Made of four short tales, linked by a story filmed by Wim Wenders. Taking place in Ferrara, Portofino, Aix en Provence and Paris, each story, which always a woman as the crux of the story, invites to an inner travel, as Antonioni says “towards the true image of that absolute and mysterious reality that nobody will ever see”. –IMDb

Director

Wim Wenders

Born in Dusseldorf just after the end of World War II, German film director Wim Wenders grew up with an insatiable appetite for American movies. Not all that interested in big-budget products, he, instead, developed a fascination with B-movies, notably melodramas and Westerns. After studying Medicine and Philosophy in his native country, Wenders took up art in Paris (a mecca for viewing American films), and then returned to his homeland to attend Munich’s Academy of Film and Television. Like many of his French movie-fan brethren, Wenders began his career writing film criticism before directing a few short subjects of his own, and, in 1970, he and several other young filmmakers formed a production-distribution firm, Filmverlag Der Autoren. Summer in the City (1970) was Wenders’ first feature film, but it was his 1973 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter that first brought him attention outside of Germany. The film included many accomplishments, most notably coaxing… read more

Born in Dusseldorf just after the end of World War II, German film director Wim Wenders grew up with an insatiable appetite for American movies. Not all that interested in big-budget products, he, instead, developed a fascination with B-movies, notably melodramas and Westerns. After studying Medicine and Philosophy in his native country, Wenders took up art in Paris (a mecca for viewing American films), and then returned to his homeland to attend Munich’s Academy of Film and Television. Like many of his French movie-fan brethren, Wenders began his career writing film criticism before directing a few short subjects of his own, and, in 1970, he and several other young filmmakers formed a production-distribution firm, Filmverlag Der Autoren. Summer in the City (1970) was Wenders’ first feature film, but it was his 1973 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter that first brought him attention outside of Germany. The film included many accomplishments, most notably coaxing a superb performance from Senta Berger as Hester Prynne, and managing to make the landscapes of Spain resemble 17th century New England.

At this point, Wenders began his road movie cycle, inspired by such American pictures as Easy Rider (1970) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Three films in this genre followed in quick succession: Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976). For his first English-language picture, The American Friend (1977), Wenders cast three of his American movie idols: actor Dennis Hopper (director/star of Easy Rider) and “cult” directors Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet). Wenders would later co-direct Lightning Over Water (1980) with Ray.

Wenders’ American-financed films Hammett (1980) and Paris, Texas (1983) were remarkable in their evocation of time and place, and the director could certainly have continued quite satisfactorily in Hollywood. However, he seemed to prefer activity in Europe, even though he was always one step ahead of his creditors — especially when running his own studio, Gray City. Wenders’ return to German filmmaking was rewarded in 1987 with the release of Der Himmel Über Berlin, or Wings of Desire. The story of an angel who wants to become human after finding earthly love met with an enthusiastic international response, culminating in a slew of honors for Wenders (including a 1987 Cannes Best Director award, a 1988 European Film Academy award for Best Director, and a host of awards from the New York Film Critics Circle) and an eventual 1998 American remake, City of Angels.

In the 1990s, Wenders’ love of on-the-road location filming was again manifested in such films as Until the End of the World (1991) (filmed on four continents and designed to be “the ultimate road movie”), and Faraway, So Close (1993), a marathon experience (which originally ran 164 minutes) wherein an angel wanders about to observe the changing scene in a newly unified Germany. In 1995, Wenders made a road movie of a different sort with Par-Dela les Nuages/Beyond the Clouds, which he co-directed with legendary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Set in various European countries, the film explored the vagaries of love and lust through the experiences of several principle characters. Receiving decidedly mixed reviews, it differed strongly from Wenders’ next effort, Die Gebrüder Sklandanowsky/A Trick of the Light, a 1996 historical tribute to some of the more neglected developers of moving picture technology. Wenders returned to the States the following year with The End of Violence, a film that explored the effects of violence on the intertwining of people’s lives. Featuring Bill Pullman, Andie McDowell, and Gabriel Byrne, it was not a great commercial or critical success, but Wenders did win acclaim the following year for The Buena Vista Social Club. A documentary about Cuban music, the film was the result of a successful collaboration between Wenders and musician Ry Cooder, who had previously supplied the score for the director’s Paris, Texas. —allmovie guide

