An analysis of the life and work of the Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni.

Michelangelo Antonioni, who died in 2007, was one of cinema’s greatest modernist filmmakers. The films in his black and white trilogy of the early 1960s—L’avventura, La Notte, L‘eclisse—are justly celebrated for their influential, gorgeously austere style. But in this book, Murray Pomerance demonstrates why the color films that followed are, in fact, Antonioni’s greatest works. Writing in an accessible style that evokes Antonioni’s expansive use of space, Pomerance discusses The Red Desert, Blow-Up, Professione: Reporter (The Passenger), Zabriskie Point, Identification of a Woman, The Mystery of Oberwald, Beyond the Clouds, and The Dangerous Thread of Things to analyze the director’s subtle and complex use of color. Infusing his open-ended inquiry with both scholarly and personal reflection, Pomerance evokes the full range of sensation, nuance, and equivocation that became Antonioni’s signature.

Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the great visual artists of the cinema. The central and distinguishing strength of Antonioni's mature films, Seymour Chatman argues, is narration by a kind of visual minimalism, by an intense concentration on the sheer appearance of things and a rejection of explanatory dialogue. Though traditional audiences have balked at the "opacity" of Antonioni's films, it is precisely their rendered surface that is so eloquent once one learns to read it. Not despite, but through, their silences the films show a deep concern with the motives, perceptions and vicissitudes of the emotional life. This study covers films not dealt with in any other book on the great director, including Il mistero di Obertwald (1980) and Identificazione di una donna (1982), which have not yet been seen in the U.S. Its coverage of the early documentaries and features, when Antonioni was forging his new and original stylistic "language," is especially full. In a free-ranging analysis of the evolution of Antonioni's style that quotes liberally from Antonioni's own highly articulate writings and interviews, Chatman shows how difficult it was for the filmmaker to liberate his art from the conventional means of rendering narrative, especially dialogue, conventional sound effects, and commentative music. From his first efforts to his triumphant achievements in the tetralogy of L'avventura, L'eclisse, and Il deserto rosso, Antonioni's acute sensibility struggled to achieve the mastery that has won him a secure place in film history. Chatman's study is the only complete account of Antonioni's work available in English. Its novel visual approach to the films while attract not only film scholars but also readers interested in painting and architecture—both important elements of Antonioni's work.

"Containing many illustrations from Michelangelo Antonioni's own archives, this text explores his life and career from his earliest documentaries to his latest collaborations"--Publisher's description.

Publisher description

This collection of new essays by leading film scholarsaddresses Michelangelo Antonionias apre-eminent figure in European art cinema, explores his continuing influence and legacy, and engages with his ability to both interpret and shape ideas of modernity and modern cinema.

A reissue of a significant and hard-to-find text in film studies with a new introduction and three additional essays included.

Influential, innovative and aesthetically experimental, the films of Michelangelo Antonioni are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key in ushering in its 'new' or 'modern' incarnation around 1960. Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity offers a radical rethinking of the director's work. It argues against prevalent understandings of it in terms of both cinematic purity and indebtedness to painting. Reconnecting Antonioni's aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s and 1970s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity brings into relief these works' crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new, 'impure', art practices - of John Cage, Franco Vaccari, Robert Smithson, Piero Gilardi and Andy Warhol among others - that precipitated the demotion of painting from its privileged position as a paradigm for all the arts. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via cinema, the book replaces auteuristic, if not hagiographic, accounts of the director's work with a new understanding of its critical significance across the modern visual arts and culture more broadly.