Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties (on short documentaries like N.U., about street cleaners in Rome) and fifties (directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating study of bourgeois Italian life LE AMICHE), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force in international film. It was also then that he began to typify, alongside such artists as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais, a new European art cinema, expressing a distinctly contemporary ennui. With their stunning visuals, ambiguous narratives, and still-relevant focus on modern alienation, Antonioni’s films of this period, all starring Monica Vitti—L’AVVENTURA (famously booed at Cannes for confounding its audience with its longueurs and lack of closure), LA NOTTE, L’ECLISSE, and RED DESERT—have stood the test of time, while his overlooked later films, like IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN, have only grown more compelling and mysterious as the years have passed.