Part Mafia murder mystery, part novel of ideas, but most of all a love story, The Sadness of Antonioni follows Hank Morelli, a young assistant professor of film who is obsessed with Antonioni's L'Avventura. As he embarks on an unlikely romance with a Wendy's cashier, he is also drawn into the mystery of his grandfather's underworld connections and tempted by his department chair and his department chair's mysterious girlfriend, Nadia, to take part in a monstrous film project they are planning. Haunted throughout by the terror of time's raw present without exit, The Sadness of Antonioni is an American adventure in the Antonioni vein—visually rich and emotionally mysterious—in which an unlikely young couple navigates the difficult waters of their relationship, each suffering the remnants of a violent past that must be resolved if they hope to stay together. Heartrending and unsparing, yet with a persistent comic vein, this is Frank Lentricchia's seventh and most ambitious and disturbing novel to date.

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.

In his analysis of a scene in La notte, for instance, Arrowsmith proposes how the composition of shots expresses the meaning. Noting how the actress portraying a nymphomaniac is framed next to expanses of wall, Arrowsmith writes, "What the nymphomaniac wants to shut out is any knowledge of the blank immensity ... that we see exteriorized as she stands against the absolutely clinical white blankness of the wall, her own emptiness projected as the emptiness around her, threatening her."

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.

Gathers thirty-three story ideas for films by the Italian director noted for his use of silence, omission, and suggestion

Cinema was the most important new artistic medium of the twentieth century and modernism was the most important new aesthetic movement across the arts in the twentieth century. However, what exactly is the relationship between cinema and modernism? Cinematic Modernism and Contemporary Film explores how in the early twentieth century cinema came to be seen as one of the new technologies which epitomised modernity and how cinema itself reflected ideas, hopes and fears concerning modern life. Howard Finn examines the emergence of a new 'international style' of cinema, combining a poetic aesthetic of the image with genre-based fictional narrative and documentary realism. He provides concise accounts of how theorists such as André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière have discussed this cinematic aesthetic, clarifying debates over terms such as 'realism', 'classical' and 'avant-garde' as well as recent controversies over terms such as 'slow cinema' and 'vernacular modernism'. He further argues the influence of modernism through close readings of many contemporary films, including films by Abbas Kiarostami, Béla Tarr, Jia Zhangke, and Angela Schanelec. Drawing on a broad range of examples, including Soviet montage, Italian neorealism, postwar new waves and the 'new cinema' of Taiwan and Iran, this book explores the cultural significance of modernism and its lasting influence over cinema.

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

Collection of short critical essays from 2001 to the present.