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The TIFF Cinematheque presents a retrospective on the Italian acclaimed filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni.

The TIFF Cinematheque presents a retrospective on the Italian acclaimed filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni.

The TIFF will held a series of screenings of movies by the artist as well as talks on his mastery and his influence on cinema.

JUNE 6 (6.30pm): Pers Handling on L’Avventura

special talk from TIFF Director & CEO Piers Handling, in which he offers an overview of the acclaimed Italian filmmaker’s oeuvre and its influence on art cinema.

JUNE 7 (6.15pm): La Notte (The Night)

JUNE 8 (3.00pm): La Notte (The Night)

“Antonioni’s most rigorous film … an ambiguous and desolate masterpiece” (Peter Cowie), La Notte maintains its power to shock audiences into a new kind of seeing, its compositions among the most striking in all of the director’s films. Marcello Mastroianni plays an exhausted novelist coasting on his reputation, Jeanne Moreau his disenchanted wife who declares “I wish I didn’t exist anymore.” Opening with the couple’s afternoon visit to a dying friend in hospital, the film, as the title suggests, follows the pair to the end of the night, from the wife’s wandering through the deserted streets of Milan, to a party at the home of a millionaire industrialist (where Mastroianni encounters Antonioni’s muse Monica Vitti as the host’s smouldering daughter), to an al fresco reconciliation in the cold light of dawn, one of the most moving and erotic sequences in Antonioni’s cinema. “A visually dazzling yet psychologically dislocating pageant of clashing architectural styles…. Antonioni captures vast currents of shifting power — whether sexual or cultural — in chilling and resonant details” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker).

JUNE 9 (6.30pm): James Macgillivray on L’Eclisse

Architecture scholar James Macgillivray discusses how Antonioni frames space, landscape, and Rome’s postwar architecture in L’Eclisse to construct an environment that is as important as the people within it.

JUNE 12 (6.15pm): Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair)

“One of the most perfectly and completely structured films in the entire history of cinema” (Nöel Burch), Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature is a film of astonishing formal beauty, and prefigures the thematic and stylistic preoccupations of Antonioni’s later work. Like Visconti before him with Ossessione, Antonioni transposed James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice to a radically different setting: here, the swanky environs of fashion-conscious Milan, where an industrialist hires a detective to investigate the past of his glamorous wife (Lucia Bosè, exuding anguished elegance), and in so doing unwittingly reunites her with her high-school sweetheart (hunky Massimo Girotti, who also starred in Ossessione). Their passion enflamed anew, the two lovers conspire to kill the suspicious spouse. Semiotically sleek and impossibly chic, with its glistening succession of luxurious cars and boudoirs, Story of a Love Affair is “an amazing film, and one of the great feature debuts in movie history” (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

JUNE 15 (3.00pm): L’Avventura

A beautiful 35mm print of Antonioni’s epochal masterpiece, which provoked outrage at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival but quickly established its claim as “the most important film since Citizen Kane” (Robert Benayoun) and, along with Godard’s Breathless, Bresson’s Pickpocket and Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour, a foundation of modernist cinema. During a yachting party, a young woman (Léa Massari) mysteriously disappears from the Sicilian island the group had been exploring. The woman’s architect lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Monica Vitti) travel through Sicily in search of her, but the urgency of their pursuit dissipates as they fall into an uneasy sexual relationship. Part love story, part detective mystery, and part travelogue, L’Avventura continues to influence contemporary cinema with its unmoored narrative and existential themes. “Of all the memorable works in film history, only a relative few have pioneered … and shining amongst these few is L’Avventura” (Stanley Kauffmann).

