Michelangelo Antonioni at LACMA
by Andre Soares
Can you feel that inner void that simply refuses to go away? Do you believe that life has no meaning or purpose? Are your relationships all falling apart? Do you find life an angst-ridden, insufferable bore? Ennui fans — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art awaits you . . .
LACMA is presenting "Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni" a series of films by the giant Italian filmmaker, whose body of work includes revered classics such as the cryptic L’Avventura (1960), the cryptic-er Blowup (1966), and the cryptic-est Identificazione di una donna / Identification of a Woman (1982).
But if you’re in the LA area, don’t let the absence of a linear plot and/or the presence of utterly befuddling denouements discourage you. Antonioni’s films are challenging, but they can be extremely rewarding.
Besides the aforementioned films, the festival will also screen the good (and quite accessible) Le Amiche / The Girlfriends (1955), with solid performances by Eleonora Rossi Drago and Valentina Cortese; Il Grido (1957), a downbeat drama with American import Steve Cochran and Alida Valli; La Notte (1961), a merciless dissection of a marriage, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, and Antonioni’s muse, Monica Vitti; and Il Deserto rosso / Red Desert (1964), another study of the human incapacity to connect with others, starring Vitti and Richard Harris.
Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni
"The cinema is not, in essence, moral. It is emotional." -Michelangelo Antonioni
All films in this series are directed by Michelangelo Antonioni unless otherwise noted. All films are projected in new 35mm prints courtesy of Cinecittà Holding and Warner Bros.
This series is presented with the support of Cinecittà Holding, the Italian Ministry of Culture, and the Italian Cultural Institute.
Friday, September 9
Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair) (1950/b&w/110 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Daniele D’Anza, Silvio Giovannetti, Francesco Maselli, Piero Tellini; w/Lucia Bosé, Massimo Girotti.
For his first feature, Antonioni adapted James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, transposing the setting from Depression California to the postwar world of the Milanese aristocracy. An industrialist hires a detective to investigate his wife’s past, and in so doing he unwittingly reunites her with her high-school sweetheart. The two lovers conspire to kill the suspicious husband. Impossibly chic with its glistening succession of cars, boudoirs, and boîtes, Cronaca is a work of astonishing plastic beauty and prefigures the thematic and stylistic preoccupations of Antonioni’s later work. "One of the most perfectly and completely structured films in the entire history of cinema."- Nöel Burch
Il Deserto rosso (Red Desert) (1964/color/120 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra; w/Monica Vitti, Richard Harris.
A traumatized woman, in a desperate search for love, has a brief affair with the owner of a factory that her husband manages. Antonioni’s first color film all but subjugates its characters to its landscape, transforming Ravenna, a city of Byzantine murals, and marble churches into a terrifyingly beautiful desert of slagheaps and sulphuric skies. Prescient in its connection of existential and ecological concerns, Red Desert is counted by many as one of the greatest works of European cinema.
Saturday, September 10
L’Avventura (1960/b&w/140 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Tonino Guerra; w/Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari.
During a yachting party, a wealthy young woman argues with her architect lover and then disappears from the Sicilian island they’d been exploring. Her lover and her best friend set out to find her, but their urgency dissipates as they fall into an uneasy sexual relationship. Shot on location in Palermo, Messina, Syracuse and Taormina the film unfolds in a succession of stark black-and-white images that culminate in a wrenching and tentative reunion on a sun-bleached hotel terrace. Antonioni’s epochal masterpiece provoked derision and outrage at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, but quickly established its claim as "the most important film since Citizen Kane."- Robert Benayoun
Short Documentaries, 1943-1950 (b&w/60 min. total)
Gente del Po, Nettezza urbana, L’Amorosa menzogna; Superstizione; Sette canne, un vestito, La Villa dei mostri, Vertigine, and fragments of La Funivia del faloria.
Throughout his career, Antonioni made short films-essays, travelogues, small meditations, and narratives for anthology films. This selection comprises all the films made prior to his first feature, among them the thematically important Gente del Po, a portrait of the people and landscape of the misty Po River Valley, where Antonioni (and later Pasolini and Bertolucci) grew up.
