Surfacing without press screenings at a few theatres in the Landmark arthouse chain in the US for two weekend screenings in mid-August, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 17-minute Lo sguardo di Michelangelo may conceivably be his most interesting film since Red Desert (1964). It’s hard to be sure of this after only one look at it – the film was abruptly withdrawn after qualifying for an Oscar nomination – but I thought afterwards that I might have just seen one of the first truly durable reflections to date on digital cinema.
Mislabelled Michelangelo Eye to Eye in English when a more accurate English title might be The Gaze of Michelangelo, this beautifully filmed meditation is preceded by an intertitle – the only words in the film apart from the credits – explaining that Antonioni has been confined to a wheelchair since his stroke in 1985, but through the ‘magic of movies’ shows himself visiting the sculpture on foot. The action consists of Antonioni – walking without a cane, and looking like Antonioni prior to his stroke – entering the St. Pietro church in Rome to look at and then touch and caress portions of the restoration of Michelangelo’s Moses, then leaving again. It sounds quite simple, despite the digital trickery that made it possible, but like the montage sequence at the end of L’eclisse (1962), this is a very intricate (and beautifully intricate) simplicity, in terms of framing as well as editing. Conceptually it might be described as one restoration interacting with another restoration – a spectacle that, like all of Antonioni’s greatest films, pointedly raises more questions than it dares to answer, and preserves more mysteries than it can dream of resolving. –Jonathan Rosenbaum
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
This is the most captivating short film of all time for my eyes to see, no words said, yet outlines the meaning of Cinema through juxtaposition & imagery, Antonioni never gave up on expressing Human alienation, he is the God of Cinematography, a God of visual language, a God of silent interpretation.
this film is a perfect example of the difference between a master director and an average director. Only a guy like antonioni could make this movie so simple, but so genious at the same time.
This is Antonioni's finest work of the last decade (or decades in his case), a sublime silent short film I adore above most works of this kind, to me this is the final statement on the art and insight of framing and its colossal impact in filmmaking from one of the masters in this area, a coda of sorts to one of his strongest weapons in his vision as an auteur.
