Word: antonioni
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that revolution was ancillary. (So was the Blowup rave-up performed by the Yardbirds, including the young Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.) Artistically, Antonioni was after bigger game, and bagged it. As critic Adriano Apra says on the Criterion edition of Eclipse: "In film each auteur gives us his distinctive perception of the world. Antonioni goes beyond that. He always invents a world of his own." Apra means that literally, especially regarding the director's first two color features...
...canals, as if they had vomited on themselves. (He also gave Vitti red hair). It was all in aid of showing the already polluted city through the eyes of the schizophrenic wife and mother played by Vitti. "I have to put into the landscape the colors needed," Antonioni said, "to express a certain state of mind...to violate, so to speak, this reality, to adapt it to the purposes of my story...
...find a meaning, is a 10-1/2min. tour de force, silent except for the briefest phone conversation. It puts Thomas in the position of a movie director, editing the film he's shot, seeking to impose narrative logic on shuffled images. He is also the viewer of an Antonioni film, who is willing to follow a mysterious story where it leads him while hoping against hope it might be resolved. At any rate, Thomas is no passive pawn of his own weak will. He's a smart, resourceful detective, a hip Hercule Poirot. And Hemmings, 24 when the film...
...truth? Or is the reality revealed by photographs another seductive deceiver, a trick the mind plays on the eye, like the persistence-of-vision trompe l'oeil that makes the consecutive images clicking through a movie projector at 24 frames per second seem like one continuous moving image. Antonioni, true to his creed, won't say - unless we are to take Blowup's last shot as the answer to this larger question. Thomas is seen from a distance alone on a green field. And then he disappears, as Anna had in L'Avventura. This is the anticonjuror's dogma...
...next 14 years Antonioni made only two fiction features: the bleak and glorious Zabriskie Point and the meandering Passenger, with its one climactic sequence of nearly unrivaled technical virtuosity. He didn't fall out of critical or popular favor so much as he gracefully receded from view, like Thomas at the end of Blowup. By the late '70s the movie environment had changed, and not for the better. Hollywood was reluctant to finance the chancy projects of a double-domed European of Social Security age, when kids in L.A. could bring in hundreds of millions with their clever toy movies...