Friday, September 16
Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) (1955/b&w/104 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Alba De Cespedes; w/Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti.
A young woman returns to her native Turin to open a fashion salon where she falls in with the "smart set," including the suicidal daughter of an eminent family, a painter who is jealous of his wife’s success, and a woman who vents her despair by attacking her closest friends. In its emphasis on the spiritual and moral malaise of the wealthy and in its stunningly abstract style, this important early work looks forward to the groundbreaking trilogy of the early 1960s. "The film merits all possible superlatives."- Philip Strick
Il Grido(The Cry) (1957/b&w/102 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Ennio De Concini; w/Steve Cochran, Alida Valli.
Steve Cochran, who specialized in Hollywood gangsters and playboys, gives a powerful performance as a violent and inarticulate laborer who drifts from job to job in the Po Valley following the breakup of his marriage. With images and an atmosphere that are among the most indelible in all Antonioni films, ll Grido is one of the director’s personal favorites: "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 at the mirror and are startled by the reflection of our own face."
Saturday, September 17
Special Guests: Michelangelo Antonioni and Enrica Fico Antonioni
Being with Michelangelo (2005/color/57 min./DVD) Dir: Enrica Fico Antonioni.
A moving and intimate portrait of the master shot and edited by his wife.
La Notte (1961/b&w/122 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra; w/Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti.
A key work of modernist cinema, La Notte still maintains its power to shock audiences into a new kind of seeing. Mastroianni plays an exhausted Milanese novelist coasting on his reputation, and Moreau plays his disenchanted wife. As the title suggests, the film follows the couple from a daytime visit to a dying friend in a hospital, through a decadent all-night party at the mansion of a wealthy industrialist, and onto a deserted golf course where, in the chilly dawn light, they face uncomfortable truths. In what was to become an Antonioni trademark, the most original sequence is wordless: Moreau’s solitary, erotically charged stroll through the empty but disquieting streets and soccer fields of a housing project.
Preceded by The Gaze of Michelangelo (2004/color/10 min) Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni.
A piece of sculpture provides the context for this "dialogue" between Antonioni and his Renaissance namesake.
Friday, September 23
La Signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camellias) (1953/b&w/105 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Francesco Maselli, P. M. Pasinetti; w/Lucia Bosé, Gino Cervi, Andrea Checchi.
The "lady without camellias" is a Milanese shop girl who is discovered by a sleazy movie producer. Insanely jealous he marries her, and attempts to change her image by casting her as Joan of Arc in his first art film. Originally conceived for Gina Lollabrigida (who turned it down because of its stinging portrait of the Italian film industry and of actresses very much like herself), Camellias, wrote Vincent Canby, is "far more than a footnote to Antonioni’s career; it is a preface" and "invariably stunning to behold."-Time Out
Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman) (1982/color/128 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Gérard Brach; w/Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio.
A filmmaker searches for two women: one to inspire his new film, the other to replace the wife he has divorced. His encounters with a beautiful, androgynous, and bisexual aristocrat and then with a stage actress, drive the director only further into artistic and emotional paralysis. Chic, oblique, and extraordinarily erotic, Identification marks Antonioni’s return to the preoccupations and setting of his first film and of his great trilogy: ennui and desolation among the haute bourgeoisie.
Saturday, September 24
L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962/b&w/125 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra; w/Monica Vitti, Alain Delon.
"Of all my old films, L’Eclisse is the one I like best," Antonioni claimed in 1967. "From the point of view of style it is the most rigorous, and therefore the most successful. Also it is the most modern." A tailspin in Rome’s stock market serves as the backdrop for a love affair between a translator (Monica Vitti) and her mother’s stockbroker, embodied to perfection by two of cinema’s most beautiful animals: Vitti and Delon. The final sequence, in which the camera travels to the appointed assignation but the lovers do not, is increasingly suspenseful and justly famous.
