

Italy / France / USA / Spain 1975
d: Michelangelo Antonioni
Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment / Sony Pictures Classic (Region 1 us)

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Despite the burdensome presence of Runacre in a relatively minor role, this is Antonioni's finest film for years. With a terse, imaginative script by Peploe and Wollen (drawing in part on their experience abroad as, respectively, documentarist and political correspondent) that delves into Graham Greene-ish territory, it concerns a TV reporter (Nicholson) who exchanges identity with an acquaintance he finds dead in a North African hotel room, only to find himself hunted not just by mystified wife and friends, but by some rather threatening strangers. At times obscure, the film certainly sags in the middle, while the relationship Nicholson strikes up with Schneider in his bid to escape to a new life seems both a little perfunctory and gratuitous to the central theme. But the film's opening, charting the burnt-out journalist's progress through an endless desert, and the final twenty minutes - including a virtuoso seven-minute single take - are stunning.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
THE PASSENGER could probably be analyzed until the end of time, each viewing uncovering a different path to understanding the film as a whole. What is more interesting than the "whys" and "hows" of the plot however, are the "where" and "when." Locke and the girl are very much a part of their environment, whether it's the sandy wastelands of northern Africa or the exquisitely organic Gaudi architecture of Barcelona. The girl has no history--she just is--a state of being to which Locke also aspires.
— TV MovieGuide
•••••
"The Passenger" is a desert film, but it resembles "Zabriskie Point" far less than it does the much earlier "L'avventura"-a desert island film-with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. Jack Nicholson portrays a London journalist named Locke who, while in Africa, assumes the identity of a man, Robertson, who has died in the next hotel room. Locke is running away from being a documentarian-from the language and codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing. Nicholson's Locke is Vitti-esque in his desire for escape, for a mask. Embracing Robertson's globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man's life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The final zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus.
— PFA
•••••
Working from a terse, taut, imaginative script by Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen, Antonioni creates a haunting, suspenseful and extremely subtle study of psychological and spiritual disenchantment, beginning with visually ravishing scenes of the burnt-out protagonist's progress through the desert, hinting at a revival of tentative hope in his relationship with a young woman (Maria Schneider), and ending with one of the most memorable and brilliantly audacious codas in the cinema.
— BFI