APRIL 28, 2018
CASTRO THEATRE
Presented by Luce Cinecittà, in collaboration with The Italian Cultural Institute and the Consul General of Italy in San Francisco.
Michelangelo Antonioni, was born in Ferrara on September 29, 1912. He died in Rome on July 30, 2007 at 94 years of age.
His films received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, including: at Festival de Cannes - Jury Prize (1960, 1962), Palme d'Or (1966), and 35th Anniversary Prize (1982); at the Venice Film Festival - Silver Lion (1955), Golden Lion (1964), FIPRESCI Prize (1964, 1995) and Pietro Bianchi Award (1998); the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon eight times; an honorary Academy Award in 1995. He is one of only three directors to have won the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear, and the only director to have won these three and the Golden Leopard of the Locarno International Film Festival.
Few directors have so radically transformed our perception of the possibilities of film as has Michelangelo Antonioni. Just as there is painting before and after “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” there is cinema before and after “L’Avventura.” Indeed Antonioni’s films constitute a monument of modernism. Their evocation of postwar alienation and anomie, their formal innovation and figurative beauty, created one of the most influential and inexhaustible canons in the history of cinema. – James Quandt
Italy/France. Screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra. Starring Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti and Lea Massari.
Presented in 35 mm film. In Italian with English subtitles.
An existential “detective story” in which Anna, a young woman, disappears on a deserted island during a boat cruise. Anna’s best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti in the first of her many collaborations with Antonioni), and Anna’s lover, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), look for clues as to her whereabouts, but as the search seems to get out of hand they begin to fall into love.
“When Antonioni’s cinematic masterpiece L’Avventura opened in New York in the spring of 1961, art film audiences identified passionately with a mood that had never been expressed on the screen with such poetic intensity. The film contemplated the modern world with a heart that was heavy and an eye that arranged Italian landscape and architecture into exquisitely composed, if somber, visual metaphor of a profound spiritual malaise.”
– Stephen Holden (The New York Times, Oct. 23, 1992)
Italy/France. Screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Ottiero Ottieri.
Starring Monica Vitti, Alain Delon, and Francisco Rabal.
Presented in 35 mm film. In Italian with English subtitles.
A tailspin at the Rome stock exchange serves as a backdrop for a love affair between a translator (Monica Vitti) and her mother’s stockbroker (Alain Delon). Antonioni’s evocation of anomie and alienation was never so exquisitely articulated as in L’ECLISSE. The final scene, in which suspense is built out of an increasingly unbearable absence, is justly famous.
“Of all my old films, L’ECLISSE is the one I like best,” Antonioni claimed in 1967. “From the point of view of style, it is the most rigorous and therefore the most successful. Also the most modern.”
Italy/France. Screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra. Starring Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, and Carlo Chionetti.
Presented in a new, digitally restored 4K digital DCP courtesy of CSC-Cineteca Nazionale and Istituto Luce Cinecittà, with the cooperation of RTI-Mediaset. In Italian with English subtitles.
A provocative look at the spiritual desolation of the technological age - about a disaffected woman (Monica Vitti), wandering through a bleak industrial landscape beset by power plants and environmental toxins, and tentatively flirting with her husband’s coworker (Richard Harris). RED DESERT creates a nearly apocalyptic image of its time, and confirms Antonioni as cinema’s preeminent poet of the modern age. (Janus Films)
If L’AVVENTURA remapped the nature of narrative in the modern cinema, RED DESERT ushered in a new era in color cinematography. Working in color for the first time, Antonioni literally repainted and re-visualized the world to evoke the spiritual distraction of his central character and the poisonous environment of the industrial age. Monica Vitti plays a plant manager’s wife, quietly mad in an unhappy marriage and unsuccessfully seeking comfort in a fleeting affair with her husband’s business associate (Richard Harris).
Great Britain/Italy/USA. Screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra and Edward Bond; based on Julio Cortázar’s short story “The Devil's Drool.”
Starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, and Sarah Miles.
Presented in 4K digital restoration DCP, curated by Thr Criterion Collection, Cineteca di Bologna and istituto Luce Cinecittá in collaboration with Warner Bros and Park Circus. In English.
BLOW-UP takes the form of a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park. Antonioni’s meticulous aesthetic control and intoxicating color palette breathe life into every frame, and the jazzy sounds of Herbie Hancock, a beautifully evasive performance by Vanessa Redgrave, and a cameo by the Yardbirds make the film a transporting time capsule from a bygone era. (The Criterion Collection)
“BLOW-UP is the movie of the year. It is what LOLA MONTES was to Ophuls, UGETSU to Mizoguchi, CONTEMPT to Godard, FRENCH CAN CAN to Renoir, LIMELIGHT to Chaplin, REAR WINDOW to Hitchcock, 8 ½ to Fellini -- a statement of the artist, not on life but on art itself as the consuming passion of an artist’s life.” – Andrew Sarris
"La Cupola" party inspired to the famous villa that architect Dante Bini built for Michelangelo Antonioni in Costa Paradiso, Sardinia.
Catered by Rudy Duran's C'era una volta restaurant.
Italian Islands food and wine. Live entertainment.
Italy/Spain/France. Screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni, Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen.
Starring Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, and Jenny Runacre.
Presented in 35 mm film. In English, Spanish, German, and French with English subtitles.
David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a disillusioned American reporter is sent on a grueling mission to North Africa. When he stumbles across the body of a dead man, Locke, long desirous of starting life over again, assumes the corpse's identity. He soon discovers that the man he's pretending to be is involved in gun running on behalf of a terrorist group. Making the acquaintance of a mysterious woman (Maria Schneider), he finds a kindred spirit -- a woman as "lost" as he.
– Hal Erickson
In one of his greatest performances, “played with a stunning mixture of emotional lethargy and sexual heat” (Manohla Dargis), Jack Nicholson is a television reporter on assignment in Africa. In an attempt to reinvent himself, he sheds all ties to his past—his wife, his child, his career—and assumes the identity of a dead man.