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It would be nice if Antonioni's short documentaries could be collected on disc.

Broken record time here.

The 4k restoration of Red Desert is inferior to the rather old restored 35mm that is still in circulation and recently screened at the Metrograph.

Watching the 4k was a bizarre experience. Some scenes are too dark, and the famous colours just disappear. Others are too bright. Flesh tones are washed out almost throughout. But oddly it varies from scene to scene.

The black house that appears in the antenna scene should be absolutely pitch black. The whole point of that house being in various shots is to provide an almost 3D perspective, which in the 35mm is achieved by its utter blackness. In the 4k, it's just some house. Another example of the 4k being too bright.

The famous DCP blur is there. At one point Vitti picks up a book. I've forgotten the title/author, but in the 35mm it is clearly visible. In the 4k it is not. As in any MA film, he doesn't have scenes like this for no reason, so the "restoration" ruins it.

The 35mm has cold colours throughout except the beach scene. In the 4k, the beach scene is not sufficiently different, although clearly MA intended that scene to have a totally different colour scheme. In the 35mm, it's like switching to super-technicolour.

I generally avoid retro DCPs but I have noticed that many have a few bits where the "film" gets jerky. As if a few frames are skipped. I have never seen this in current-release DCPs, but it happens in restored versions on occasion. Fortunately this was only a problem a few times in Red Desert. But still.

There are a handful of typos or awkward translations in the 4k, although generally it follows the (perfect) 35mm translation word for word.

Upshot: see the 35mm if you can. It is GORGEOUS.

Anyone see Chung Kuo at MoMA? A screening of this title is rare enough. Not only is this the full-length version, it's reportedly an excellent 35mm print.

Thanks to the weather, I won't be back in time to see it, but Jim Hoberman has already hailed it as a masterpiece and Nick Pinkerton has also praised it as a major work.

hearthesilence wrote:Anyone see Chung Kuo at MoMA? A screening of this title is rare enough. Not only is this the full-length version, it's reportedly an excellent 35mm print.

Thanks to the weather, I won't be back in time to see it, but Jim Hoberman has already hailed it as a masterpiece and Nick Pinkerton has also praised it as a major work.

I've read quite a bit about it and certainly know why it's rare to see. I know that a copy was available from Mr. Bongo but it was brought to my attention they don't always do things legally. This is a pretty big deal it's being shown. The film was very much intended to be propaganda (By the Chinese officials) but Antonioni didn't comply in the way the Chinese officials wanted wanted. One shot in particular, a passing shot of the underside of a bridge infuriated the government because they wanted to give off the impression that the architecture was flawless. (It was not and apparently looked quite shoddy.) An interesting bit of trivia but it should give you some insight into not only what Antonioni's mindset was but also the Chinese governments at the time. There is also I believe a particularly graphic sequence is which a Caesarean section is performed. In this sense Chung Kuo is pretty naturalistic and that's precisley why the Chinese government hated it.

I realize this isn't exactly what you wanted but I hope it gives some insight into what it actually is supposed to be. It's a dream release from any legitimate label for me.

Thanks for the info - I was unaware of this film until the Antonioni retrospective was announced a month ago, and it wasn't until the past week that I saw any reviews on this film. They all discussed its problems with the Chinese government, but I wasn't seeing any specific details of what may have been offensive within the film itself. It's amazing to me that an excellent (possibly pristine) 35mm print of this film even exists - it was shot in 16mm and primarily broadcast on television (apparently in a much shorter cut in the U.S.) before being more or less shelved.

The (formerly) official Chinese line on the film is laid out in this interminable piece, and while I won't go so far as to claim that the anonymous commentator made these criticisms entirely in bad faith, the fact that they were given such a prominent airing (or any airing at all) probably had a lot more to do with factional struggles than the actual film—Antonioni made it at the invitation of Zhou Enlai and the campaign against it was the initiative of the rival grouping around Jiang Qing, who hoped to embarrass and weaken the Foreign Ministry that Zhou controlled. In other words, I think anything Antonioni might've produced would've come in for similarly vituperative criticism. (As an aside, a secondary target of the anti-Zhou maneuverings was Deng Xiaoping, who of course later made a spectacular comeback; apparently Antonioni was invited back to China in the early '80s after Deng's elevation to paramount leader, but Antonioni refused because the Chinese government wouldn't give him a formal apology.)

