February.
Il Grido (1957), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. When I first arrived in the city of Toronto, a callow youth from a small town, I discovered the New Yorker, a small movie theater on Bloor Street, just at the ‘t’ with Charles Street. This is where I first experienced cinema, and one of the first films I saw was this one. I had not seen it since until last evening. I had a memory of a father and young daughter wandering aimlessly across a barren flatland, and this memory proved accurate. Antonioni and his cinematographer, Gianni de Venanzo, capture the dislocated and alienated life of mechanic and labourer Aldo (Steve Cochran). After his partner for seven years, Irma (Alida Valli), learns that her husband in Sydney, Australia, has died, she informs Aldo that she is leaving him. He is upset. Being upset, Aldo packs a small valise, takes their daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi), and hits the road. The film is something of a road movie with Aldo and Rosina making a few stops where Aldo strikes up short relationships with three women (not all at once?): his former fiancé Elvia (Betsy Blair), Virginia (Dorian Gray ) who runs a petrol station, and the prostitute Andreina (Jacqueline Jones). Like the landscape we see with its bare and stunted trees, its wide open spaces and flatness, and its assortment of shabby buildings and factories, the people live dreary lives struggling to make a living and find some semblance of contentment. Antonioni nicely captures a world on the verge of decline, a world drained of purpose, direction, and hope. At the end, Aldo may be the man in the high tower, but this does not get him very far. He ends where he began: splat. The film made an impression on me when I first saw it 55 and more years ago. It still impresses.
La Notte (1961), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Here is another film I first saw at the New Yorker Cinema in Toronto over fifty years ago. It remains perhaps the most searching film having to do with the modern malaise, alienation and boredom and the ennui of the bourgeoisie. We follow novelist Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) for the better part of 24 hours, from midday to the following morning. During this time, a time that has, in a way, stopped (we see at one moment a broken clock), Lidia and Giovanni begin to face the futility of their marriage, and perhaps the futility of the lives they have fashioned for themselves. We also see the vacuous lives of the high society in which the Pontanos live. Not a lot happens, on the surface, but much happens below the surface as the lives of these people unravel. The film presents its themes with a light hand; we see this in the remarkable rapport between Lidia and the woman her husband sets out to seduce, the industrialist’s daughter, Valentina (Monica Vitti). But what most impresses the viewer are the cityscapes, the blank walls, glass panels, long vistas, interior architecture, and juxtaposition of modernity and time past. At the party of a rich industrialist, Gherardini (Vincenzo Corbello), Gherardini remarks that he has “always looked upon my business as works of art.” He may be a philistine, but Gherardini has an artistic ambition, one that Antonioni’s camera delights in recording, even celebrating. The rub here is that such celebration comes with a caveat, this modernity may have artistic merit, but it also has emptiness, flatness, and alienating hardness. Sounds, too, are urgent reminders of the loud and even cacophonous present. La Notte comes between Antonioni’s L’Avventura and L’Eclise, and this trilogy of films perhaps sums up modernity as well as any works of art.
L'Eclisse (1962), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The last seven minutes of this film are justly famous. They communicate absence, emptiness, failure, and a world of meaning without substance. Antonioni's film lacks the drive of what we are used to seeing these days, except perhaps in the two lengthy stock exchange scenes. These scenes have the frenetic activity of ostensible chaos, the workings of ants that seem random and yet have dire human consequences. So much of this film speaks of the ruination of humanity because of money, colonial power, concrete, and the ever-present market that rules the practice of modern living. Antonioni invests insignificant things with communicative power - a chip of wood floating on water, lamps, clothing, cars, knick-knacks, windows, doors, mirrors, silence, cigarettes, a balloon, a chain link fence, a water tower looking like a mushroom, newspapers, an elbow. The film is very much of its time, and yet its exploration of modernity strikes me as of continuing relevance.
Identification of a Woman (1982), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Characters lost in a fog pretty much sums up this film. The protagonist, Niccolo (Tomas Milian), is a movie director who mistakes lust for research in his quest to find a woman suitable for his next film and for a companion. He tries two women, Mavi (Danielo Silverio), a cool upper-class woman whose friends greet Niccolo with icy distance, and Ida (Christine Boisson), an actor who is pregnant with another man’s child. The elusiveness of these women is expressed when Niccolo tapes a photograph of Louise Brooks on a window. This is another of Antonioni’s examinations of the hollowness of modernity, reminding me of L’Eclisse, except here lust attempts vainly to fill the emptiness of being. The narrative proceeds in a rather staccato fashion, leaving gaps for the viewer to fill in. Tomas Milian, in the main role, strikes me as curious. I associate him with the westerns of Sergio Corbucci, Giulio Questi, and Sergio Solima. Here he wanders through various locales in a bemused, even bewildered state. Anyone starting out with Antonioni might steer clear of this film until you have seen his early films from the 1950s and early 60s.
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013), directed by Frank Pavich. The greatest movie never made! Actors include Mick Jagger, Orson Wells, Salvador Dali, artists include H. R. Giger and Jean 'Moebius' Giraud, and music by Pink Floyd. Oh, and then the participation of Dan O'Bannon because Jodorowsky had liked the film Dark Star (who wouldn't like Dark Star?). This documentary has an infectious appeal as it traces the work of Jodorowsky through the collation of the script and story boards for Dune. Oh, and did I mention that Jodorowsky had not read Frank Herbert's book? I found this film a hoot. And of course El Topo and The Holy Mountain have their moments here.
