Patrick McElroy Digs into Antonioni's L'ECLISSE (1962, dir by Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)

Martin Scorsese once stated, “I used to think of Godard and Antonioni as the great modern visual artists of cinema—great colorists who composed frames the way painters composed their canvases.” While that can be true of Godard, many of his films also have a  stripped-down feel that is still beautiful. With Antonioni, I find that it applies to him about as much as it does to any filmmaker of the second half of the 20th century.

The film where he does push the visual medium to a newer form of language is the 1962 L’Eclisse, which turns 60 this year. The film stars two of the most beautiful people in cinema at the time, Monica Vitti, and  Alain Delon, in an exploration of Italy’s economic view and the world it’s creating. It would be the third and final film in Antonioni’s unofficial trilogy on alienation, the other two  being L’Avventura, and La Notte. The former film follows the post-war age, in which people try to find meaning in a nuclear era, the latter film is about the failure of marriage in a place of excess, and L’Eclisse is about the failure to communicate.

When William Friedkin was a guest programmer on TCM back in 2014, he chose Antonioni’s Blow-Up and stated “Antonioni never repeats a shot.” So when watching any film by Antonioni, you never predict what the next frame will be, versus today’s industry where the shots are reminiscent of television, and it’s very 1, 2, 3; there’s no thought going into it.

Antonioni uses deep focus to allow one actor to move across the frame and still have the other actor seen, so he doesn’t give into the cliche of editing back and forth. In the first eleven minutes of this movie, Vitti’s character is breaking up with her boyfriend (Francisco Rabal), and it’s one of the most exhilarating sequences in film history. It all takes place in one room — Antonioni blocks it like a dance between the two actors, and creates compositions so bold, they have the grandness of David Lean.

With each film Antonioni was going against the standard conventions of film and creating a new visual language that couldn’t be achieved by theater, literature, music, or painting. His films are more of a mood then the typical narrative. When watching his films more than half a century later, they’re still a splash of cold water in the face, showing how little we’ve grown in terms of filmmaking. His films are about the beginning of an age of loneliness, now we dwell in it.

Patrick McElroy is a movie writer and movie lover based in Los Angeles. Check out his other writing at: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.mcelroy.3726 or his IG: @mcelroy.patrick