Michelangelo Antonioni @ The Museum of Modern Art

I. i. (December 09, 2017)
Michelangelo Antonioni Retrospective. A Celebration of the work of one of the world’s greatest film directors began last night at the MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in association with Istituto Luce Cinecittà presented the first complete film retrospective in New York in more than a decade of the work of Italian filmmakerMichelangelo Antonioni.

The retrospective, taking place from December 7, 2017 through January 7, 2018 in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, launched with two successful events: a VIP screening of Red Desert and a panel discussion on the book 'My Antonioni'.

This retrospective features nearly 40 35mm prints and digital preservations, and celebrates the writer-director’s legendary collaborations with Monica Vitti—the trilogy of L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, and La Notte, as well as Red Desert, Blow-Up, and The Passenger.

It would be hard to overstate Michelangelo Antonioni’s influence on postwar cinema, architecture and design, fashion, and literature, even on modern conceptions of the intellectual and the erotic. Antonioni (1912–2007), whose fascination with mediated reality only deepened over time, was a restless experimenter with composition, camera movement, cutting, and storytelling.

Presented with Luce Cinecittà, Rome, and featuring nearly 40 35mm prints and digital preservations, this first complete retrospective in New York in more than a decade celebrates the writer-director’s legendary collaborations with Monica Vitti—the trilogy of L’AvventuraL’Eclisse, and La Notte, which Pauline Kael myopically dismissed in her infamous essay “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties”—as well as Red DesertBlow-Up, and The Passenger.

It also foregrounds Antonioni’s sociopolitical concerns through his neorealist documentary shorts and through his impressionistic yet incendiary Chung Kuo—China(1972), which lifted the Iron Curtain on China during the Cultural Revolution; a newly struck 35mm print of the Director's Cut is presented at MoMA in a weeklong theatrical run. Comparing the “antique and silent” beauty of Ferrara, his childhood town, with his “hard and hostile” experience of Rome, Antonioni might well have been describing the tensions within his own films: abstract, elliptical narratives involving men and women who are estranged from each other, from nature, and from themselves, and who drift through landscapes reflective of their existential despair and yearning.

The entire schedule for this retrospective is available at the following link >>

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