Word: antonioni
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...your article on Marcello Mastroianni [Oct. 5]: La Nolle was made by Michelangelo Antonioni, not Luchino Visconti...
...Notte is, as they say, an Antonioni. Which means that Michelangelo Antonioni wrote and directed it. What makes La Notte better than other movies is hard to say. First of all, it has a continuity through narrative, unifying it from the opening shots of modern Milan to the closing embrace in a sand trap. At points, such as when one hears, then sees a helicopter whoosh past the hospital, it parodies La Dolce Vita, a film lacking tightness and cohesiveness, though also attempting to portray the senselessness of modern Italy. The essential difference in approach between Fellini and Antonioni...
...second strong point of La Notte is its successful use of the existing technique Alain Resnais tried in Last Year at Marienbad: the cinematic journey into the mind. Watching Lidia (Miss Moreau) look at walls, buildings, people, one senses again that Antonioni is parodying. But because of the reality of his characters, and the fineness of his touch, such scenes are not soporific (as Marienbad was). The technique is no longer experimental: it is controlled...
Furthermore, La Notte outstrips Antonioni's last work, L'Avventura, largely because of its quicker pace and more startling scene shifts. One defect of L'Avventura was the sameness of the light that infused each scene. Not so with La Notte: first the dazzling glare of sunlight reflected from the steel and glass structures of the city, then the artificial whiteness of a hospital room, then the shadows by a wall, a continuously changing field of intensities that keep one's attention riveted on the screen...
...keeping it simple, Antonioni is able to tell a whole story in two hours, as he almost did in L'Avventura. In fact, La Notte features Aristotle's other old pals, unity of time and of place, as well. The film portrays one day and night in the lives of Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) a successful young novelist; Lidia, his wife; and Tina (Monica Vitti), 19-year old daughter of a fantastically wealthy industrialist. Mostly it is the story of Lidia's attempt to tell her husband that he should still love her, and his attempt to shake off the lethargy...