Michelangelo Antonioni

June 15–August 31, 2018

This comprehensive retrospective is a rare chance to explore the full range of an Italian modernist master’s formally dazzling work.

Read full description

  • L’avventura

  • La notte

  • Red Desert

  • Blow-Up

  • Zabriskie Point

  • The Passenger

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Red Desert

    • Saturday, June 30 6 PM
    • Wednesday, July 4 7 PM
    • Friday, August 31 7 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, France, 1964

    Antonioni’s first color film draws images of alarming beauty from environmental apocalypse as an industrialist’s wife (Monica Vitti) suffers a nervous breakdown. “Never has so bleak a vision of contemporary life been projected with more intensity” (Time).

  • L'eclisse

    • Wednesday, June 20 7 PM
    • Wednesday, August 29 7 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    France, Italy, 1962

    Digital Restoration

    “Antonioni’s 1962 masterpiece showcases Monica Vitti as his moodiest, most evasive heroine, drifting out of one affair and into another with Alain Delon’s mercurial stockbroker” (Village Voice). “Perhaps the director’s most savage blast of gorgeous B&W ennui” (Time Out).

  • Chung Kuo China

    • Sunday, August 26 2 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, China, 1972

    Imported Print

    A meditation on China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. “The rarest of rare, this epic documentary is as legendary as it is unseen” (Cinematheque Ontario).

  • La notte

    • Sunday, June 17 7 PM
    • Saturday, August 25 5:30 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, France, 1961

    Digital Restoration
    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
    Film to Table dinner follows the August 25 screening

    Novelist Marcello Mastroianni and his wife Jeanne Moreau play out a drama of marital disillusionment against Antonioni’s rigorous sense of place and architecture.

  • Beyond the Clouds

    • Friday, August 24 8:45 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders
    Italy, France, Germany, 1995

    Imported Print

    This late work is a resolutely idiosyncratic treatise on that most old-fashioned of themes: beauty. With John Malkovich, Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Irène Jacob, Peter Weller, and Jean Reno. “One of the major films of the decade” (Film Comment).

  • L’avventura

    • Friday, June 15 7 PM
    • Thursday, June 28 7 PM
    • Wednesday, August 22 7 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, France, 1960

    Imported Print

    Monica Vitti on a desert island in “a mystery that casually abandons its ostensible premise midway through. . . . Cinema as temporal sculpture” (Village Voice). “The first (and the definitive) film about the diminishing attention span of a modern world” (New York Times).

  • Identification of a Woman

    • Sunday, August 19 7 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, France, 1982

    Imported Print

    In 1982, Antonioni returned to the themes of his great 1960s films—alienation and ennui among the well-to-do—for this enigmatic, erotic work. “A brilliant, glittering piece of filmmaking . . . stunningly beautiful” (Sight & Sound).

  • The Mystery of Oberwald

    • Sunday, August 12 4 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, 1980

    Imported Print

    Adapted from a drama by Jean Cocteau, the story of a queen (Monica Vitti), her king, a poet, and treachery and murder in an unidentified kingdom. “A work of dazzling ambition and achievement” (Time).

  • Short Films by Antonioni, Program 2

    • Saturday, August 11 5 PM

    Imported Prints

    This evening’s program of shorts ranges from the island setting of L’avventura to India and Sicily. Plus Enrica Antonioni’s portrait of her husband’s passion for cinema, To Make a Film Is to Be Alive.

  • The Passenger

    • Wednesday, August 8 7 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, France, Spain, United States, 1975

    Decades later, Antonioni’s 1975 film “still packs a wallop. . . . This moody Jack Nicholson political thriller remains a great, bizarre film, full of beauty, mystery, and riddles with no answers” (Chicago Tribune).

  • Short Films by Antonioni, Program 1

    • Wednesday, August 1 7 PM

    Imported Prints
    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!

    An evening of short documentary and narrative works by the Italian master, including The People of the Po, Lies of Love, Superstition, The Villa of Monsters, Suicide Attempt (from the omnibus film Love in the City), and more.

  • Zabriskie Point

    • Saturday, July 28 8 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    United States, 1970

    Antonioni filmed the 1960s war between radical and straight cultures in L.A. and Death Valley, creating “a sorrowing, stranger’s-eye view of modern America” (Time Out).

  • Blow-Up

    • Saturday, July 21 6 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    United Kingdom, 1966

    Digital Restoration

    “Simply put, the key movie of the 1960s. Set in a vividly mod Swinging London, Antonioni’s first English-language film [is] a cryptic murder mystery . . . a landmark of the decade’s observational outrage and Pop disposability” (Time Out).

  • Il grido

    • Thursday, July 19 7 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, United States, 1957

    Imported Print

    Amid the desolate vistas of the Po Valley, “an angry working man wanders impulsively through a world that has no place for him. Pervasive mist, fluid compositions, and melancholy piano add to the disorientation” (Village Voice).

  • Le amiche

    • Saturday, July 14 8:15 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, 1955

    Imported Print

    Antonioni inspects the social architecture of 1950s Turin in this portrait of a group of fashionable young women, “masterfully directed in Antonioni’s choreographic manner, with strong melancholic undertones” (Chicago Reader).

  • I vinti

    • Sunday, July 8 7 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, 1952

    Three moral tales observe the dehumanized behavior of postwar youth; aimlessness is reflected in the landscape as much as in the action.

  • The Lady Without Camellias

    • Saturday, July 7 6 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, 1953

    Imported Print

    A Milanese shopgirl becomes a movie actress, but not a great one, in this expressive early melodrama. “Antonioni transcends the traditional hypocrisies of the soap-opera genre, [yet] never loses touch with the throbbing feelings of his characters” (Village Voice).

  • Story of a Love Affair

    • Sunday, July 1 7 PM
    Michelangelo Antonioni
    Italy, 1950

    Imported Print

    Antonioni’s first feature is loosely based on The Postman Always Rings Twice, but turns a torrid love story into a tale of corruption and betrayal in postwar industrial society.