This event on March 30, 2012, was part of: Homage to Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) held at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, to mark the centenary year of the Italian director’s birth organized jointly by the Department of Italian Studies and the Department of Cinema Studies, NYU.
Above: PANEL 1: Richard Allen (NYU), ‘Hitchcock, Antonioni, and the Wandering Woman’ and Karen Pinkus (Cornell), ‘Automation, Autonomia, Anomie’; PANEL 2: John David Rhodes (Sussex), ‘Antonioni and Geopolitical Abstraction’ and Karl Schoonover (Warwick), ‘Antonioni's Toxicology’
Above: PANEL 3 Screening of N.U. (11’, 1948) and discussion with David Forgacs and Ara Merjian (NYU) Matilde Nardelli (UCL) 'Antonioni and the Cultures of Photography’ PANEL 4 Michael Siegel (Brown), ‘From Identificazione to Investigazione: Looking at Looking in Late Antonioni’ Francesco Casetti (Yale), ‘The Remains of the Modern’ PANEL 5 Eugenia Paulicelli (CUNY), David Forgacs (NYU), John David Rhodes (Sussex)
Approaching the figure and work of Michelangelo Antonioni a century after his birth, one is confronted with a number of persistent critical tropes about his oeuvre, with a substantial, if in great part dated, body of critical work and, perhaps, also with the sense that all has already been said and written on the director of the malady of feelings, of filmic slowness and temps mort, of the crisis of the postwar bourgeoisie, of epistemological uncertainties, of modernist difficulty and even boredom, of aestheticism and the hypertrophy of style, of narrative opacity. And yet, Antonioni today powerfully escapes the reach of old categorisations that have attempted to congeal his figure once and for all into an inert monument of modern cinema. His continued influence on world film-makers and the new pressing questions that his films raise today for contemporary audiences call for a renewed critical effort. [Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)]
Despite Antonioni’s deep concerns about scientific logic and any objective representation of reality, in purely formal terms his work is always defined by a clear tension between what I would call on the one hand a documentary impulse, and on the other a drive towards fiction pushed at times to the level of melodrama.
[... H]owever hollowed-out and experimental Antonioni’s works become, they always constitute fictions since they present characters in artificial situations. As Antonioni himself put it, his primary interest lies in the moment when the context or environment suddenly takes on “relief.” Which is to say, his hybrid narratives marked by temporal disjunction, disorientation, black holes, ellipses, and a lack of resolution serve to provide just enough justification for human figuration, however “unnaturally” heightened and stylized, to take hold. This recourse to melodrama, broadly defined, offered Antonioni a means of shortcircuiting and sculpting the Real in slowed-down, distended form in order to capture it as a series of tableaux vivants. [...]
Alert to the tensions in the spatiotemporal relations between people, objects, and events, the director must, according to Antonioni, engage with a “special reality” and be “committed morally in some way.” What this means in practice is dedramatizing the narrative event in order to focus attention on the physical context that both makes it possible but also eludes it. Antonioni propels his protagonists into new or alien environments, and we follow them almost ethnographically as they develop new perceptual powers in order to negotiate their changed conditions'. [James S. Williams, 'The Rhythms of Life: An Appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni, Extreme Aesthete of the Real', Film Quarterly (Fall Issue 2008, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 46-57), pp. 50-52 - my emphasis]
Today,
Film Studies For Free gleefully celebrates the publication online of just under seven hours of videoed content from an excellent, recent conference in New York City that its author had really wished she'd been able to attend. Now -- virtually -- she (and you) can!
Rhodes, a highly esteemed (and much loved!) colleague of
FSFF's humble scribe, appears in the video frame still at the top of this post, and throughout both embedded videos. He was one of the organisers of, and main contributors to, the NYU conference. A very generous sample excerpt from his and Rascaroli's book may be found
here.
To accompany the truly excellent videos,
FSFF has assembled a rather fabulous list of links to other online and openly accessible studies of Antonioni's work. If you know of any significant resources missing below, please leave a link in the comments.
Grazie!If you happen to be in the vicinity of Antonioni's birthplace of Ferrara between September 30, 2012 and January 6, 2013, you'll be able to catch an excellent exhibition about his work, which opens following a public celebration of the filmmaker on the day of his birth itself (September 29). You can find more information
here. Thanks to Antonioni scholar
Ted Perry for his tip off about this event. Do look out for his new book on him which should be out next year.