JUNE 16 (3.40pm): I Vinti (The Vanquished)

See it now or never: I Vinti is the rarest of Antonioni’s features, and consequently the most neglected (the director often expressed frustration that it did not receive the analysis it deserved). Made for a Catholic production company, which intended it as a dire commentary on the amoral state of postwar European youth (the original English title was Youth and Perversion), the film transforms conventional social document into stylistic experiment with its three-part structure. Part One focuses on a group of Parisian teenagers on an outing, one of whom pretends to be a racketeer and is murdered for his money; shifting to Rome, the middle episode centres on the son of a rich family who becomes involved in a contraband ring; the concluding chapter, which foreshadows Antonioni’s fascination with London in Blow-Up, is a Hitchcockian portrait of a would-be poet who decides to become famous by murdering a woman. “[I Vinti] remains a major experiment in narration, for Antonioni, and for the cinema” (Sam Rohdie).

JUNE 17 (6.30pm): Durga Chew-Bose on Red Desert

Writer and essayist Durga Chew-Bose considers the performances of Red Desert star Monica Vitti and the crucial contribution that the actress made to Antonioni’s work.

JUNE 19 (6.30pm): Le Amiche (The Girlfriends)

“Though seldom seen now, Antonioni’s fourth feature is one of his greatest films, in which diverse plot strands, character psychology, and a masterful control of the camera are perfectly fused” (Time Out Film Guide). Based on a Pavese novella, Le Amiche is about a young woman who returns to her native Turin to open a fashion salon and falls in with a “smart set,” including the suicidal daughter of an eminent family, a painter who is jealous of his wife’s success, and a viperous woman who vents her despair by attacking her closest friends. In its emphasis on the spiritual and moral malaise of the wealthy, and in its stunningly abstract style, this important early work looks forward to the filmmaker’s groundbreaking trilogy of the early ’60s. “Quintessential Antonioni” (Penelope Houston); “A masterpiece of understatement, restraint, economy of style and characterization” (Jonas Mekas).

JUNE 22 (6.30pm): Blow-Up

A meticulous restoration of the ever-enigmatic Blow-Up, whose narrative ambiguities and irresolutions made it the trendiest cinematic conversation piece since Last Year at Marienbad and which continues to elicit intense critical scrutiny half a century after its making. Antonioni’s first film in English is set in “swinging” mid-’60s London, where a disaffected fashion photographer (David Hemmings) stumbles upon a murder while taking pictures of a couple making love in a park — or so his blown-up photographs of the tryst seem to suggest. Hemmings is a whiter shade of pale as the callow shutterbug, his pallid ennui masterfully deployed by Antonioni, while Vanessa Redgrave is incandescent as the woman who may or may not have been used as lure to kill her suitor, her erotic anxiety palpable as she tries to wrest from the photographer an image that has both literally and metaphorically captured her. “[Blow-Up is] a statement of the artist, not on life but on art itself as the consuming passion of an artist’s life” (Andrew Sarris).

JUNE 23 (4.15pm): La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camellias)

None other than Bernardo Bertolucci called The Lady Without Camellias “a beautiful Antonioni film that is very underrated — it’s one of his best.” The “lady without camellias” is a Milanese shopgirl (Lucia Bosè, of Story of a Love Affair) who is discovered by a sleazy movie producer. He becomes insanely jealous of her consorting with actors, marries her, and attempts to change her image by casting her as Joan of Arc in his first art film. A devastating work that is an ideal companion to Visconti’s Bellissima, Camellias was originally conceived for Gina Lollobrigida, who turned it down because of its stinging portrait of the Italian film industry and of actresses very much like her. “One of the cruellest and most accurate portraits of studio filmmaking and the Italian movie world that we have … informed by a visually and emotionally complex mise en scène that juggles background with foreground elements in a choreographic style recalling Welles at times” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

JUNE 24 (3.15pm): La Notte (The Night)

“Antonioni’s most rigorous film … an ambiguous and desolate masterpiece” (Peter Cowie), La Notte maintains its power to shock audiences into a new kind of seeing, its compositions among the most striking in all of the director’s films. Marcello Mastroianni plays an exhausted novelist coasting on his reputation, Jeanne Moreau his disenchanted wife who declares “I wish I didn’t exist anymore.” Opening with the couple’s afternoon visit to a dying friend in hospital, the film, as the title suggests, follows the pair to the end of the night, from the wife’s wandering through the deserted streets of Milan, to a party at the home of a millionaire industrialist (where Mastroianni encounters Antonioni’s muse Monica Vitti as the host’s smouldering daughter), to an al fresco reconciliation in the cold light of dawn, one of the most moving and erotic sequences in Antonioni’s cinema. “A visually dazzling yet psychologically dislocating pageant of clashing architectural styles…. Antonioni captures vast currents of shifting power — whether sexual or cultural — in chilling and resonant details” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker).

