Word: oberwald
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...smaller but no less ambitious scale, Antonioni kept experimenting. He reunited with Vitti for The Mystery of Oberwald (1981), which used the new video technology to repaint forests, walls, gowns in an expert riot of surreal colors. He continued even after a 1985 stroke robbed him of speech. His four short segments in Beyond the Clouds had the old camera suavity and started to make explicit the erotic yearnings of his '60s films. He could not have made this film, and his 2003 contribution to the omnibus project Eros, without his wife Enrica, through whom he communicated with his casts...
...Mystery of Oberwald...
...Blow-Up (1966), he painted London phone booths a deeper red, turned the grass a brighter green, to play against his protagonist's Day-Glo life. Now Antonioni has plumbed the resources of the new video technology and emerged with his most impressive experiment yet. The Mystery of Oberwald will be shown next week at the New York Film Festival; it is unlike anything you are apt to see on a TV or movie screen this year...
...movie begins at sundown in Oberwald. Soldiers patrol the castle grounds in search of Sebastian (Franco Branciaroli), the would-be assassin. The film stock looks grainy, murky, like a kinescope of some 1948 "Kraft Television Theater" production. Afterimages cast a split-second shadow on every movement. Then a sound is heard, a soldier arms his rifle, a shot is fired-and bright red flame spits out of the barrel. The sky is suddenly soiled pink with brooding clouds. Lightning flashes, and it is as unnaturally red as the gun blast. The forces of nature are gathering to announce the beginning...
...looks like prehistoric television but manipulates tomorrow's techniques. His film is a fairly faithful adaptation, yet it departs radically from even the most modern movie strategies. The acting in this traditional theater piece is modishly austere and alienating. Because of this last contradiction- because The Mystery of Oberwald does not "work" on the accepted narrative level-the film may be scorned or, worse, dismissed. That would do this tireless innovator an injustice. Antonioni will be 70 next year, but he has suggested a bold new direction for the cinema-and created a work of dazzling ambition and achievement...