“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.
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, Giovanni and Lidia begin to recognize the lovelessness of their marriage and the internal and unspoken collapse of their relationship. They are no longer the people they used to be; they are simply pretending.…