Michelangelo Antonioni

Discussion and info on people in film, ranging from directors to actors to cinematographers to writers.
Post Reply
Message
Author
rrenault
Joined: Wed Nov 17, 2010 3:49 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#276 Post by rrenault » Fri Jul 26, 2013 9:37 am

Yes, but much of the art that's been easily assimilated now, like that of Flaubert or of any of the French Impressionist painters was considered "deliberately alienating" during its time in much the same way a film like Contempt would be seen as "deliberately alienating" today.

User avatar
MichaelB
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
Location: Worthing
Contact:

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#277 Post by MichaelB » Fri Jul 26, 2013 9:38 am

rrenault wrote:But still, I wonder why Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game have so much more staying power than L'Avventura. They've continuously been in the top 5-10 while L'Avventura dropped from 3 to like 21!
Yes, but that's because you're not comparing like with like. The 1962 poll (where L'Avventura came second) had just 145 contributors, and was only assessing roughly fifty years of cinema. The 2012 poll (where it did indeed come 21st) had 846 - with the further complication that these 846 people had an additional half-century of cinema to take into account, so the competition was far fiercer.

And yet despite all this, L'Avventura still managed to get twice as many votes in 2012 (43) as it did in 1962 (20)!

Which is pretty impressive when you consider that the film hasn't been that easy to see for much of the intervening period (as I probably already said in this thread, it was out of circulation in Britain for a very long time indeed, and doubtless elsewhere) - whereas Citizen Kane, La Règle du Jeu and Tokyo Story have been constantly reissued. Even Vertigo was widely seen in bootleg copies when it was notionally locked away in the vaults prior to 1983.

User avatar
Sloper
Joined: Tue May 29, 2007 10:06 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#278 Post by Sloper » Fri Jul 26, 2013 9:57 am

rrenault wrote:Yes, but much of the art that's been easily assimilated now, like that of Flaubert or of any of the French Impressionist painters was considered "deliberately alienating" during its time in much the same way a film like Contempt would be seen as "deliberately alienating" today.
Not sure I understand your point about Flaubert, or how you're applying the term 'alienating' to his work. Wasn't it condemned for being obscene, rather than for being 'alienating' or difficult? Madame Bovary is a scathing, horrifying novel, but it's also incredibly funny, empathetic and tragic. That's why it's so popular, and I'm guessing it's why it was a bestseller in its own day (I don't know much about the novel's reception, I have to say). Same goes for Sentimental Education and A Simple Heart, which I believe are Flaubert's next most popular works.

rrenault
Joined: Wed Nov 17, 2010 3:49 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#279 Post by rrenault » Fri Jul 26, 2013 10:03 am

This might have something to do with the allegations of pretension directed at Antonioni:

Image

rrenault
Joined: Wed Nov 17, 2010 3:49 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#280 Post by rrenault » Fri Jul 26, 2013 10:06 am

MichaelB wrote:
rrenault wrote:But still, I wonder why Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game have so much more staying power than L'Avventura. They've continuously been in the top 5-10 while L'Avventura dropped from 3 to like 21!
Yes, but that's because you're not comparing like with like. The 1962 poll (where L'Avventura came second) had just 145 contributors, and was only assessing roughly fifty years of cinema. The 2012 poll (where it did indeed come 21st) had 846 - with the further complication that these 846 people had an additional half-century of cinema to take into account, so the competition was far fiercer.

And yet despite all this, L'Avventura still managed to get twice as many votes in 2012 (43) as it did in 1962 (20)!

Which is pretty impressive when you consider that the film hasn't been that easy to see for much of the intervening period (as I probably already said in this thread, it was out of circulation in Britain for a very long time indeed, and doubtless elsewhere) - whereas Citizen Kane, La Règle du Jeu and Tokyo Story have been constantly reissued. Even Vertigo was widely seen in bootleg copies when it was notionally locked away in the vaults prior to 1983.
20/145=.138
43/846=.051

User avatar
MichaelB
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
Location: Worthing
Contact:

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#281 Post by MichaelB » Fri Jul 26, 2013 10:13 am

Your formula doesn't take into account the number of films in existence in 1962 and the equivalent in 2012 - without which, your calculation is meaningless.

But I have to say that your whole argument seems pretty meaningless.