JUNE 24 (6.05pm): Zabriskie Point

Set in southern California at the height of late-’60s student unrest, Antonioni’s first and only American film was dismissed as risible by many critics at the time of its release, but in the decades since it has acquired a cult following and influenced artists and filmmakers from Rodney Graham and Bruno Dumont to Ed Ruscha and the Smashing Pumpkins. Non-professional actor Mark Frechette plays Mark, a student activist who goes on the run after being accused of killing a cop. Stealing an airplane, he lands in Death Valley and encounters Daria (non-professional actor Daria Halprin), a young woman who works for a rapacious property developer. In a renowned sequence, the two young people make love in the desert, where they are joined by dozens of other copulating couples in a seemingly LSD-induced fantasy. Famously culminating in a literally explosive finale, Antonioni’s vision of America offers semiotic splendour and surprisingly contemporary truths; like so many of his films, it looks more radical — formally, thematically, politically — than it did when originally released.

JUNE 28 (8.30pm): L’Eclisse (The Eclipse)

Antonioni’s evocation of anomie and alienation was never so exquisitely articulated as in L’Eclisse, which the filmmaker once declared his personal favourite of his “old films”: “from the point of view of style it is the most rigorous, and therefore the most successful. Also it is the most modern.” A tailspin in Rome’s stock market serves as the backdrop for a love affair between a translator (Monica Vitti) and her mother’s stockbroker (a supernal Alain Delon), Antonioni’s sense of disconnection and intellectual exhaustion turning what might have been a classic Roman romance into a study in existential anxiety, intensified by the director’s fixation on the Eternal City’s Fascist-era architecture. (Critics continue to debate whether the unnerving sequence in which Vitti dons blackface and does an African tribal dance is intended to illustrate the racism of her character and milieu, or is racist itself.) The final moments, in which suspense is built out of an increasingly unbearable absence, are justly famous: as David Thomson states, “Alas, [this], one of the seminal passages in modern cinema, makes so much else seem old-fashioned.”

JUNE 29 (6.30pm): Professione: Reporter (The Passenger)

Cited by such Antonioni authorities as Richard Roud and Penelope Houston as the director’s finest work since L’Eclisse, The Passenger became an object of mystery and endless speculation when it suddenly dropped out of view in the 1980s, after star Jack Nicholson’s company purchased world rights and allowed it to be screened only in the rarest circumstances; re-released on its 30th anniversary in 2005, it was widely hailed as one of Antonioni’s greatest films. Nicholson plays David Locke, a TV reporter who seizes the chance to assume a new identity when a man who looks like him dies suddenly in an isolated hotel in Chad. Switching passport photos, Locke inherits the dead man’s career as an arms dealer, and begins an affair with a mysterious young architecture student (Maria Schneider, of Last Tango in Paris) he encounters on the road. Antonioni’s exploration of the tenuousness of identity leads to a quietly dazzling final sequence, “a single shot lasting seven minutes which is one of the most extraordinary in film history” (Roud).

JUNE 30 (4.00pm): Il grido (The Cry)

“Il Grido attains the perfection of a masterpiece … one of the most significant films of recent years” (Pierre Leprohon). One of Antonioni’s most haunting and beautiful films, Il Grido stars Hollywood import Steve Cochran as a worker in a sugar refinery, who plans to marry his mistress of many years (Alida Valli, searing) until he learns that she loves someone else. Taking their little girl in tow, the disconsolate man wanders the fog-enshrouded Po Valley, encountering other lost souls on his aimless journey, including a seamstress (Betsy Blair, heartbreaking) who was once his girlfriend and the widow who runs a gas station where he resides for a while. “When I saw Il Grido after some time, I was stunned to find myself faced with such nakedness, with such great solitude. It was like what happens on some mornings when we look in the mirror and are startled by the reflection of our own face” (Michelangelo Antonioni).

