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.
The Night, La noche, A Noite, 밤
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“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.…
"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 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…
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.
"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…
#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…
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…
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.
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…
There is a moment about forty minutes into La Notte that, to me, captures the essence of Antonioni’s filmmaking.
Antonioni is a director that will stage a complex set piece, apropos of nothing, and will not even show the climax. In this particular scene, a group of men are setting off gargantuan fireworks in a field. The telling bit, the Antonioni moment, is that he focuses not on the launched rocket but on the smoke it creates on the ground.
After this, we cut away to something else but this slight sequence says so much about his sensibilities. It is not just that he likes to surprise and wrong foot the audience, it is that he finds the beauty and…
La Notte is a decent continuation following the brilliance of L'Avventura, as it further dissects the Italian bourgeois existence of that era and urban loneliness in general. It's more uneven compared to its predecessor, but its full-on display of heart, energy and top-notch performances is simply undeniable.
Despite its title, La Notte is more than just "the night." Chronicling an upper class couple's experiences over the course of 24 hours, La Notte goes from day to night and to day again, with the priority and highlight obviously on the night segment, where the couple stay overnight at a friend's house party, and that's when the seemingly underwhelming story finally shows its claws. Ultimately La Notte is a statement on love,…
