Italy

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By the time Michelangelo Antonioni released Michelangelo Eye to EyeBeyond the Clouds in 1995, his keen sense of patient, intimate observation had seemed to give way to a kind of leering, gratuitous voyeurism in the film’s repeated, over-lingering shots of the female form. It is, however, precisely this painstaking attention to the voluptuousness of form and tactileness of surfaces that makes his subsequent short film, Michelangelo Eye to Eye particularly sensual and textural in its execution. Prefaced with a text description of the filmmaker’s recent health problems (in particular, a debilitating stroke that left him partially paralyzed), the film opens with a shot of a frail Antonioni emerging from the shadows as he walks in slow, awkward gait into an unpopulated hall where Michelangelo Buonarotti’s marble statue of Moses – a scaled down version of an ambitiously conceived wall tomb for Pope Julius II – is once again in display after a period of meticulous restoration. Composed of a series of detailed observations of the sculpture’s composition from several camera angles and vantage points, Antonioni continually refocuses to the shot of Moses’ opaque gaze – an image that is sublimely matched by the filmmaker’s own occluded, returned gaze as he examines the object of his attention through limpid, watery eyes. In addition to creating a thorough, meticulous, and deliberative objective study of the Renaissance sculpture’s robust physical form and timeless, universal beauty, Antonioni’s juxtaposition of his own weakened, aging frame against the larger-than-life sculpture of Moses creates an indelible, thoughtful, and poignant image on human frailty, transience, creative compromise, and the enduring legacy of – and mortal transcendence through – enlightened art.
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One of Antonioni’s most important films and a precursor of L’AVVENTURA, IL GRIDO has gained in stature over the years to the point where it overshadows some of his better known works. (Its images and atmosphere are amongst the most indelible in all Antonioni.) An imposing portrait of a worker who wanders the Po Valley with his little daughter after his wife leaves him, IL GRIDO is one of the director’s personal favourites: “When I saw IL GRIDO after some time,” Antonioni said, “I was stunned to find myself faced with such nakedness, with such great solitude. It was like what happens on some mornings when we look in the mirror and are startled by the reflection of our own face.” “IL GRIDO attains the perfection of a masterpiece. . . Indeed, it is a classic of cinematography, and certainly one of the most significant films of recent years” (Pierre Leprohon).Read More »

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Feb. 19, 1965

Red Desert is at once the most beautiful, the most simple and the most daring film yet made by Italy’s masterful Michelangelo Antonioni, a director so prodigiously gifted that he can marshal a whole new vocabulary of cinema to reiterate his now-familiar themes. The new element of Antonioni’s art is color. In Red Desert he shows a painterly approach to each frame; indeed he had whole fields and streets sprayed with pigment to produce precise shades of mood and meaning. Never has so bleak a vision of contemporary life been projected with more intensity, from craven yellow and life-brimming green to violent, passionate crimson and the grey of total despair.Read More »

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader wrote:

The controversial, highly charged 1960 masterpiece that put Michelangelo Antonioni’s name on the international map. It’s a work that requires some patience–a 145-minute mystery that strategically elides any conventional denouement–but more than amply repays the effort. The ambiguous title adventure begins on a luxury pleasure cruise. The disconsolate girlfriend (Lea Massari) of a successful architect (Gabriele Ferzetti) mysteriously disappears on a remote volcanic island, and the architect and the woman’s best friend (Monica Vitti) set out across Italy looking for her, becoming involved with each other along the way. In the course of their epic travels, Antonioni paints a complex portrait of a crisis in contemporary values and relationships. His stunning compositions and choreographic mise en scene, punctuated by eerie silences and shots that linger expectantly over landscapes, made him a key Italian modernist director of the 50s and 60s, perhaps rivaled only by Rossellini. This haunting work–the first in a loose trilogy completed by La notte and Eclipse–shows him at the summit of his powers.Read More »

A three-part collaboration of auteurs Michelangelo Antonioni ,Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-Wai on the subject of eroticism. With, amongst others, Gong Li and Robert Downey jr.

Totalling 108 minutes.
1, Antonioni – “Il filo pericoloso delle cose”
2, Soderbergh – “Equilibrium”
3, Wong Kar-Wai – “The Hand”Read More »

In 1970, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni was asked to return to his roots as a documentarian for this profile of China, fully sanctioned by the government of the People’s Republic. In a detached, distant style, the director and his crew pick up snatches of life in and around Bejing, including: kids at an elementary school; a hospital where a woman is giving a cesarean birth; and a cotton mill and its workers. Despite Antonioni’s efforts, China denounced the finished film, and as such, it has gone relatively unseen in most parts of the world, including the United States.Read More »

The Passenger (1975) marked the end of Antonioni’s three picture deal with MGM, and simultaneously the end of his mainstream acceptance. Although revered now as one of his finest works, The Passenger had lukewarm reception at best, with most of the American critics still bitter of Antonioni’s caricaturing of American capitalism in Zabriskie Point (1969). Since those two films had been costly flops, Antonioni found himself unable to secure investors for the arthouse pictures he’d become known for. Five years past, and still not a film, until finally Antonioni settled on The Oberwald Mystery.Read More »

Promotional omnibus film, made for the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy, featuring portraits of 12 Italian cities.
For all those who will not be going to Italy for a vacation this year… here is the next best thing. A who’s who of Italian directors anno 1990 turn their cameras on a specific Italian city. Most of these (very) short films do not have dialogue of any kind, and rely instead solely on the beauty of the images and music to depict the various cities.

Directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni (segment “Roma”)
Bernardo Bertolucci (segment “Bologna”)
Giuseppe Bertolucci (segment “Bologna”)
Mauro Bolognini (segment “Palermo”)
Alberto Lattuada (segment “Genova”)
Carlo Lizzani (segment “Cagliari”)
Mario Monicelli (segment “Verona”)
Ermanno Olmi (segment “Milano”)
Gillo Pontecorvo (segment “Udine”)
Francesco Rosi (segment “Napoli”)
Mario Soldati (segment “Torino”)
Lina Wertmüller (segment “Bari”)
Franco Zeffirelli (segment “Firenze”)Read More »

A non-fiction documentary made between 1943 and 1947 about a barge trip down the Po River, looking at the relationship between individuals and their environment.Read More »