Antonioni: Centenary Essays

The cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) embodiesmore than that of any other directorthe substance of European art cinema. Antonioni's films are intensely stylized, stylish, demanding, beautiful, daring, frustrating, and gratifying. Antonioni died on 30 July 2007, eerily the exact same day that his art cinema rival Ingmar Bergman also passed away. Antonioni's deathperhaps too convenientlyseemed to mark a terminal point in film history. More importantly, his death brought home immediately the need to reassess Antonioni's contribution to world cinema. This collection of new essays by leading film scholars addresses Michelangelo Antonioni as a pre-eminent figure in European art cinema, explores his continuing influence and legacy, and engages with his ability to both interpret and shape ideas of modernity and modern cinema.

Laura Rascaroli is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author, in collaboration with Ewa Mazierska, of From Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema (2003), The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries (2004), and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (2006). Her essays have appeared in Screen, Framework, Film Criticism, Studies in French Cinema, Kinema, and New Cinemas. Her monograph, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, was published by Wallflower Press in 2009.

John David Rhodes is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome (Minnesota, 2007) and the editor of On Michael Haneke (with Brian Price, Wayne State University Press, forthcoming 2010) and The Place of the Moving Image (with Elena Gorfinkel, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). He is also a founding co-editor of the journal World Picture. He is at work on a monograph on cinema and domestic architecture. His essays have appeared in Log, Modernism/Modernity, Framework, and Film History, as well as various anthologies.

CONTENTS
Table of Contents
Section I: The Documentary Impulse
• Antonioni and Documentary
Leonardo Quaresima
• Antonioni: Minor Work& Interview with Carlo Di Carlo
Noa Steimatsky
Section II: Contingent Modernities
• Antonioni's Rome, 1948-1961
Jacopo Benci
• Fashioning modernity: the Objectual in early Sixties Antonioni
Laura Rascaroli
• The ABCs of Zabriskie Point
Angelo Restivo
Section III: The Aesthetic
• On L'avventura and the picturesque
Rosalind Galt
• Antonioni and the Labour of Style
John David Rhodes
• Quasi: Il provino and participation in art
Alexander García Düttmann
Section IV: Beyond Anomie: Actors and Characters
• Face, Body, Voice, Movement: Antonioni and Actors
David Forgacs
• ''woman is the more subtle filter of reality': On Antonioni's Women'
Mark Betz
• Antonioni and Abstraction
Peter Brunette
• Reporter, Soldier, Detective, Spy: Watching The Passenger
Robert S. C. Gordon
Section V: Medium Specifics
• Blow-up and the Cinematization of Photography
Matilde Nardelli
• Il mistero di Oberwald and Antonioni's cross-media experimentalism
Francesco Casetti
• Identification of a Medium: Identification of a Woman and the Emergence of the 'Mixed
System' in Italian Television
Michael Siegel
Section VI: Ecologies of the Image
• Antonioni and Waste
Karl Schoonover
• Antonioni's Cinematic Poetics of Climate Change
Karen Pinkus