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A TRIBUTE TO
MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

I never begin with an idea in order to end with a story. The majority of the stories that have taken form in my hands have come from outside, from germs which I have, as it were, breathed from the air. It can happen that films acquire meanings, that is to say, the meanings appear afterwards, which isnatural enough.
Michelango Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni always maintained that the meaning of his films only emerged after the completion of their production. Perhaps the same can be said about his life... With Antonioni’s death on July 30th 2007, the world lost not only the last surviving member of his generation of Italian filmmakers (a list which includes such luminaries as De Sica, Fellini, Visconti, and Pasolini), but a great master of the art of cinema, modern and otherwise. Antonioni’s filmmaking career spanned six decades. He was critically lauded for re-imagining cinematic language, in the process helped invent, along with his contemporary Ingmar Bergman (see also our Bergman tribute) European art cinema. Antonioni’s films are known for their depiction of modern alienation, with isolated characters wandering through desolate urban environments and unforgiving natural landscapes. As much as the exterior world expressionistically mirrored the internal psychology of his protagonists, so to did the environment condition his characters, providing a mysterious outside to observe and investigate. The intellectual and emotional power of Antonioni’s cinema endures.

Sun./dim. Feb. 17 fev., 19:00
THE OUTCRY/Il Grido (35mm print)

Italy/USA 1957, 116 minutes
With a theme of (unrequited) love, abandonment and wandering that would be further explored in his later 60s “alienation tetralogy,” Antonioni’s IL GRIDO tells the story of Aldo (Steve Cochran), a psychologically tormented and near-silent refinery mechanic, whose love affair with Irma (Alida Valli) comes to a sudden and unforeseen end. Terribly upset, Aldo takes their seven-year-old daughter on an aimless journey, encountering a number of misanthropic women as they go. Aldo’s peripatetic drift eventually leads him back to Irma in a desperate attempt to restore whatever sense of peace his previous humdrum existence allowed. A haunting neorealist film, a powerful allegory, and, in its masterful use of stylistic devices involving framing, deep focus, and sound design, a gesture toward Antonioni’s next film, the watershed L’ AVVENTURA (1960). English subtitles.

Sun./dim. March 9 mars, 19:00
THE PASSENGER (35mm print)

Italy/Spain/France 1975, 126 minutes
Considered by many to be his masterpiece, THE PASSENGER takes up all the quintessential Antonioni themes and subjects: identity, perception, isolation, modernity – all in his characteristically glacial and self-reflexive style. Jack Nicholson, in a career defining performance, plays the role of David Locke, an American reporter working on a story in the North African Sahara Desert. Exhausted and bored with his own identity and life, Locke assumes the identity of a very recently deceased Englishman that he met at the hotel. The Englishman had a rather dangerous occupation, however; he was a gunrunner. Soon, Locke, traveling with a mysterious woman (Maria Schneider), is on the run from various groups for many reasons, some known, and others unknown. The second to last shot, a bravura seven-minute take, is a part of cinema history that critics to this day celebrate. THE PASSENGER is Antonioni at the peak of his creative power. English subtitles.