Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni

3/2/07 to 4/22/07

An essential retrospective surveys the career of this most elegant proponent of cinematic modernism, from early melodramas through landmarks like Red Desert, Blow-Up, and The Passenger-all visually compelling and still amazingly resonant. "Would it be too much to simply say, 'Go see them all'? This is the kind of retro that can make . . . the enlightened out of the curious."-Time Out N.Y.

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  • Red Desert, March 2

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

Past Films

  • Red Desert

    Friday, March 2 8:45pm
    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
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  • La notte

    Sunday, March 4 4:30pm
    Novelist Marcello Mastroianni and his wife Jeanne Moreau play out a drama of marital disillusionment against Antonioni's rigorous sense of place and architecture.
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  • L'eclisse

    Friday, March 9 7:00pm
    "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
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  • Il grido

    Saturday, March 10 5:30pm
    “A stripped-down existential drama . . . 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
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  • Story of a Love Affair

    Sunday, March 11 4:30pm
    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.
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  • L'avventura

    Thursday, March 15 7:30pm
    Monica Vitti on a desert island in "a mystery that casually abandons its ostensible premise midway through. . . . Cinema as temporal sculpture, L'Avventura [was] among the most influential of '60s movies."-Village Voice. "The first (and the definitive) film about the diminishing attention span of a modern world."-N.Y. Times
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  • The Lady Without Camellias

    Sunday, March 25 4:00pm
    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
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  • The Mystery of Oberwald

    Thursday, March 29 7:30pm
    Adapted from a drama by 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. With short Antonioni visto da Antonioni.
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  • Blow-Up

    Friday, March 30 7:00pm
    “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
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  • Le amiche

    Saturday, March 31 6:30pm
    “This strong early feature . . . focuses on a woman who returns to her native city of Turin to open a fashion salon, and on the troubled wealthy young men and women she gets to know. Masterfully directed in Antonioni's choreographic manner, with strong melancholic undertones.”-Chicago Reader
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  • Short Films by Antonioni, Program 1

    Sunday, April 1 2:00pm
    Rare, early shorts made between 1943 and 1965 document the lives of villagers and street cleaners, models and lovers.
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  • I vinti

    Sunday, April 1 3:45pm
    Three moral tales observe the dehumanized behavior of postwar youth; aimlessness is reflected in the landscape as much as in the action.
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  • Antonioni: The Vision That Changed the Cinema (Free Screening!)

    Thursday, April 5 5:30pm
    An illuminating collection of clips and interviews. With short The Last Sequence of The Passenger.
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  • Zabriskie Point

    Saturday, April 7 8:30pm
    Antonioni filmed the '60s war between radical and straight cultures in L.A. and Death Valley. “A sorrowing, stranger's-eye view of modern America.”-Time Out
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  • The Passenger

    Friday, April 13 8:50pm
    Over 30 years 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
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  • Identification of a Woman

    Saturday, April 14 8:30pm
    In 1982, Antonioni returned to the themes of his great ‘60s films-alienation and ennui among the well-to-do-for this enigmatic, erotic work. “A brilliant, glittering piece of filmmaking . . . stunningly beautiful.”-Sight & Sound
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  • Chung Kuo China

    Sunday, April 15 2:00pm
    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
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  • Beyond the Clouds

    Saturday, April 21 8:50pm
    Completed with help from Wim Wenders after Antonioni suffered a stroke, with John Malkovich playing the director's alter ego, this series of vignettes offers "moments of such astounding visual power . . . that you are all but transported through the screen to a place where the physical and emotional weather fuse into a palpable sadness."-N.Y. Times
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  • Short Films by Antonioni, Program 2

    Sunday, April 22 2:00pm
    Shorts made between 1997 and 2004 range from a return to the island of L'avventura to a moving self-portrait. With Making a Film for Me Is Life, a documentary shot during the making of Beyond the Clouds.
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