Michelangelo Antonioni’s reputation precedes him; he was a favorite of Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, and Andrei Tarkovsky — and panned by Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles who couldn’t comprehend his long shots and “humorless” content. All opinions aside, Antonioni was a masterful, artistic genius, and with his “trilogy” (three films that were not intentionally connected, were just coined as so because of their parallel themes of modernity) featuring 1960’s “L’Avventura,” 1961’s “La Notte,” and 1962’s “L’Eclisse” he caught the deserved attention of critics and patrons alike.
READ MORE: The Essentials: Michelangelo Antonioni
The face and presence that forever comes to mind with the director’s trilogy is that of Monica Vitti, Antonioni’s former flame and frequent collaborator, with the pair first working together when Vitti joined his Teatro Nuovo di Milano, before he cast her as the lead in “L’Avventura.” Her expressions are often melancholy or apprehensive in the four films she made with the director — whether portraying a friend seducing her missing girlfriend’s sad lover or a young literary translator — but Vitti’s sadness has an incalculable depth because her characters always have the potential for happiness that’s overridden by human vacuity.
In Tope Ogundare’s video essay for Fandor, he explores Vitti’s versatility even when suffering through existential crises in post-war Italy, and the sanguine promise behind her quintessential pout. In Antonioni’s narrative, realist cinema, Vitti’s seraphic malaise represents the possibility of difference in an obsessive, materialistic world.
What’s your favorite Vitti moment? Let us know in the comments below.