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#282 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jul 26, 2013 10:16 am

Plus, the early sixties were probably the last time a serious film lover could have been said to have seen a majority of available films of import. There's a reason Godard viewed his tenure at Cahiers as experiencing the last breath of cinema

User avatar
Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
Location: Canada

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#283 Post by Mr Sausage » Fri Jul 26, 2013 10:23 am

Sloper wrote:Not sure I understand your point about Flaubert, or how you're applying the term 'alienating' to his work. Wasn't it condemned for being obscene, rather than for being 'alienating' or difficult? Madame Bovary is a scathing, horrifying novel, but it's also incredibly funny, empathetic and tragic. That's why it's so popular, and I'm guessing it's why it was a bestseller in its own day (I don't know much about the novel's reception, I have to say). Same goes for Sentimental Education and A Simple Heart, which I believe are Flaubert's next most popular works.
It's a pretty weird thing to say about a novel about torrid adultery. Flaubert's own claim, "I am Madame Bovary!", would seem to contradict the idea that Flaubert was keeping any of the material at arm's length. Plus there's its lyrical prose style, especially in the nature descriptions, never a technique that provoked much alienation.
sloper wrote:I guess his point is that Bergman (and Antonioni) are trying too hard, thinking too much, and so revealing a lack of 'inspiration'. Bergman and Antonioni are perhaps rather cerebral film-makers, better at making us think than at making us feel; at least that's how I respond to them, and is perhaps why I tend to get impatient with Bergman's films when they become emotive or sentimental.
Wow, that's about the extreme opposite of how I respond to Bergman. I can take or leave the intellectual content, whereas I'm enthralled by the emotional content, and not just the more gentle, winning emotions of Wild Strawberries, say, but the relentless excavations of pain and rage in something like Cries and Whispers or Winter Light. Far from alienating me, I find Bergman's films fairly pulse with emotions that, however far from your own, are easy to get caught up in, or at least come to feel they're of singular importance. This is quite the opposite of Antonioni, who's a fairly dispassionate and removed filmmaker.

I think this whole conversation is sour grapes. I mean, complaining that L'aaventura managed to make the list of the top 20 films ever made is kind of bemusing in its narrow-sightedness.

User avatar
MichaelB
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
Location: Worthing
Contact:

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#284 Post by MichaelB » Fri Jul 26, 2013 10:44 am

domino harvey wrote:Plus, the early sixties were probably the last time a serious film lover could have been said to have seen a majority of available films of import. There's a reason Godard viewed his tenure at Cahiers as experiencing the last breath of cinema
Exactly. If you look back to what was available in 1962, vast chunks of film history were off limits to most English speakers (a description that I imagine applied to the majority of people being polled).

Japanese cinema had only been around a decade as far as the West was concerned, eastern European cinema was represented pretty much exclusively by Poland (which had recently had an international breakthrough that the Hungarians and Czechs wouldn't match until the mid-60s), and Latin American, African and Chinese cinema might as well not have existed at all, or Indian besides Satyajit Ray. And there were precious few opportunities to watch older films besides a selection of already-canonised titles - one reason, I suspect, why the older polls tend to favour what were then very recent titles like Bicycle Thieves and L'Avventura much more than the later ones.

So not only was the overall pool much, much smaller, it would have been massively US and western European-centric, with a few token Soviet and Japanese titles thrown in.

Under those circumstances, as Mr Sausage says, the fact that a title like L'Avventura, which has been only patchily accessible for much of its life, still manages to come in at number 21 (and since 17 was a tie, you could argue that it cracked the Top 20) is a remarkably impressive achievement.
Last edited by MichaelB on Fri Jul 26, 2013 3:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.

User avatar
Sloper
Joined: Tue May 29, 2007 10:06 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#285 Post by Sloper » Fri Jul 26, 2013 10:48 am

