PDA

View Full Version : Sundance on ANTONIONI in Dec



ella es toda
12-01-2007, 08:07 PM
Dec 14 - 5:00pm - L'Avventura
Dec 14 - 7:30pm - The Passenger
Dec 14 - 10:00pm - L'Eclisse

Dec 15 - 5:45am - L'Avventura

Dec 18 - 4:00pm - L'Eclisse

Dec 19 - 3:05pm - L'Avventura

Dec 26 - 6:00am - L'Eclisse

Dec 29 - 6:00am - L'Avventura

Dec 31st - 9:15am - The Passenger

In the new ACCESS DIRECT TV GUIDE, Martin Scorsese wrote a review of THE PASSENGER. Actually every month he writes reviews for usually 5 or 6 movies. Here's the review:

There's a strangely mystical quality to many of Michelangelo Antonioni's films. When you watch certain moments in his work, it's as if you'd had your senses returned to a different frequency and you were receiving cryptic messages from the heart of the world. At the end of The Eclipse, for instance, or during the park scenes in Blow-Up or the scenes on the island in L'Avventura, the world appears to have filmed itself and revealed itself as it is, the comings and goings of human beings a fairly inconsequential matter. It's terrifying, but it's also thrilling.

This film, Antonioni's third in English, is about a British/American reporter played by Jack Nicholson, who's stuck in the North African desert covering a civil war. He's staying at a small hotel in the middle of nowhere, and he strikes up an acquaintanceship with th eman next door. They bear a striking resemblance to each other. One night he knocks on the door and finds the man dead. He makes a quick decision and decides to switch identities and start a new life. He discovers that the man, named Robertson, was an illegal arms dealer, and he tries to play along.

The opening scenes, in the desert, are remarkable, and quite different from previous Antonioni films. The camera work feels looser, the compositions freer. We appear to be simply drifting through time and space, sound and vision, and odd little emotions and sensations start to register: the lethargy, the heat, the indifference of the people who run the hotel, the endlessness of the desert. When Nicholson's jeep breaks down in the middle of the desert, he sees a figure in the distance slowly approaching, a man clad completely in white wearing dark glasses, on a camel, prodding the animal on. Nicholson appeals for help and the man rides slowly past him and off into the horizon without giving him so much as a look. As Nicholson tries to dig himself out of the sand, his trouble and frustration seem to drift away in the desert wind.

And there's a similar feeling to the film's famous ending, an apparently simple but immensely complex camera movement that is easily one of Antonioni's greatest moments and probably one of the greatest in film history. In a way, it's close to those final moments of The Eclipse, but it's much more peaceful, maybe even more mysterious.

The Passenger was unavailable for many years in the U.S., for complicated reasons. Sony Pictures Classics made new prints available a couple of years ago, and it showed the picture in Antonioni's preferred cut. It's one of the best films by one of the cinema's true masters.

Qrazy
12-11-2007, 10:36 AM
No showings of La Notte? Weak.

Izzy Black
12-11-2007, 10:18 PM
No showings of La Notte? Weak.

Well, it is the weaker film after all.

Qrazy
12-11-2007, 10:32 PM
Well, it is the weaker film after all.

Well, that's a little something we like to call, your opinion. If they're showing the other two they ought to show the third part of the trilogy.

Izzy Black
12-11-2007, 11:08 PM
Well, that's a little something we like to call, your opinion. If they're showing the other two they ought to show the third part of the trilogy.

Thanks for reminding me. I forget that some people require a sufficient amount of first person pronouns to ensure no one's opinion is in danger of being monopolized by another. The idea of La Notte as being part of a trilogy was created by critics anyways. In that respect, Il Deserto rosso should be played before The Passenger. It could be that the programmers just picked the movies they liked the best. In that case, they could have done worse. If they only had three films to choose from, it was probably wiser to pick one of his color films that would add variety along side the conventional trilogy picks.

lwilson85
12-12-2007, 06:37 PM
No showings of La Notte? Weak.

Or The Red Desert or Zabriskie Point. :cry: I can't see them anywhere.

Qrazy
12-12-2007, 09:49 PM
Thanks for reminding me. I forget that some people require a sufficient amount of first person pronouns to ensure no one's opinion is in danger of being monopolized by another.

No problem, I consider it the duty of those with better memories to set those with foundering synapses, upon the proper path.