JULY 1 (5.50pm): Chung Kuo China

Declared “a major accomplishment by a great filmmaker” (J. Hoberman, The New York Times) when it was recently revived at MoMA, Antonioni’s epic documentary is as legendary as it is unseen. Invited by the Chinese government to film a portrait of their country, which was then in the throes of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Antonioni spent five weeks shooting with the full cooperation of officials; a year after the film’s release, the director was violently attacked by the Chinese government as “a worm who speaks for the Russians,” who demonstrated “extreme hatred” for China, and who spoke from “the pack of imperialists and social imperialists.” (Umberto Eco wrote an article offering a semiotic explanation of why the Chinese found the film so insulting, which only increased the film’s notoriety.) Traversing the country from Beijing to the towns and cities along the Yangtze River and concluding in Shanghai, “[Antonioni’s] travelogue is generally affirmative and admiring as well as entrancing…. a tourist’s snapshot that has the heft of a monument” (Hoberman).

JULY 3 (6.15pm): Il mistero di Oberwald (The Mystery of Oberwald)

Time Magazine chose The Mystery of Oberwald as one of the 10 best films of the year, and called it “Antonioni’s most impressive experiment yet … a bold new direction for the cinema, a work of dazzling ambition and achievement.” In this very strange version of Jean Cocteau’s play The Eagle Has Two Heads, the director’s longtime muse Monica Vitti (appearing in an Antonioni film for the first time since Red Desert) plays a queen who falls in love with a young man sent to assassinate her. Antonioni shot Oberwald on video and transferred it to 35mm film, manipulating colour and texture to transform each image into a startling signifier of emotional states. (Dawn arrives as a wave of cerulean light; a blizzard of vermillion swirls around the lovers as they struggle against their fates; the sky blazes crimson as their passion ignites…) The Mystery of Oberwald was never distributed in North America, so this is your only chance to see it.

JULY 6 (9.15pm): Blow-Up

A meticulous restoration of the ever-enigmatic Blow-Up, whose narrative ambiguities and irresolutions made it the trendiest cinematic conversation piece since Last Year at Marienbad and which continues to elicit intense critical scrutiny half a century after its making. Antonioni’s first film in English is set in “swinging” mid-’60s London, where a disaffected fashion photographer (David Hemmings) stumbles upon a murder while taking pictures of a couple making love in a park — or so his blown-up photographs of the tryst seem to suggest. Hemmings is a whiter shade of pale as the callow shutterbug, his pallid ennui masterfully deployed by Antonioni, while Vanessa Redgrave is incandescent as the woman who may or may not have been used as lure to kill her suitor, her erotic anxiety palpable as she tries to wrest from the photographer an image that has both literally and metaphorically captured her. “[Blow-Up is] a statement of the artist, not on life but on art itself as the consuming passion of an artist’s life” (Andrew Sarris).

JULY 6 (3.00pm): Il Grido (The Cry)

“Il Grido attains the perfection of a masterpiece … one of the most significant films of recent years” (Pierre Leprohon). One of Antonioni’s most haunting and beautiful films, Il Grido stars Hollywood import Steve Cochran as a worker in a sugar refinery, who plans to marry his mistress of many years (Alida Valli, searing) until he learns that she loves someone else. Taking their little girl in tow, the disconsolate man wanders the fog-enshrouded Po Valley, encountering other lost souls on his aimless journey, including a seamstress (Betsy Blair, heartbreaking) who was once his girlfriend and the widow who runs a gas station where he resides for a while. “When I saw Il Grido after some time, I was stunned to find myself faced with such nakedness, with such great solitude. It was like what happens on some mornings when we look in the mirror and are startled by the reflection of our own face” (Michelangelo Antonioni).