Mr Sausage wrote:Wow, that's about the extreme opposite of how I respond to Bergman. I can take or leave the intellectual content, whereas I'm enthralled by the emotional content, and not just the more gentle, winning emotions of Wild Strawberries, say, but the relentless excavations of pain and rage in something like Cries and Whispers or Winter Light. Far from alienating me, I find Bergman's films fairly pulse with emotions that, however far from your own, are easy to get caught up in, or at least come to feel they're of singular importance. This is quite the opposite of Antonioni, who's a fairly dispassionate and removed filmmaker.
I thought someone might respond like this - not that I was trolling, of course... It's interesting to debate these distinctions, but they're all so subjective. What you find 'dispassionate and removed' in Antonioni, I feel intensely caught up in on an emotional level...though I can see what you mean, and I tend to go through a lot of brain-work before getting to that emotional level. What you're 'enthralled' by in Bergman tends to leave me fairly cold, although again I can of course see what you mean. For instance, I find Harriet Andersson's performance in Cries and Whispers literally unwatchable at times, because it's such an unflinching evocation of unendurable pain. No one could watch those scenes without having some kind of emotional response. And yet, this seems to me something that Andersson, rather than Bergman, is making me feel, and the film itself strikes me as rather cold, indeed as rather detached from what that character is going through (much like her sisters). Likewise, Scenes from a Marriage is full of scenes that are, by any normal standards, 'emotionally intense', and yet when I watch the film I tend not to empathise much with the characters - first and foremost, I admire the intricacy and flair with which Bergman and his actors dissect the relationship. The five hours go by in a flash, I find, partly because I find the film so compelling, but also because I don't feel all that 'caught up' in it emotionally, even at the most violent moments. Conversely, although Antonioni never (on the surface) seems to invite empathy or sympathy for the un-named photographer in Blowup, and rarely does so for Niccolo in Identification, their barely-expressed anguish affects me very deeply. The latter film in particular always seems to last forever, and is quite exhausting - I usually have to take a break halfway through - because the story it's telling is so painful. This may all sound a bit weird, but I suppose it's a good thing that we can respond to these films in such drastically different ways.

User avatar
Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
Location: Canada

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#286 Post by Mr Sausage » Fri Jul 26, 2013 11:12 am

Yeah, I wrote that in the spirit of respectful disagreement. In a case like this, our responses to Bergman (or Antonioni) will be our own. I think we can find common agreement on at least two points:

A. Bergman's films are emotional and very up front about those emotions, regardless of whether one can engage in them or not.
B. Antonioni's films are subdued and pitched very low. It's not the presence so much as the absence of emotion that affects the viewer.

The only thing I would add is that my response to Bergman is probably more like the general response to him, whereas your response to Antonioni is probably more like the general response than mine. If I had to guess, anyway.

I will add, too, that despite all the disrupting formal techniques in Contempt, I find that, unlike every other Godard film I've seen, I'm able to engage with that one on a deep emotional rather than just an intellectual level. That central scene in the apartment is increasingly devastating as the pattern of reconciliation and rupture keeps renewing, and for all the deliberate fakeness of the auto accident, the image still wrecks me every time.

User avatar
repeat
Joined: Wed Jun 24, 2009 4:04 am
Location: high in the Custerdome

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#287 Post by repeat » Fri Jul 26, 2013 1:03 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:despite all the disrupting formal techniques in Contempt, I find that, unlike every other Godard film I've seen, I'm able to engage with that one on a deep emotional rather than just an intellectual level
Ditto - and consequently it's the only Godard film for which I can honestly claim to feel anything else than either a) rather disinterested appreciation/admiration or b) rather intense frustration/annoyment...

Mathew2468
Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2012 4:40 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#288 Post by Mathew2468 » Fri Jul 26, 2013 6:31 pm

:roll:

User avatar
ellipsis7
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 1:56 pm
Location: Dublin

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#289 Post by ellipsis7 » Sat May 31, 2014 4:41 am

Major exhibition @ the Albertina Museum in Vienna, BLOW-UP: ANTONIONI'S CLASSIC FILM AND PHOTOGRAPHY
(30 April 2014 - 17 August 2014)
...

A substantial catalogue (in both German and English editions) is published by Hatje Cantz and available through Amazon, Book Depository, the Albertina itself and the publisher's own website...

Saimo
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 5:30 am
Location: journeys-italy.blogspot.com
Contact:

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#290 Post by Saimo » Tue Aug 26, 2014 1:37 am

ellipsis7 wrote:Not every day two new (albeit relatively minor) entries are added to Antonioni's filmography - a couple of promotional shorts from 1956 for a new daily newspaper then, IL GIORNO... Prints of the films have surfaced on Ebay....
Hard to believe, but on e-bay the Antonioni shorts received no bid at all... La Cineteca del Friuli eventually bought them, and they will be screened at Trieste in September.

User avatar
ellipsis7
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 1:56 pm
Location: Dublin

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#291 Post by ellipsis7 » Wed Apr 08, 2015 1:17 pm

Antonioni exhibition (previously shown at Ferrara & Brussels) opens today @ Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, those two newspaper commercials screening as part of the parallel retrospective... This is an interesting virtual exhibit 'travelling' through his length of his career...

