The Michelangelo Antonioni Poll

Driving home, I was writing a post in my mind about how I've tried harder to like L'Avventura than any film I can think of...and I see I wrote it above already. I want to step out the theatre and feel like Phillip Lopate did when he saw it as a teenager in 1961. Still not there. Maybe the themes have been so thoroughly absorbed into so much else that I take them for granted; Don Draper crossed my mind tonight.

One thing I try not to do is hold older art too stringently to the attitudes of today. I don't mean egregious stuff like Birth of a Nation and such, but less obvious moments of awkwardness. The last shot--I see it as a moment of acceptance and empathy (profound empathy, even if I don't feel it deeply myself), and I'm sure that was Antonioni's intention, but do modern-day critics ever complain that it's self-serving exoneration from a male director?

Very detailed piece about the london locations in Blowup

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/blowup-michelangelo-antonioni-london-locations

Wow, no punches pulled against Charlton! Maryon Park is hardly the raggedy trash heap it's portrayed as here. And the desolateness of Woolwich Road is actually quite charming in its way... Great article though, thanks. Love this film.

“I don’t think there is any love in this world…Also, there is no feeling for family. No religion…LSD and mescaline are better for [the young] than love.”

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/cinema-67-revisited-blow/

1963 Antonioni challops

Michelangelo Antonioni, the shallow bore

Focusing on the shallow selfishness of our existential angst is exactly what makes Antonioni essential, and seems more relevant now that it must have at the time.

Not that I claim to understand the nuances of internet-speak, but doesn't challops mean to dispute overwhelming consensus in a really contrived way, just to get a reaction? At least in the context of 1963, Antonioni was still pretty divisive; I don't think the writer's point of view would have been all that unusual, and may have even represented majority opinion.

In the 1962 Sight and Sound poll, L'Aventura came second after Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made, so while there certainly were critics hostile to Antonioni at this point in time, I'm not sure theirs was a majority opinion.

most all-time polls favor feverish minorities

(xpost) Fair point. I don't know where The Guardian would fall on the spectrum of, say, mainstream reviewing and more specialized criticism, but I should have broadened that to include both. People famously walked out on L'Avventura three years earlier; the Sight & Sound poll notwithstanding, I don't Antonioni had become a beloved figure in the interim. And I know you don't hold her in high regard yourself, but I'm also thinking of one of his more vocal critics, Kael.

Red Desert is some kinda bullshit though.

― Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, October 14, 2009 12:49 PM (seven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:|

L'Avventura also famously booed at Cannes 1960. It was a call to arms in those years.

xpost

Orson Welles often seemed to single out Antonioni in particular for criticism, so I'm guessing he at least was looking at who has nipping at Kane's heels in the Sight and Sound poll.

Yes, not a Kael expert, but didn't her criticism of Antonioni mainly come later in the decade? Guardian film criticism in the early 1960s would I guess sit somewhere between 'mainstream' and 'specialised' film criticism (as it does now) - ie talking to a broadly leftist, university educated middle class audience with some interest in 'modern culture' without necessarily being cinephiles.

Kael's "The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" (about La Notte, Marienbad, and La Dolce Vita) came out in book form in '65, but it might have originally been a radio broadcast a couple of years earlier--at work, so I can't check.

Kael loved "L'Avventura" but turned on him after that.

“The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties: La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita" seems to have first appeared in The Massachusetts Review (Winter 1963), sex this guy.

http://benefitofthedoubt.miksimum.com/2010/10/searching-out-sick-soul-la-dolce-vita.html

um, sez

it's Monica Vitti, so sex

I went through a phase in college 20+ years ago when L'Avventura, which I'd copied from a horrible VHS, was a touchstone; I wrote a terrible script that was supposed to be a modern South Florida pastiche. These days I prefer L'Eclisse because of the opening sequence + Alain Delon.

This thread revive has driven me back to the excellent BFI Film Classic volume on L'avventura by the British film theorist/historian (and relative of a former ilxor) Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. He writes: "It is hard to overstate the importance of L'avventura when it came out in 1960" and "The feeling that L'avventura was a revolution in the making was widespread when it came out." Nowell-Smith saw the film in 1960, not long after its Cannes premiere, and he reminds us that the next morning "a statement had been issued, signed by twenty-five film-makers and critics and datelined 2am, denouncing the behavior of the audience and affirming their belief in the film" (Rossellini was among the signatories). I guess my point is that anti-Antonioni sentiment was, by the time of that Guardian piece, definitely a bit of a challops within film buff/snob discourse (I think Kael, always keen to point out that she was the first to spot the emperor's nudity, enjoyed writing against this kind of hardening critical orthodoxy.) And I'm sure it's age and sentiment, but I find there's something quite moving and inspiring in the response that British cineastes like Nowell-Smith had to this 'moment' in world art cinema - it was an opening of the mind to new and challenging experiences, and like L'avventura itself a journey, out of post-war dourness into the sunshine of a small Italian island, and from there to eternity, or infinity (the unresolved ending suggesting the impossibility - or imposture - of narrative closure.) Yes, Kael's 'The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties' is a good one liner, and points to some kind of common truth about these films (L'avventura lost out to La Dolce Vita at Cannes) but it also, to me, feels pinched and sneery and ultimately indifferent to the sheer beauty of Antonioni's imagery.