JULY 8 (6.50pm): L’Avventura

A beautiful 35mm print of Antonioni’s epochal masterpiece, which provoked outrage at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival but quickly established its claim as “the most important film since Citizen Kane” (Robert Benayoun) and, along with Godard’s Breathless, Bresson’s Pickpocket and Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour, a foundation of modernist cinema. During a yachting party, a young woman (Léa Massari) mysteriously disappears from the Sicilian island the group had been exploring. The woman’s architect lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Monica Vitti) travel through Sicily in search of her, but the urgency of their pursuit dissipates as they fall into an uneasy sexual relationship. Part love story, part detective mystery, and part travelogue, L’Avventura continues to influence contemporary cinema with its unmoored narrative and existential themes. “Of all the memorable works in film history, only a relative few have pioneered … and shining amongst these few is L’Avventura” (Stanley Kauffmann).

JULY 14 (6.15pm): Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman)

“Visually, this is perhaps Antonioni’s most beautiful film to date” (Time Out Film Guide). Chic, oblique, and extraordinarily erotic, Antonioni’s first film set in Italy since Red Desert marks a return to the preoccupations and setting of the director’s great trilogy: ennui and desolation among the Italian haute bourgeoisie. Tomás Milián plays a filmmaker (Antonioni’s alter ego) searching for two women, who might turn out to be one: an actress to inspire his new film, and a lover to replace the wife he has divorced. His encounters with the mysterious Mavi (Daniela Silverio), a beautiful, androgynous and bisexual aristocrat, and then with stage actress Ida (Christine Boisson), drive the director only further into artistic and emotional paralysis. With several setpieces as great as anything in Antonioni’s canon — including a sequence shot in swirling sheets of fog and a long passage that exploits the beauty of the Venetian lagoons and Grand Canal — Identification of a Woman is “a brilliant, glittering piece of filmmaking … a stunningly beautiful film” (Nick Roddick, Sight & Sound).

JULY 19 (6.30pm): Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds)

Extending the themes (and the astonishing eroticism) of Identification of a Woman in a style that seems at once literary and musical, this four-part meditation on love marked Antonioni’s heralded return to feature filmmaking following a debilitating stroke a decade earlier. The first episode, “Chronicle of a Love Affair That Never Existed,” is about a chaste night spent by two people who desire each other. In “The Girl, the Crime…,” a film director (John Malkovich) becomes intrigued by a Portofino shopgirl (Sophie Marceau) who has murdered her father. “Don’t Look for Me” stars Fanny Ardant and Peter Weller as a couple undone by his erotic obsession with a younger woman; finally, “This Body of Dirt” concerns a love as devotional as it is sexual. With prefaces and interludes written and shot by Wim Wenders (including one that reunites Antonioni’s La Notte stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau), Beyond the Clouds is “a lovely farewell work … It is wonderful that at 83, almost from beyond the clouds, [Antonioni] got to make Beyond the Clouds” (Gilberto Perez).

JULY 20 (6.30pm): Il deserto rosso (Red Desert)

Prescient in its connection of existential and ecological concerns, Red Desert is considered one of the greatest works of European cinema, and must be seen on the big screen for its fullest effect, especially in this 35mm print of a recent restoration. Monica Vitti is the traumatized heroine, who, suffering from an unnamed malaise and in a desperate search for love, has a brief affair with a visiting business associate (Richard Harris) of her factory-manager husband. Working in colour for the first time, Antonioni all but subjugates character to landscape as he transforms Ravenna, glorious site of Dante’s tomb and Byzantine murals, into a desert of slagheaps, factories, and sulphurous skies (grass, sand, buildings, even hair and fruit were painted and dyed to accomplish this disturbing effect). “Perhaps the most extraordinary and riveting film of Antonioni’s entire career” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out).

JULY 21 (6.25pm): Michelangelo’s Gaze: Antonioni’s Short Films

Ranging from Antonioni’s earliest works to his last, this deluxe assortment of beautiful and bewitching short films — including essays, travelogues, small meditations, and thematic contributions to anthologies — demonstrates the director’s mastery of the form.

 

  • Organized by: TIFF, Cinecitta' Luce
  • In collaboration with: Istituto Italiano di Cultura