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Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni once described his work as “archeological research” which sifted through “the arid remains of our times”. If Fellini claimed to treat the past as science fiction, Antonioni gazed deeply into the future already visible in the present (L’Eclisse) or a past which uneasily hung onto a present that had outlived it (L’Avventura). Born in an upper-middle class family in Ferrara in 1912; Antonioni studied economics at the University of Bologna, where he staged works by Luigi Pirandello as well as original work written by himself. Antonioni’s time as a film critic for the Roman Cinema magazine brought him in contact with Cesare Zavattini, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and others. For Rossellini, he would co-write Un pilota ritorna and with Fellini, he collaborated on the screenplay of his first feature The White Shiek.
Antonioni, however, yearned to begin his own career in film. To this end, he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinemografia… read more

Michelangelo Antonioni once described his work as “archeological research” which sifted through “the arid remains of our times”. If Fellini claimed to treat the past as science fiction, Antonioni gazed deeply into the future already visible in the present (L’Eclisse) or a past which uneasily hung onto a present that had outlived it (L’Avventura). Born in an upper-middle class family in Ferrara in 1912; Antonioni studied economics at the University of Bologna, where he staged works by Luigi Pirandello as well as original work written by himself. Antonioni’s time as a film critic for the Roman Cinema magazine brought him in contact with Cesare Zavattini, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and others. For Rossellini, he would co-write Un pilota ritorna and with Fellini, he collaborated on the screenplay of his first feature The White Shiek.
Antonioni, however, yearned to begin his own career in film. To this end, he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinemografia, the official state supported film school. This period included a brief detour to France where Antonioni worked as an assistant director on Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir. Antonioni began his film career in earnest with documentary shorts Gente del Po (about the poverty surrounding the Po River Valley) and N. U. (about janitors in post-war Rome). His feature film debut Story of A Love Affair (1950) departed from the existing norm of neorealism in its focus on the nouveau-riche middle class of post-war Italy. This haunting work contains the hallmarks of what became the Antonioni style – visual richness, intricate camera movements, sensual rhythm and an unsentimental approach to love and human relationships. Antonioni developed this style in his subsequent films: Le Amiche, an adaptation of Cesare Pavese’s Among Women Only which focused on the lifestyle of working women; The Lady Without Camelias, a scathing satire of the Italian film industry which features a powerful performance from Antonioni’s first muse Lucia Bosè and the haunting Il grido, which focuses on the desiccated life of a factory worker after his long-time lover (played by Alida Valli – The Third Man, Senso) leaves him.

L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, his succeeding films, formed a loose trilogy. The international acclaim made these films the director’s most representative work; refining themes from his early features while breaking new ground in its poetic approach to narrative and its magnificent black-and-white cinematography. These films expressed the uncertain nature of modern life and the overwhelming influence environment held on human consciousness. All three of these films starred Monica Vitti. Her next film with Antonioni, his first in colour and their last real collaboration (barring the uncharacteristic video-theater piece The Mystery of Oberwald) was The Red Desert. The film used colours as dramatic material in order to transpose the psychological state of Monica Vitti’s character. Where his black-and-white works used stark compositions to emphasize the psychological impact of physical spaces on his characters, Antonioni would use colour to move further inside his character’s subjectivity. Antonioni succinctly explained his changing approach to Jean-Luc Godard in a famous 1964 interview:

Jean-Luc Godard: The drama is no longer psychological, but plastic . . .

Michelangelo Antonioni: It’s the same thing.

A three-film deal with producer Carlo Ponti initiated a period of travel that took Antonioni to England (Blow-Up), America (Zabriskie Point), China (Chung Kuo) and Spain (The Passenger). These films reflected a new optimism in the director, emphasized by a widening of geographical horizons. They also served as significant documents of the late 60s zeitgeist; Blow-Up being a definitive portrait of “Swinging London”, and Zabriskie Point is an unforgettable time capsule of late-60s Los Angeles. The latter film featured one of Antonioni’s most extravagant set-pieces, a climactic montage of consumer goods and household articles exploding to bits and pieces. Antonioni would better this with the end of The Passenger, which featured one of the most elaborate camera set-ups in film history.

The final phase of Antonioni’s career reduced Antonioni’s output to a film per decade, with only three features and two shorts completed before his death in 2007. Identification of a Woman, made in 1984, is the strongest of his final films. While revisiting themes from his 60s films, it also signals a major shift in style. The drama is more impressionistic, the visual design is restrained; Antonioni’s composition and use of colour is solely concentrated on his characters state of mind. The film director protagonist (played by Tomás Milián) moves through unfulfilling relationships while deciding the theme of his next film. The film’s heightened self-reflexivity derives from Antonioni seeking a measure of serenity amidst the constant mutability of modern life. Serenity is the quest of many of his characters, what they seek at the end of their adventure, regardless of how fleeting and transient it proves to be. —Mr Bongo

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