Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
8 Episodes
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.
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11:13Episode 1Gente del Po
Episode 1
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1947 • Italy
This film of a barge trip down the Po River is, along with N.U., one of several early nonfiction shorts by Michelangelo Antonioni to look at the relationship between individuals and their environment, a theme the director would fully explore in...
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Le amiche
Episode 3
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1955 • Italy
Starring Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti, Franco FabriziThis major early achievement by Michelangelo Antonioni bears the first signs of the cinema-changing style for which he would soon be world-famous. LE AMICHE (THE GIRLFRIENDS) is ...
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2:23:02Episode 4L’avventura
Episode 4
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1960 • France, Italy
Starring Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica VittiMichelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork. An iconic piece of challenging 1960s cinema and a gripping narrative on its own terms, L’AVVENTURA concerns the enigmatic di...
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La notte
Episode 5
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1961 • Italy
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica VittiThis psychologically acute, visually striking modernist work was director Michelangelo Antonioni’s follow-up to the epochal L’AVVENTURA. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau star as a n...
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L’eclisse
Episode 6
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1962 • France, Italy
The concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni's informal trilogy on contemporary malaise (following L'avventura and La notte), L'eclisse tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) and drifts ...
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1:57:03Episode 7Red Desert
Episode 7
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1964 • Italy
Starring Monica Vitti, Richard HarrisMichelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s panoramas of contemporary alienation were decade-defining artistic events, and RED DESERT, his first color film, is perhaps his most epochal. This provocative look at the spirit...
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2:10:29Episode 8Identification of a Woman
Episode 8
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1982 • Italy
Starring Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine BoissonMichelangelo Antonioni’s IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN is a body- and soul-baring voyage into one man’s artistic and erotic consciousness. After his wife leaves him, a film director finds him...
