“I no longer have ideas, only memories.”

Antonioni extracted meaning of abstraction. Solipsistic in his approach, he rendered objects, space, and buildings as extensions of the inner psychological states of his characters. He was a literal symbolist, and his imagery was absolute. Antonioni often lamented overly intellectual readings of his films, encouraging a more instinctive approach to engage with his films.

La Notte, the middle child of the alienation trilogy, is a poignant formalist masterwork that charts the emotional despondence and interior degradation of a failing loveless marriage, externalized in the prosaic modernist architecture of 1960s Milan.

After visiting a dying friend in the hospital, which incites an existential awakening, Giovanni and Lidia begin to recognize the lovelessness of their…

I did a thing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCyZyA9YlU

How do I put this delicately? La Notte is simply the finest film I have ever seen. I have reached this point after much careful consideration. The mastery of the film is inescapable and the conclusion I have come to feels inevitable. La Notte is a perfect example of the cinema's ultimate grammar. It's the best film in the whole world.

La Notte is a film of reflections, of internalized deterioration made visibly external through false extensions of our composite social selves. Giovanni's novels are imprecise reflections of his intellectualism. His wife, Lidia, is an untrue, forced reflection of his masculine and social worth. The role of architecture in La Notte serves as the mirror…

"Soon hospitals will look just like nightclubs; people want a good time right to the very end."

In order to give a sense of this outstanding film I will first engage in a few facile comparisons. This is purely an exercise in trying to paint a picture through context, which is to say I'm not claiming that the following films had an actual influence on Antonioni (indeed in about half the cases the films in question didn't even exist when La Notte was produced). First let's take the glossy decadence that informs the visual palette for Fellini's La Dolce Vita and transpose it from Rome to Milan. Next take the mournful impetus of a close friend's recent (or in this…

An exploration of alienation and ennui, Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte depicts the rapid deterioration of an already listless marriage over the course of a day, catalyzed by the mirrored decline in health and imminent death of the couple’s close friend. Giovanni (a stymied Marcello Mastroianni) and Lidia (a tortured Jeanne Moreau) are the financially secure literati of Milan; Giovanni a successful author with a new book out and Lidia his beautiful but despondent wife from family money. 

Lidia is shaken by the sight of their dying intimate, Tommaso, writhing in pain on his deathbed, but completely nonplussed by her husband’s apparently serial philandering. Regarding Lidia, Giovanni is only concerned with her presence when she isn’t home for his return, but…

#Existential Musings Vol. 2.
#La Notte
#Antonioni

tonight i just feel like dying. i really do. at least this agony would end and something new would begin
or maybe nothing
true. maybe nothing
(i say it as if i didnt care)
(oh but i do its all i care about)
(yet no one cares about me)
(he doesnt either)

It's night. We're at a party. My husband and I. At the Gherardinis. God, I hate them. I hate their pretentiousness. Their selfishness. Their materialness. There's this woman who talks about being all alone and being born to be alone. (just shut up already will you) She says I'm pretty when in truth I look terrible. She says it so that…

I'm really getting to like the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, having loved this, L'Avventura and Blow-Up.

Whilst the first film of his alienation trilogy had an otherworldly, slow, fevered atmosphere some describe as boredom, it was in much of La Notte that I found something akin to boredom or neutrality or even a very mild depression: a feeling of what standard days are like in the spaces between things: the way that much of life is spent waiting for things to get better, to change, to happen. This doesn't make it sound like an exciting watch, but then if that matters you'd probably be better off with a Bruce Willis movie.

La Notte is a very grown-up film about a…

Antonioni makes almost the perfect stereotype of what European art films are. It is instantly apparent from the opening credits of La Notte that this will be an art film above anything else. It is film of mood and ideas over story. It is a journey into the night, destined to go towards a perfectly open ending. La Notte is a film about how we value life and the questions death gives us. It presents broken, detached people with nowhere to go if they want to escape their situation. Responsibility depresses us and compresses our lives, we want irresponsibility so we can live freely but our head tell us not to pursue that path. We are alienated from each other…

I feel this is one of the more difficult films to write about, particularly on a first watch, but I’ll give it a go. I know I’ll have more insight after multiple watches, but for now, I adored it.

La Notte is an attempted escapade into a night brimming with extravagance and emptiness, and yet with some possibility to run from it. Giovanni and Lidia’s encounters with potential lovers represent that wish for excitement; for something true that they cannot have. The rain pours down as a beautiful sign of nature in a hyper-industrialized world, creating a rare childlike excitement in all its inhabitants. 

Milan is a fashion capital, a prosperous city. And yet, Milan presents itself as a frigid…

whenever i try to communicate... love dissappears

LA NOTTE, film by michelangelo antonioni, wanders through a mixed black and white making it a unique emotional desolation world with such an inviting and flexible direction that brings the viewer a envisage distortion about two intensely engrossed characters.

the script, however, is simplistic and as much as it is, it is a complex narrative. two souls lost in the world, lost in their own nuanced stories and especially about two people so intimate but so anonymous with each other. giovanni and lidia embark us in a great modern layer of a broken and melancholic italy with some lived jazz. giovanni is lost in his own relationship, not knowing whether he wants to…

Bored horny aristocrats don’t feel fulfilled, boohoo

I was first introduced to the work of Antonioni in a film class I took around a a year and a half ago. At the time, I was very underwhelmed by Red Desert and Blow-Up, however both these films have slightly grown on me over time, mainly due to what I’ve read about them and less about how they’ve impacted me. I feel as though this initial reaction of underwhelming complacency is still very much present in my opinion of his work. However, unlike Red Desert and Blow-Up, in La Notte this seems to be more intentional.

Films that focus on the unfulfilled and unsatisfied bourgeois lifestyle of “intellectuals” seems like a common trope…