Antonioni online archives, site available in English and Italian:
https://www.archivioantonioni.it/en/

Also:
http://www.michelangeloantonioni.info/wordpress/home/

I mentioned in another thread how amazing it was to see someone as uncompromising as Antonioni accept an honorary award at the Oscars (presented to him by Jack Nicholson) and how we will never see that sort of thing again during the main ceremony - I had no idea Scorsese was the reason he got it. The AFI has a clip online where Antonioni reveals that and thanks him in-person at the AFI ceremony where Scorsese won the lifetime achievement award (which was also broadcast on television). In both cases, Antonioni's wife speaks on his behalf - a massive stroke in 1985 left him aphasic - but he does manage one word ("grazie") at the Oscars.

Film Desk Books brought Antonioni’s That Bowling Alley on the Tiber back into print. The book is a collection of sketches written by Antonioni, some of which ended up incorporated into Antonioni’s final films — anyone read it?

hearthesilence wrote: Wed Mar 05, 2025 7:10 pm I mentioned in another thread how amazing it was to see someone as uncompromising as Antonioni accept an honorary award at the Oscars (presented to him by Jack Nicholson) and how we will never see that sort of thing again during the main ceremony - I had no idea Scorsese was the reason he got it. The AFI has a clip online where Antonioni reveals that and thanks him in-person at the AFI ceremony where Scorsese won the lifetime achievement award (which was also broadcast on television). In both cases, Antonioni's wife speaks on his behalf - a massive stroke in 1985 left him aphasic - but he does manage one word ("grazie") at the Oscars.

See also Steven Spielberg successfully lobbying for Andrzej Wajda to receive an honorary Oscar circa 2000 - he'd previously notched up three unsuccessful nominations (for The Promised Land, The Young Ladies of Wilko and Man of Iron), and would score a fourth with Katyń a few years later.

The Spielberg connection is to do with the fact that he and Wajda had been good friends since the 1980s after discovering that they were mutual fans (Wajda said in an early-80s interview that Polish cinema could learn a lot from Spielberg, and Spielberg was in turn, wholly unsurprisingly, a devotee of Wajda's great 1950s WWII films), and it was Korczak in 1990 that finally persuaded Spielberg that Schindler's List might be a viable project. He'd ultimately shoot it in Poland with a fair chunk of Wajda's Korczak crew, and Wajda gets a personal thank-you in the end credits.

In contrast to the debacle surrounding Godard's honorary Oscar.

Film Desk Books brought Antonioni’s That Bowling Alley on the Tiber back into print. The book is a collection of sketches written by Antonioni, some of which ended up incorporated into Antonioni’s final films — anyone read it?

Yes, I read it many years ago (I think I've still got my copy somewhere). Definitely worth a look! I remember a signed copy up
for sale a while back on Biblio... quite pricey.

MichaelB wrote: Wed Jun 25, 2025 1:38 pm See also Steven Spielberg successfully lobbying for Andrzej Wajda to receive an honorary Oscar circa 2000.

For some reason (maybe the Polish cinema box sets), I had misremembered that this was Scorsese too. Thanks for the correction.

domino harvey wrote: Wed Jun 25, 2025 1:20 pmFilm Desk Books brought Antonioni’s That Bowling Alley on the Tiber back into print. The book is a collection of sketches written by Antonioni, some of which ended up incorporated into Antonioni’s final films — anyone read it?

As JSC says it's well worth reading, full of fascinating material for anyone who likes Antonioni’s films. The stories are not always immediately satisfying as stories, but they reward close attention, especially if you read them slowly and try to picture the films Antonioni might have made out of them. In all his completed films, I think there is a lingering sense of a story that cannot fully be told, and this impossibility of completing the narrative is both a source of frustration and essential to what makes the films so beautiful. The title story of Bowling Alley is a good example, because it is explicitly presented as a film idea that will never be realised, which adds an extra layer to its haunting, nebulous quality.

The publisher's website doesn't specify this, but after previewing a couple of pages it seems they are still using William Arrowsmith's translation from the first edition. This is a shame, because although every Antonioni fan owes Arrowsmith a huge debt of gratitude for his translations and scholarship, someone really needs to take a second pass at this. I've checked the Italian text for quite a few passages, and there seem to be a lot of errors and questionable choices. There are typos that will cause serious confusion, as at the start of ‘That Bowling Alley on the Tiber’ when 'intuizione' is translated as 'institution' rather than 'intuition'. But there are also passages, like one towards the end of that story, where I think Arrowsmith may be mis-representing the original meaning in a more subtle way. The premise of this story is that Antonioni sees a man leaving a bowling alley and imagines that he goes on to randomly murder two children in a field. He notes that there are a lot of unanswered questions about the man’s motives or what happens to him afterwards, then he says:

Come su Ferrara, dove io sono nato, d’inverno scende la nebbia talmente fitta che non si vede a un metro di distanza, cosí è accaduto alla mia imaginazione.

