1961 Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Set during a single day and night in a Milan where steel and glass skyscrapers are going up and old buildings being pulled down, it opens with a disillusioned novelist and his embittered wife visiting their dying friend, a leftwing critic.
A Noite, La noche, The Night, 밤
Rewatching the trilogy because I was able to see this one at the American Cinematheque (Egyptian Theatre) on a DCP of the nicely restored version. Of course, it was wonderful seeing on the big screen.
I still think L'Avventura is my fave but revisiting L’Eclisse next week.
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…
“I no longer have inspirations, only recollections.”
Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte is an indelible formalist masterwork that charts the emotional despondence and interior degradation of a failing loveless marriage, externalized in the prosaic modernist architecture of 1960s Milan.
Giovanni and Lidia are amidst existential crises precipitated by marital ennui, mutually disillusioned by the artifice of their marriage and the minutiae of mere existence. As such, they embark on diverging spiritual journeys to seek inner truths. Akin to a labyrinth, the film is structureless and meandering, seemingly opaque in its direction and exposition, and yet it is immensely hypnotic due in large part to its gorgeous black and white cinematography, sleek jazz score, and subtly expressive performances.
La Notte is an intricate and delicate inspection into the rootlessness of the modern man, the coldness and indifference of romance, and the enigmatic confines people unconsciously construct around their partners and themselves.
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…
That Antonioni is consistently labelled 'boring' is a gross misconduct. This is among the most primally exciting films I've ever seen, and Vitti is terrifying.
"I'd like to read a novel about a woman who loves a man but the man doesn't love her. But he does admire her intelligence, her temperament. They start living together and then...but how could a story like that end?"
I really like how it is shot and directed, eveb the pacing makes things pretty unexciting.
There's something so entrancing and enigmatic about the films of the great Michelangelo Antonioni. Everytime I sit down to watch his movies, I find myself deeply absorbed them in a way that's so rare to feel nowadays from movies. Yes, Antonioni's style may prove frustrating to some viewers, but for me, I fully appreciate what this man brought to cinema. Far from your conventional cinematic storyteller, Antonioni places a heavier emphasis on mood and characters, rather than spelling things out for the audience. The amount of quiet subtlety and dramatic restrain I find to be very refreshing. La Notte is my favorite of his works, featuring some of the best cinematography ever put to film. La Notte acts as the…
A fracturing marriage, rendered with the kind of nuance you'd only expect to see in indie dramas made decades later.
why did the first 45 minutes have to be so insufferably boring...if the film had only taken place at the party...five stars
"Think about what could happen"
"Nothing ever happens"
Cinema as architecture.
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