Castro Theatre celebrates Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni once summed up his filmmaking philosophy in one sentence: “I’m looking for traces of feeling in men.”
In women, too.
From Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti searching for their missing friend (and their own souls) along the Mediterranean in “L’Avventura” to David Hemmings’ photographer who might have uncovered a murder within the emptiness of his images of Swingin’ ’60s London in “Blow-Up,” to Jack Nicholson’s TV news reporter who exchanges identities with a dead man (thus searching for his own) in “The Passenger,” Antonioni depicts people who find themselves trapped in a material, modern world, with meaning slowly slipping away even as they try desperately to find it.
A true artist of the 20th century, Antonioni (1912-2007) will be celebrated at the Castro Theatre on Saturday, April 28, with new restorations of five of his films and an evening party. The daylong celebration is presented by Luce Cinecitta in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, the Consulate General of Italy and The Leonardo da Vinci Society, all organized by Cinema Italia of San Francisco.
The day begins bright and early at 10:30 a.m. with “L’Avventura,” a landmark film that changed the course of Antonioni’s career at age 48, after 20 years in the Italian film industry — the last 10 as a director. And I do mean bright: “L’Avventura,” soaked in the Mediterranean sun and screening in 35mm, is one of the most gorgeously shot black-and-white films, with intense compositions that emphasize distance, both physical and emotional, and detail: rocks, wooden doors, architecture, crashing ocean waves, faces.
It is about Anna (Lea Massari) on a boating trip with her boyfriend Sandro (Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Vitti, who stars in three of the five films Saturday). Suddenly, Anna disappears without a trace. Sandro and Claudia search for her. But as they search for her, these two unfinished souls become attracted to each other, and Anna becomes a distant thought.
Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” also about emotional and moral emptiness in the material world, came out around the same time, and there was fierce debate on which film took the better approach. Fellini’s film is so full of life and vigor (the title, after all, translates as “The Sweet Life”) before that emotional house of cards collapses, while the characters in “L’Avventura” never seem to have tasted the sweetness. The title’s translation, “The Adventure,” seems more like an ironic joke.
“L’Avventura” was the first of a thematic trilogy, followed by “La Notte” (not screening Saturday) and capped by “L’Eclisse” (“The Eclipse”), a film which demands to be seen on the Castro big screen as Antonioni pushes his own envelope both philosophically and visually.
In this one, Vitti is a literary translator who breaks up with her lover — she doesn’t love him, and likely never did. On the rebound, she becomes smitten with a hotshot, handsome young stockbroker (Alain Delon), and they begin an affair that, as modern affairs often do, plays out during breaks between their hectic schedules. It’s pretty obvious that, while they have fun, this is not a relationship that’s built to last. The breakup is the last seven minutes of the film, a bold sequence that is perhaps the most discussed seven minutes of Antonioni’s career.
The afternoon concludes with “Red Desert” (“Il Deserto Rosso”) Antonioni’s first film in color, muted to emphasize the drabness of its setting: polluted industrial landscapes that serve as the backdrop of the increasingly toxic Vitti, a neglected housewife of the manager of a petrochemical plant who begins an affair with a business associate of her husband’s (Richard Harris). The affair, however, only accelerates her unraveling; it might be Vitti’s best performance.
By this point, Antonioni was an international star. Hollywood took notice, and Italian producer Carlo Ponti, who had just gone international by producing David Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago,” and MGM signed Antonioni to a three-picture deal. The first, “Blow-Up,” was a megahit that influenced not only filmmaking, but also fashion and college campus debates, and it helped make Vanessa Redgrave a star.
Hemmings’ fashion photographer Thomas is fabulously successful, available for parties and emotionally disconnected sex. His search for meaning begins when he’s out shooting random photographs in a park, and focuses his lens on a interesting young couple kissing on the grass. The woman (Redgrave) spots the photographer and demands he hand over the film.
He refuses, and when he develops the film, notices that the woman is looking worriedly at a figure obscured by trees, with an arm that appears to be holding a pistol. The next day, the photographer returns to the spot and finds a dead body, setting in motion a personal journey for Thomas, who tries to hide from reality by hitting clubs and drug-fueled parties. Herbie Hancock wrote the score, the Yardbirds make an appearance, and then there are these mimes appearing here and there during the film ...
The tribute is capped by “The Passenger,” the last film in the MGM-Ponti deal (after “Zabriskie Point,” not screening here). David Locke, Nicholson’s TV reporter, finds out the man he has switched identities with was a gunrunner for an African rebel group. Nonetheless, working off the dead man’s appointment book, he keeps meetings in Munich and Barcelona and gets in deeper danger.
All of Antonioni’s themes — alienation and identity set against a harsh mixture of desolate rural landscapes and cramped city architecture — are honed to perfection and capped in a bravura sevenminute closing sequence, done in one shot.
Nicholson made this around the time of “Chinatown” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” yet his restrained, internal performance anticipates the pre-maniacal form of his character in “The Shining”; David Locke is Nicholson as would be imagined by Camus, a man as addicted to his imagined rootlessness as he is nonplussed.