Beyond the Clouds (1995/color/109 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Soheil Ghodsy, Tonino Guerra, Wim Wenders; dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders; w/Fanny Ardant, Irène Jacob, John Malkovich, Sophie Marceau, Jean Reno, Peter Weller, Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau.
In a style that seems at once literary and musical, Antonioni juxtaposes four tales of love and loss in contemporary France and Italy. "Beyond the Clouds feels like a summation of [Antonioni's] abiding concerns . . . [and] an elegy for the art movie."-Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
Friday, September 30
Blowup (1966/color/110 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra; w/Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, David Hemmings, Jane Birkin.
David Hemmings plays a disaffected fashion photographer who stumbles on a murder while taking pictures of a couple kissing in a shadowy park. Or so the photographs of the tryst, successively enlarged (another of Antonioni’s virtuoso exercises in pure visual storytelling) seem to suggest. Blowup’s narrative U-turns and enigmatic dead end made whether the murder had really taken place into the trendiest debate of the 1960s, and the "swinging London" zeitgeist still parties on in the antics of nymphet Jane Birkin, anorexic model Veruschka, and The Yardbirds. But Blowup has not dated; it seems richer, subtler, and more complex than ever.
Zabriskie Point (1970/color/110 min.) Scr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Rossetti, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe; w/Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Rod Taylor.
At age fifty-seven and flush from the international success of Blowup, Antonioni traveled to a Southern California roiling with student unrest to film (for MGM) this politically engagé portrait of a rich college "drop out" who flees to Death Valley in a stolen plane after his plot to kill a policeman fails. In the desert he meets and makes love to a young woman amid a phantasmagoria of copulating couples. While many critics admired both this sequence and the film’s apocalyptic ending-in which consumer America blows up in lyrical slow motion-Richard Corliss was closer to today’s critical assessment when he wrote in Time: "the most entertaining of Antonioni’s films . . . the most intelligent, compassionate probing of the radical young in recent American film."
The Film Department wishes to extend particular thanks to Camilla Cormanni, Anna Principato, and Rossella Rinaldi, Cinecittà Holding; Massimo Sarti, Italian Ministry of External Affairs; Francesca Valente, Italian Cultural Institute, Los Angeles; Joyce Shen, No Shame Films; Sarah Finklea, Janus Films; Marilee Womack, Richard May, Warner Bros.; Antonella Pizzetti, eu-genia, and James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario.
Cinecittà Holding thanks the rights holders of all the movies and documentaries that made this retrospective possible: Associazione Philip Morris-Progetto Cinema in collaboration with Marco Ferreri; Cecchi GoriI Group; Mediaset-Cinema Forever; Cineteca Del Friuli; Codi SpA; Compass-Movietime; Felice De Maria; Doro TV Merchandising; Mrs. Jacqueline Ferreri; Gruppo Minerva International; Hollywood Classics, London; Intra Movies; Istituto Luce; Iter Film; Mr. André S. Labarthe; Lanterna Editrice; Maurizio La Pira; Pathe Renn Production, Paris; Plaza Production International, Paris; RAI Cinema; RAI Direzione Teche; RAI Trade; Roadmovies Produktionen, Berlin; Scuola Nazionale Di Cinema-Cineteca Nazionale; Société Cinematographique Lyre, Paris; Sunshine, Paris; Surf Film; Titanus; Titti Film.
TICKETS/INFORMATION
$9; $6 for museum and AFI members, seniors (62+), and students with valid ID.
Please note: many programs sell out. Tickets are on sale now and may be purchased at the museum box office. For information call the box office at (323) 857-6010. Purchase of a film ticket includes entrance to the galleries.
All evening screenings begin at 7:30 pm unless otherwise noted. There is a ten-minute intermission between features on a double bill. All programs are subject to change. All films are in 35mm unless otherwise indicated. All foreign-language films are subtitled in English. Many films are unrated and may not be appropriate for younger viewers.
Source: LACMA’s schedule.
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