Word: antonioni
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...what is left of their relationship. ''I tried to make you happy," he says hopelessly, and hopelessly she replies: "You did not succeed." Why not? What was missing in their lives? What do people need in order to be happy? In this gloomy little masterpiece, Michelangelo Antonioni does not try to answer such questions. He simply shows how one young woman tried to answer them-and failed. He tells the story of a luteless Orpheus and a promiscuous Eurydice who don't even know they're in hell...
...need to love? The camera wonders as it wanders through the city. Change and decay, Antonioni seems to say, in all around I see. A nurse wheels a baby carriage down a street. An old man watches it with haunted eyes. Headlines threaten atomic destruction. Water leaks from a barrel, runs into a sewer and is seen no more. In a park a fountain suddenly fails. The day fails. In the darkness a single street lamp burns, far away and cold. Then suddenly the lamp burns in the center of the screen, immense and pulsing, urgent, the light of life...
...sequence is masterful. With a few stark strokes Antonioni puts a diffuse and apparently senseless picture in a frame, in a black border of mortality that instantly reveals its perspective and its significance as a spiritual admonition, a memento mori. What's more, the frame reveals the picture as an extraordinary effort of style, as a definitive treatment of the themes Antonioni developed in L'Avventura and La Notte. As in those films, he employs the method of tedium to explain the nature of tedium, but he employs it so skillfully now that boredom is seldom boring. Vitti...
...Antonioni's style is beyond argument; his substance is not. No doubt he has reasons for his pessimism: millions of people now alive have lost their souls and will never find them; Eros in this era is all too often not a god but a disease; "the world today is ruled by money, and this leads to a dangerous passivity toward problems of the spirit." But sometimes Antonioni's pessimism seems almost as sick as the sickness he deplores, and certainly it is naive. The love of money is not, St. Paul to the contrary, the root...
...Grido. A mournful little movie, made in 1957, in which Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni first fumbled with the material he later handled so powerfully in L'Avventura...