Arrowsmith translates this as:

In Ferrara, where I was born, the winter fog moves in so thickly you can’t see three feet away, and this was how, in my imagination, it happened.

In this version, the ‘it’ seems to refer to the action of the story, as if to say that the man shot these children while surrounded by (metaphorical?) fog, so there are no answers to the questions about motive etc.. But I think Antonioni is referring to the way the story came to him, and that the correct translation would be something like:

Just as in Ferrara, where I was born, the winter fog descends so thickly that you cannot see a metre in front of you, just so [this story] came into my imagination.

This lines up with what he says at the start about how stories come to him intuitively, and then he has to work backwards from that intuition to clear away some of the fog. The sentence structure is also invoking a kind of classical simile (Dante uses similar phrasing sometimes), which is part of the ironic tone Antonioni is using here – he’s explaining why this text does not, and perhaps should not, adhere to classical conventions of storytelling. I’m not fluent in Italian, though, so someone else might have a different view on this.

I agree, Sloper, with your reading of that line & your translation - nice work... For my research I generally find it is best to read most Antonioni material in the original Italian for greatest accuracy...

The Archivio Antonioni in Ferrara holds a copy of That Bowling Alley in the Tiber (1996, OUP), Arrowsmith's translation of Quel bowling sul Tevere (1983, Einaudi).. There is also correspondence from Arrowsmith to Antonioni, 5 typed letters in English dated between 1984 &1986, three of which specifically mention Quel bowling sul Tevere/That Bowling Alley in the Tiber, according to the Archive Catalogue... This entry for a letter from September 1984 is especially interesting...

Arrowsmith William 29 settembre 1984
archivio
1 c.
b. 9B/3, fasc. 257
Lettera dattiloscritta in inglese su "Quel bowling sul Tevere".
In calce alla lettera minuta manoscritta di risposta di Michelangelo Antonioni

At the bottom of the letter there is an handwritten draft of Antonioni's response, indicating an ongoing dialogue between the two regarding the project... This and the presence of the published English version That Bowling Alley in the Tiber points to a degree of approval on Antonioni's part & essentially a sign off on the project...

There is also this for your amusement...



A response to this review...

THAT BOWLING ALLEY ON THE TIBER: Tales of a Director. By Michelangelo Antonioni. Translated from the Italian by William Arrowsmith. 208 pages. Oxford University Press. $18.95.

''TOWARD THE FRONTIER,'' one of the 33 sketches in this collection, reads like a kind of composite summary of every Antonioni movie you've ever seen. Four people, thrown together by circumstance, are traveling through a bleak landscape toward some unnamed border: the Italian director himself; a pretty German woman whom everyone calls Grethe, though Grethe is not her name; an American Army captain, and another young girl. They do not know each other very well, but they have in common a vague sense of alienation, a need to improvise their evenings together.

They stop at a guest house and receive a cordial enough welcome. The mood, however, seems rather sinister, though it's unclear whether something is really wrong or whether the travelers are simply a bit tired and paranoid. People talk perfunctorily; in between, there are silences. Occasionally someone enters the room, and the atmosphere appears to shift. The travelers leave and drive into a dark woods, where they see two figures, a man and a woman - possibly people glimpsed earlier at the guest house. A shot is heard, and the woman vanishes - maybe she is dead, maybe she is not. The travelers continue on the road, with their headlights turned off.

Like its companion pieces in ''That Bowling Alley on the Tiber,'' this sketch represents what Michelangelo Antonioni calls a ''nucleus'' - an idea for a possible film. While each sheds light on the director's decidedly depressive sensibility, they vary widely in weight, seriousness and just plain interest. Some feel like no more than entries in a moody adolescent's journal - news items or observations, jotted down for the sake of their bizarreness or irony. One reads, in its entirety: ''The Antarctic glaciers are moving in our direction at a rate of three millimeters per year. Calculate when they'll reach us. Anticipate, in a film, what will happen.'' Another merely notes that a group of people on a crocodile hunting expedition was eaten by its prey.

By Michiko Kakutani
NY Times December 11, 1985, Section C, Page 28

Antonioni’s Il Grido knocked my socks off. I had never heard of it before it came on the Criterion 24/7 channel. Such striking imagery with such a lingering sadness. The ending crushed me.