The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge Film Classics)

The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni provides an overview of the Italian director's life and work and examines six of his most important and intellectually challenging films. L'avventura, La notte, and L'eclisse, released in the early 1960s, form the trilogy that first brought the director to international attention. Red Desert was his first film in color. Blow-up, shot in English and set in swinging London, became one of the best-known (and most notorious) films of its era. The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson, is the greatest work of Antonioni's maturity. Rather than emphasizing the angst and alienation of Antonioni's characters, Peter Brunette places the films in the context of the director's ongoing social and political analysis of the Italy of the great postwar economic boom and demonstrates how they depend on painterly abstraction for their expressive effects.