1962 Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
This romantic drama by Michelangelo Antonioni follows the love life of Vittoria, a beautiful literary translator living in Rome. After splitting from her writer boyfriend, Riccardo, Vittoria meets Piero, a lively stockbroker, on the hectic floor of the Roman stock exchange. Though Vittoria and Piero begin a relationship, it is not one without difficulties, and their commitment to one another is tested during an eclipse.
태양은 외로워, L'éclipse, Eclipse, 일식, Затъмнението, Liebe 1962, Η Έκλειψη, El eclipse, Kuumetta, L'Éclipse, Napfogyatkozás, 太陽はひとりぼっち, Užtemimas, Zaćmienie, O Eclipse, Eclipsa, Затмение, Feber, Batan Güneş, Затемнення, 蚀, 慾海含羞花
Humanity and the world around us Moving relationship stories death, profound, symbolism, philosophical or vision marriage, emotion, romance, feelings or relationships sex, sexual, relationships, erotic or sensual romance, emotion, relationships, feelings or captivating emotional, emotion, family, moving or feelings Show All…
The Monica Vitti Homewrecker Trilogy concludes in a world where if clothes tear it's their own fault. As mystifying and shadowy as the human condition is presented within Antonioni's pessimistic fantasy there's still something more baffling within L'eclisse: just how do stock markets even work? Silence permeates through every crack in every wall and boredom proliferates from every second spent not talking and running and kissing and loving. Everything brings forth a perpetual aura of decay as if the whole damn thing is rapidly falling apart, walls crumble, streets crack, words falter, film unravels, every word spoken carries the tone of futility. "And the day after that" "And the day after that" Almost as if both are fully aware as…
45/100
Was excited to revisit this—I found it painfully enervating back in 1995, but my taste has evolved significantly since then, and recent viewings of L'Avventura and especially La Notte went swimmingly. (The first half of the latter is Antonioni's zenith, imo, though I prefer Blowup and Le Amiche start to finish.) But there's nothing to grab onto here. The characters are clearly vacuous by design, and I could theoretically roll with that, but visual compensation is lacking; much of the film is formally banal (Antonioni shoots the chaos of the stock exchange the same way that any hack would; that stuff feels endless), and no non-human element steals focus in the arresting way that La Notte's architecture does. That…
in which two of the most beautiful people in human history desperately try to convince each other that they're both not depressed bourgeois burnouts
kinda like particular moments in Mad Men, a bunch of disillusioned racist capitalists drown in ennui, desperate to fill a void in their hearts that sex, money and mindless hedonism can never come close to fulfilling, while living a destiny destined to burn itself out. this has less of the emotional attachment of Mad Men or the reluctant likability of many of its protagonists, and focuses more on the eerie emptiness, like we’re seeing the world itself through the lens of the depressed discontented privileged who will never be able to escape their own self made suffering. brief moments of romance are drowned out by the waves, the empty architectural husks and the terrifying piano notes become all to cling onto, the places and sounds more human than the people. perfect quarantine/isolation viewing.
#Existential Musings Vol. 1.
#L'Eclisse
#Antonioni
The Art of Filmmaking à la Antonioni, or 'The SSS' - Silence, Space, Segregation
1. Silence
'Then I really don't understand you. I wonder if your ex-fiancé did.'
'As long as we were in love, we understood each other. There was nothing to understand.'
The silence in my soul. It is overwhelming. There are sounds, of course. The sound of my footsteps on the empty street. The sound of a distant car. The sound of money. The sound of people talking, of people shouting. The sound of more money. The sounds of life. I hear them and they do not make any sense to me. There is only me and my silence. He is…
alain delon continues to be the hottest person who has ever lived, antonioni continues to elude me and excite me in equal measure, and blackface continues to ruin movies for me
Deadly silence opens L'Eclisse. It's calm and collected, an ordered relationship breaking down, quiet chaos about to ensue. That chaos is something our entire life depends on, like the stocks the whole economy rests on, full of ups and downs, destined to collapse in a single moment of darkness. This is a film of the modern world of 1960s Italy. Vapid materialism dominates, men and women are just objects to be used. The African lifestyle is mocked and misunderstood through racist sentiments, but the characters also barely understand their own lives. Living and loving is just so complicated. This is pure art cinema, full of gazes and sequences without a narrative. Yet L'Eclisse is beautifully orchestrated, intellectual, and poetic. It takes us to an apocalyptic ending, the despair of shallow love a blight upon us all.
#Existential Musings Revisited
#L'Eclisse Rewatch
#Antonioni
'I wish that I didn't love you. Or that I loved you much more.'
i often wonder about the meaning of silence and sound. i wonder if they are opposites at all. arent they the same? not always just sometimes. like when I see him running up and down and shouting and unable to stay still because he has no time to waste and all i have is time. its like a crushing silence that i want to kill but his sound just makes it even more silent and well arent they? ill be damned if theyre not the same.
i want to kill my silence. it would be easy to say my silence…
L'ECLISSE begins almost where LA NOTTE ends, as if in temporal continuity with the same sleepless couple who had just begun a terrible breakup at the end of dawn, and who now are ready to finalize it in the morning. We move from a cold marriage to a doomed love affair, with a surprising, almost shocking center that plays into genre in ways that I wasn't expecting at all. Is this a love story set against a post-apocalyptic backdrop? Is it a romantic break-up with hints of science-fiction and extraterrestrial intrusion?
Let's unpack these questions and try and make sense of what's happening here.
For starters, the modernist architecture on display is a major character. There's a futuristic bent to…
Like L'Avventura, this is a very pretty, very boring film. A woman breaks up with her lover and then goes on a series of dull adventures, connecting with another man, a friend, and others. There's one interesting moment, when she puts on blackface and dances around, but it's only interesting in that it takes a strange turn--she gets called out for it by someone even more racist than she is. Blah.
But yes, it's a very pretty film. Every shot is sterling, and Italy looks good in black-and-white. It's very hard to connect with a film depicting ennui when that's just not something you experience very often.
December count: 72/100.
