Chelsea the Cinéaste

Roundly and resoundingly booed halfway into the film, the director Antonioni and its star Vitti fled the theatre. Both could probably half-guess the audience’s hostility- being fed on films that abide by the dictates of consistency and logic, many could hardly brook L’Avventura ’s general uneventfulness and the director’s irrepressible urge to detract the storyline from its central current; but none expected the film to win, days after the disastrous premiere, the Jury Prize, the third most prestigious prize of Cannes festival. And more awards followed up, as the film blazed through the Continent, incurring more ire and bemusement. The hullabaloo was intense but short-lived. Counterculture that initiated by the discontented youngsters swept through the Western world like virus; the iconoclasts of the yore now found themselves ironically amongst the majority. It was considered “hip” to revolt against the established order, to denounce traditional values and to revel in moral de...

As a leading figure of Italian Modernist cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni made films that defy facile understanding. With their sharp deviations from conventional approach to storytelling, and a freewheeling style of filmmaking as constituted by a propensity of interspersing main events with disparate incidents, many of Antonioni’s famous works, including  L’Avventura ,  La Notte , and  L’Eclisse , are bold statements of a revolutionary redefinition of cinematic art. It was with an incredible sense of audacity and surprisingly little resistance that, straight after the making of  L’Eclisse , the reception of which was, much like the other two that preceded it, a mixture of raves and rants, Antonioni undertook his first venture to the realm of polychromatic film. The result was  Red Desert  (1964), a stunning classic that looks hardly like the director’s inaugural attempt at an unexplored medium, in which the colours, though appear bizarrely gaudy a...

Enigmatic, world-weary, capricious and bewitching, such sort of women that preoccupy  L’Avventura  and  La Note  is also the focal point of  L’Eclisse . All of them were played by Monica Vitti, with such confidence and aptitude that one cannot help wondering if Antonioni had them all tailor-made, or simply that Vitti was born for these roles. Claudia, Valentina, Vittoria and Vitti all seem the same person with only slight variations. After all, maybe one shouldn’t bother too much with the distinction of life and art when both are so confusedly intermingled in Italian cinema. Especially with Antonioni’s films, the quotidian is often made ambiguous by virtue of the auteur-director’s invariable reliance on the more instinctive mode of storytelling. Antonioni once said: “I never discuss the plots of my films. I never release a synopsis before I begin shooting…I depart from the script constantly. I may film scenes I have no intention filming. Things suggest ...