Kael herself said that L'Avventura did for cinema what Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence did for literature.

She was middling on Blow-Up, with one line that would neatly separate those who love her from those who despise her: "Yet despite Antonioni's negativism, the world he presents looks harmless, and sex without 'connecting' doesn't really seem so bad."

(Was going to post just before Ward did--another example.)

As I alluded to upthread, Philip Lopate is great on L'Avventura. Found one excerpt online:

"It was the movie I had been preparing for, for it came at the right time in my development. As a child, I had wanted only action movies. Dialogues and story set-ups bored me; I waited for that moment when the knife was hurled through the air. My awakening in adolescence to the art of film consisted precisely in overcoming this impatience. Over-compensating, perhaps, I now loved a cinema that dawdled; that lingered. Antonioni had a way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape. With his detachment from the human drama and his tactful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced me to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique. Of course the story held me, too, with its bitter world-weary disillusioned tone. The adolescent wants to touch the bottom, to know the worst. His soul craves sardonic disenchantment."

The essay that's taken from is better--about discovering art houses in general at exactly the right moment in the early '60s.

I own that Lopate collection; he introduced me to Ozu and Naruse.

sex without 'connecting' doesn't really seem so bad."

no wonder she hooked up w/ gay men

complete retro in NYC

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/3894?locale=en

Wow

Michelangelo Antonioni's original ending was a shot of an airplane sky-writing the phrase "Fuck You, America," which was cut by MGM president Louis F. Polk along with numerous other scenes. Louis F. Polk was eventually replaced by James T. Aubrey, who had most of the cut footage restored, but without this final shot.

^ Zabriskie Point

lmao

maybe we could rescue that shot for a(ny) current film

Louis F. Polk OTM, the destruction of the house says exactly the same thing

the ending is already amazing and "Fuck You, America" is maybe too on the nose but damn I wish that footage was extant

polk not otm, he shd have cut everything else as well

the myth of Zabriskie Point being a piece of shit.... ugh. I avoided the movie for many years, in fact I remember the day Antonioni (and Bergman) died, my best friend's dad went on a long rant about how much ZP sucked. he compared it to Heaven's Gate (also unfairly savaged but still by no means a great film). But Zabriskie Point is an astonishing movie, easily one of his best and rivaled only by L'avventura & Red Desert imo. Blow-Up is the overrated one.

blow-up is also bad

blow-up sucks

But it was the first Antonioni I saw, will definitely see it again next time it plays in a theater in town.

it will still suck

man, mark s taking the Orson Welles view of Mike

ZP >> Blow-Up.

i think I like The Passenger and L'Eclisse better than either

well, yeah

but i like em all. really haven't seen any loathsome Antonioni.

Ditto. Really like some of the pre-L'Aventurra films too, Le Amiche in particular.

They're all pretty much great. L'eclisse narrowly first among a bunch of equals.

I love how they were able to work the title into the lyrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZwdTkBJxcU

I got to see ZP in 35mm during a full retro in '07. That print had the correct Pink Floyd music at the end instead of this studio-imposed Roy number, which unfortunately isn't the case with the DVD.

I find Red Desert pretty silly (ZP too) but I'm in the minority.

"Listen man, a molotov cocktail is a mixture of gasoline and kerosene. White radicalism is a mixture of bullshit and jive."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK0g_J1hhDc&t=243s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK0g_J1hhDc

Not guy, fellow. That Mel fellow.
Eden Ahbez, Jack Parsons, and other LA kooks...

Did we mention Antonioni visiting The Band whilst they were recording The Band in Sammy Davis Jr’s poolhouse?

gnna start saying that zabriskie point is actually abt jack parsons, hence the explosion at the end (spoiler)

(sadly it isn't tho, yet another reason why it's rubbish)

Relevant discussion starts around here: The Band.

Now starting to imagine Zabriskie Point with a Harry Nilsson soundtrack.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmRosJmWIAMnNsP?format=png

Mark Frechette gave a good performance (dubbed into Italian) in Francesco Rosi's very dark and grim Many Wars Ago.