Word: antonioni
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DESERT. Against bleak industrial landscape near Ravenna, Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, La Notte) explores the neurotic problems of a young wife (Monica Vitti) and, frame by frame, fills his first color film with precisely shaded insights and breathtaking beauty...
...reviewer of my novel The Smile on the Face of the Lion [Feb. 12] writes that "[the author] seems to have derived his literary manner in equal measure from Marcel Proust, Ian Fleming, Bernard Shaw and Michelangelo Antonioni." I have read the regular amount of Proust, very little Shaw, and no Fleming-though I am planning to. As for Antonioni, the really relevant thing we have in common is, of course, optimism (i.e., the awareness that making films, writing novels, etc., are the ultimately worthwhile pursuits...
...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...
Story is seldom Antonioni's first concern, and in Red Desert he seems keener to offer Actress Vitti's jumpy, hyper-tense performance as an almost clinical study of neurosis. She is inspiringly alienated, for that sturdy cliché dissolves into a rich flow of images that astonish the eye. At one moment, a street scene goes entirely grey-including a vendor, his cart, fruit and all. When Vitti awakes in panic at night to find a toy robot clacking around her glacially modern home as though it had a will of its own, the very walls become...
Fascinated by his vivid experiment with style, Antonioni does not venture far in subject from the ideas he has already expressed eloquently-and at immoderate length-in L'Avventura, La Notte and Eclipse. His is a world alive with the muffled cries of human beings struggling to live without resenting it, and to communicate with other survivors in prosperous, increasingly complex societies that fill the stomach but starve the spirit. Paradoxically, Red Desert fails as drama because Antonioni, with scrupulous care, makes places and things so much more interesting than his people that an audience cannot always tell...