User avatar
filmyfan
Joined: Fri Feb 02, 2007 9:50 am

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#292 Post by filmyfan » Wed Apr 08, 2015 6:08 pm

ellipsis7 wrote:Antonioni exhibition (previously shown at Ferrara & Brussels) opens today @ Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, those two newspaper commercials screening as part of the parallel retrospective... This is an interesting virtual exhibit 'travelling' through his length of his career...
I am planning on taking the short trip to see this exhibition. Loved the Demy exhibition 2 years ago that CF did.

criterion10

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#293 Post by criterion10 » Fri Aug 28, 2015 8:37 pm

Not sure if this has been posted before (just saw it on Soderbergh's site):

Image

oh yeah
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2009 7:45 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#294 Post by oh yeah » Fri Aug 28, 2015 8:45 pm

The film premiered in the US in December 1966, though, so the dating of that memo makes no sense. Isn't this just Soderbergh being a prankster, telling us what he decided to cut out in the form of an "authentic" document? "Tureen Patarga" turns up zero results on google, also.

criterion10

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#295 Post by criterion10 » Fri Aug 28, 2015 8:48 pm

oh yeah wrote:The film premiered in the US in December 1966, though, so the dating of that memo makes no sense. Isn't this just Soderbergh being a prankster, telling us what he decided to cut out in the form of an "authentic" document? "Tureen Patarga" turns up zero results on google, also.
That's completely possible, in which case I now look like a total idiot :oops:

User avatar
FakeBonanza
Joined: Sun Dec 02, 2012 10:35 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#296 Post by FakeBonanza » Fri Aug 28, 2015 8:53 pm

It must be Soderbergh's prankster intro to his cut, not only because of the date of the US release, but the content of the letter itself (which is rather absurd). "Noted designer" Hermoine Girth-Schnidt sounds even more fictitious than Tureen Patarga.

User avatar
Kirkinson
Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:34 am
Location: Portland, OR

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#297 Post by Kirkinson » Fri Aug 28, 2015 9:59 pm

That's most definitely a Soderbergh fabrication. That's definitely his sense of humor, and names like "Hermione Girth-Schnitt" (Schnitt=cut) and "Tureen Patarga" are right up there with "Fletcher Munson" and "T. Azimuth Schwitters" (characters from Schizopolis).

User avatar
tavernier
Joined: Sat Apr 02, 2005 7:18 pm

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#298 Post by tavernier » Fri Oct 20, 2017 2:35 pm

Complete retrospective coming to MOMA in NYC:
Michelangelo Antonioni
December 07, 2017–January 07, 2018


It would be hard to overstate Michelangelo Antonioni’s influence on postwar cinema, architecture and design, fashion, literature, and philosophy, even on modern conceptions of the intellectual and the erotic. Antonioni (1912–2007), whose fascination with mediated reality only deepened over time, was a restless experimenter with composition, camera movement, cutting, and storytelling.

Presented with Luce Cinecittà, Rome, and featuring nearly forty 35mm prints and digital preservations, this first complete retrospective in New York in more than a decade celebrates the writer-director’s legendary collaborations with Monica Vitti—the trilogy of L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, and La Notte, which Pauline Kael myopically dismissed in her infamous essay “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties”—as well as Red Desert, Blow-Up, and The Passenger. It also foregrounds Antonioni’s sociopolitical concerns through his neorealist documentary shorts and through his impressionistic yet incendiary Chung Kuo, Cina (1972), which lifted the Iron Curtain on China during the Cultural Revolution. Comparing the “antique and silent” beauty of Ferrara, his childhood town, with his “hard and hostile” experience of Rome, Antonioni might well have been describing the tensions within his own films: abstract, elliptical narratives involving men and women who are estranged from each other, from nature, and from themselves, and who drift through landscapes reflective of their existential despair and yearning.


User avatar
hearthesilence
Joined: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:22 am
Location: NYC

Re: Michelangelo Antonioni

#300 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:37 pm

I typically skip DCP's, but I'll catch that new 4k restoration of Red Desert. I think the last complete retro was the one BAM put on around 2009 and 2010. I only knew a few films by Antonioni, but after plowing through another 6 or 7 films, I came to believe that he was THE greatest of all Italian filmmakers. Since then my appreciation for Rossellini has also grown enormously as I've been able to watch more of his films too. Amazing to think so many of their films were tough to track down here in the U.S. for so long.

Post Reply