Learning on ScreenAntonioni, Centenary Essays
Edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes
(British Film Institute / Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 326 pages, ISBN: 978-1-844573844 (paperback). Price: £ 18.99
About the Author: Giulia Baso is a PhD Candidate in Italian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter. Her research project is is a comparative study of the work by Michelangelo Antonioni and Atom Egoyan. In particular, the aim is to investigate how their films deal with issues of mediation and contamination in a context of major socio-historical transformations. Her recent publications include ‘Apocalypse Now’ in Pagine di Celluloide, 12, (Palermo: L’Epos, 2011).
E-mail: g.baso@exeter.ac.uk
This book marks the centenary of Antonioni’s birth. Approaching the work of one of the masters of European art cinema today, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, means acknowledging that ‘his position in the history of modern cinema is not fixed once and forever, but is mutating and still uncharted in its extraordinary richness and propulsive, experimental innovativeness.’ The essays collected in this volume reappraise the centrality and continuing influence of Antonioni’s unique, demanding, and controversial language to world filmmakers. They testify that, even from a cultural and historical moment different from ours, his films can give us insights that allow to look with new eyes at the complexities and contradictions of late-modernity.
… Antonioni’s work has been both enthusiastically acclaimed as well as harshly criticised
The text is divided into four sections, with Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes providing an overall introduction that also comprises a brief summary of the conceptual terms by which Antonioni’s work has been both enthusiastically acclaimed as well as harshly criticised. The Antonioni that emerges from the first section, ‘Modernities’, is a filmmaker deeply engaged with the processes of historical transition that have characterised Italian society since the post-war period. Jacopo Benci highlights the importance of a neglected part of the director’s biography: the journey that brought him from his native Ferrara to Rome in the early 1940s. The documentaries and films made between 1948 and 1953 reveal a parallel shift in location, as the director begins to focus on the capital, dealing with the whole spectrum of its composite society. Benci thus investigates the evolution of the image of Rome in Antonioni’s films, up to and including Tentato suicidio (1953), drawing attention to aspects of dialectical engagement with the neo-realist tradition. Laura Rascaroli’s piece explores ‘the uncanny significance of the object’ in the director’s representation of modernity, and identifies Blow-Up (1966) as a ‘proto-postmodern’ work that marks a turning point in his discourse on ‘objectuality’.