- Paolo Bartoloni, 'Blanchot and Ambiguity, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.4 (2010)
- Michael Bloom, 'Fragile Images and Concrete Things: Indirect Subjectivity and the Externalization of The Soul in Michelangelo Antonioni's Tetralogy', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
- David Brancaleone, 'Part 2 of 'The Thin Line Between Documentary and Fiction'', Experimental Conversations, Issue 8, 2011
- James Brown, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', Senses of Cinema, 20, 2002
- James Brown, 'Il Grido: Modernising the Po', Senses of Cinema, 26, 2003
- Peter Brunette, 'Introduction [excerpt]', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
- Peter Brunette, 'Blow-up', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
- Ken Burke and Héctor Mario Cavallari, 'Julio Cortázar and Michelangelo Antonioni: Words, Images, and the Limits of Verbal and Visual Representation', Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism, 05/20/10
- Bert Cardullo, 'Introduction', in Cardullo (ed.), After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films; Essays and Interviews (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009)
- James Cisneros, 'How to Watch the Story of Film Adaptation. Cortázar, Antonioni, Blow-Up', Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, n° 2, 2003
- Jonathan Dawson, The Passenger', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
- Laurie N. Ede, '[Review of Murray Pomerance's] Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011]', Screening the Past, 33, 2011
- R. Bruce Elder, 'Antonioni's Tragic Vision: Style, Fonn and Idea in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, with Especial Emphasis on His Masterpiece, Il deserto rosso', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 1.2, 1991
- Hamish Ford, 'Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Deleuze’s Time-Image', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, Sept-Oct 2003
- Matthew Gandy, 'Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert', originally in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (2) (2003)
- Peter Goldman, 'Blowup, Film Theory, and the Logic of Realism', Anthropoetics 14, no. 1 (Summer 2008)
- Absjørn Grønstad, 'Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up', Film Journal, 9, 2004
- Mike Grost on Antonioni
- Christine Henderson, 'The Trials of Individuation in Late Modernity: Exploring Subject Formation in Antonioni's Red Desert' PDF, Film-Philosophy, 15.1, 2011
- Penelope Houston, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', originally in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980
- Ian Johnston, 'We’re Not Happy and We Never Will Be: On Cronaca di un amore', Bright Lights Film Journal, 53, 2006
- Robert Philip Kolker The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (passim.), originally published 1982
- Little Rabbit's Antonioni Archive (thanks to Mike Grost for the link)
- Gaetana Marrone, 'A Cinematic Grand Tour of Sicily: Irony, Memory and Metamorphic Desire from Goethe to Tornatore', California Italian Studies, 1(1), 2010
- 'David Martin-Jones, '[Review of Brunette's book on Antonioni', Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 50, December 1999
- David Alan Mellor, '‘Fragments of an Unknowable Whole’: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incorporation of Contemporary Visualities in London, 1966', Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, 8 (2): 2007, pp. 45-61
- Zach Melzer, 'Michelangelo Antonioni and the “Reality” of the Modern', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
- Gary Morris, 'Chabrol, Losey, Antonioni: Three Classic Eurofilms: Les Bonnes Femmes, Eva, Il Grido', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 31, 2010
- Gavriel Moses, 'As We [They] See [Hear] Them [Us]: Cain/Antonioni//Antonioni/Coppola', Voices in Italian Americana, 1991
- John Orr, 'Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs. Antonioni's The Passenger', Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007
- Murray Pomerance, 'Significant Cinema: The Scene of the Crime', Senses of Cinema, 61, 2011
- Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)
- Julie Ravary, 'La Femme “Antonionienne”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
- Elena del Río, “Antonioni’s Blowup: Freeing the Imaginary from Metaphysical Ground”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 32, June, 2005
- Christopher Sharrett, 'L’eclisse', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
- Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara, 'Reporting on The Passenger', Undercurrent, 3, 2006
- Gregory Solman, 'L'Avventura', Senses of Cinema, 31, 2004
- Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Realism and Reality in Antonioni’s Profession: Reporter as dramatizing the Nietzschean notion of the “power of the false”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
- Frank P. Tomasulo, 'The bourgeoisie is also a class: class as character in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura', Jump Cut, 49, 2007
- Donato Totaro, ' Zabriskie Point (1970, Antonioni): A Scene by Scene Analysis of a Troubled Masterpiece', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
- Donato Totaro, 'Alida Valli: May 31, 1921-April 22, 2006', Offscreen Journal, 10.5, 2006
- Donato Totaro, 'May 1968 and After: Cinema in France and Beyond', Offscreen Journal, 1998
- Jack Turner, 'Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text', Other Voices 1.3 (January 1999)
- Peter Verstraten, 'A Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose: On Antonioni and Malick', Image [and] Narrative, 13.2, 2012
- Fiona A.Villella, 'Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing In Antonioni's Zabriskie Point', Senses of Cinema, 4, 2000
- Elisabeth Weis, 'Tati, Hitchcock, Antonioni: Three Approaches to Sonic Creativity', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, 2007
- Matthew M. Wylie, 'Avoiding the Masculine "Gaze": Frustrated Homosexual Desire and the Eroticized Role of the Camera In Hitchcock's Rear Window and Antonioni's Blow Up', Cinetext, February 2003
