> On Aug 10, 10:13 pm, Robert Cohen msn.com> wrote:
>

>> By MARTIN SCORSESE
>> Published: August 12, 2007
>> NINETEEN-SIXTY-ONE ... a long time ago. Almost 50 years. But the
>> sensation of seeing "L'Avventura" for the first time is still with me,
>> as if it had been yesterday.

>

>> Skip to next paragraph
>> Multimedia
>> Photographs
>> Michelangelo Antonioni
>> Related
>> Michelangelo Antonioni, Bold Director, Dies at 94 (August 1, 2007)
>> DVDs: A Director Also Elusive on Home Video (August 1, 2007)
>> Filmography: Michelangelo Antonioni

>

>> Filmography: Martin Scorsese

>

>> Times Topics: Michelangelo AntonioniWhere did I see it? Was it at the
>> Art Theater on Eighth Street? Or was it the Beekman? I don't remember,
>> but I do remember the charge that ran through me the first time I
>> heard that opening musical theme - ominous, staccato, plucked out on
>> strings, so simple, so stark, like the horns that announce the next
>> tercio during a bullfight. And then, the movie. A Mediterranean
>> cruise, bright sunshine, in black and white widescreen images unlike
>> anything I'd ever seen - so precisely composed, accentuating and
>> expressing ... what? A very strange type of discomfort. The characters
>> were rich, beautiful in one way but, you might say, spiritually ugly.
>> Who were they to me? Who would I be to them?

>

>> They arrived on an island. They split up, spread out, sunned
>> themselves, bickered. And then, suddenly, the woman played by Lea
>> Massari, who seemed to be the heroine, disappeared. From the lives of
>> her fellow characters, and from the movie itself. Another great
>> director did almost exactly the same thing around that time, in a very
>> different kind of movie. But while Hitchcock showed us what happened
>> to Janet Leigh in "Psycho," Michelangelo Antonioni never explained
>> what had happened to Massari's Anna. Had she drowned? Had she fallen
>> on the rocks? Had she escaped from her friends and begun a new life?
>> We never found out.

>

>> Instead the film's attention shifted to Anna's friend Claudia, played
>> by Monica Vitti, and her boyfriend Sandro, played by Gabriele
>> Ferzetti. They started to search for Anna, and the picture seemed to
>> become a kind of detective story. But right away our attention was
>> drawn away from the mechanics of the search, by the camera and the way
>> it moved. You never knew where it was going to go, who or what it was
>> going to follow. In the same way the attentions of the characters
>> drifted: toward the light, the heat, the sense of place. And then
>> toward one another.

>

>> So it became a love story. But that dissolved too. Antonioni made us
>> aware of something quite strange and uncomfortable, something that had
>> never been seen in movies. His characters floated through life, from
>> impulse to impulse, and everything was eventually revealed as a
>> pretext: the search was a pretext for being together, and being
>> together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their
>> lives and gave them a kind of meaning.

>

>> The more I saw "L'Avventura" - and I went back many times - the more I
>> realized that Antonioni's visual language was keeping us focused on
>> the rhythm of the world: the visual rhythms of light and dark, of
>> architectural forms, of people positioned as figures in a landscape
>> that always seemed terrifyingly vast. And there was also the tempo,
>> which seemed to be in sync with the rhythm of time, moving slowly,
>> inexorably, allowing what I eventually realized were the emotional
>> shortcomings of the characters - Sandro's frustration, Claudia's self-
>> deprecation - quietly to overwhelm them and push them into another
>> "adventure," and then another and another. Just like that opening
>> theme, which kept climaxing and dissipating, climaxing and
>> dissipating. Endlessly.

>

>> Where almost every other movie I'd seen wound things up, "L'Avventura"
>> wound them down. The characters lacked either the will or the capacity
>> for real self-awareness. They only had what passed for self-awareness,
>> cloaking a flightiness and lethargy that was both childish and very
>> real. And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the
>> most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realized something
>> extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.

>

>> "L'Avventura" gave me one of the most profound shocks I've ever had at
>> the movies, greater even than "Breathless" or "Hiroshima, Mon
>> Amour" (made by two other modern masters, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain
>> Resnais, both of them still alive and working). Or "La Dolce Vita." At
>> the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film
>> and the ones who liked "L'Avventura." I knew I was firmly on
>> Antonioni's side of the line, but if you'd asked me at the time, I'm
>> not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini's
>> pictures and I admired "La Dolce Vita," but I was challenged by
>> "L'Avventura." Fellini's film moved me and entertained me, but
>> Antonioni's film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around
>> me, and made both seem limitless. (It was two years later when I
>> caught up with Fellini again, and had the same kind of epiphany with
>> "8 ½.")

>

>> The people Antonioni was dealing with, quite similar to the people in
>> F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels (of which I later discovered that
>> Antonioni was very fond), were about as foreign to my own life as it
>> was possible to be. But in the end that seemed unimportant. I was
>> mesmerized by "L'Avventura" and by Antonioni's subsequent films, and
>> it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense
>> that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries - or rather the
>> mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to
>> time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the
>> mysteries of the soul. That's why I kept going back. I wanted to keep
>> experiencing these pictures, wandering through them. I still do.

>

>> Antonioni seemed to open up new possibilities with every movie. The
>> last seven minutes of "L'Eclisse," the third film in a loose trilogy
>> he began with "L'Avventura" (the middle film was "La Notte"), were
>> even more terrifying and eloquent than the final moments of the
>> earlier picture. Alain Delon and Ms. Vitti make a date to meet, and
>> neither of them show up. We start to see things - the lines of a
>> crosswalk, a piece of wood floating in a barrel - and we begin to
>> realize that we're seeing the places they've been, empty of their
>> presence. Gradually Antonioni brings us face to face with time and
>> space, nothing more, nothing less. And they stare right back at us. It
>> was frightening, and it was freeing. The possibilities of cinema were
>> suddenly limitless.

>

>> We all witnessed wonders in Antonioni's films - those that came after,
>> and the extraordinary work he did before "L'Avventura," pictures like
>> "La Signora Senza Camelie," "Le Amiche," "Il Grido" and "Cronaca di un
>> Amore," which I discovered later. So many marvels - the painted
>> landscapes (literally painted, long before CGI) of "Red Desert" and
>> "Blowup," and the photographic detective story in that later film,
>> which ultimately led further and further away from the truth; the mind-
>> expanding ending of "Zabriskie Point," so reviled when it came out, in
>> which the heroine imagines an explosion that sends the detritus of the
>> Western world cascading across the screen in super slow motion and
>> vivid color (for me Antonioni and Godard were, among other things,
>> truly great modern painters); and the remarkable last shot of "The
>> Passenger," where the camera moves slowly out the window and into a
>> courtyard, away from the drama of Jack Nicholson's character and into
>> the greater drama of wind, heat, light, the world unfolding in time.

>

>> I crossed paths with Antonioni a number of times over the years. Once
>> we spent Thanksgiving together, after a very difficult period in my
>> life, and I did my best to tell him how much it meant to me to have
>> him with us. Later, after he'd had a stroke and lost the power of
>> speech, I tried to help him get his project "The Crew" off the ground
>> - a wonderful script written with his frequent collaborator Mark
>> Peploe, unlike anything else he'd ever done, and I'm sorry it never
>> happened.

>

>> But it was his images that I knew, much better than the man himself.
>> Images that continue to haunt me, inspire me. To expand my sense of
>> what it is to be alive in the world.

>

>> More Articles in Movies »Need to know more? 50%% off home delivery of
>> The Times.

>

>> Tips
>> To find reference information about the words used in this article,
>> double-click on any word, phrase or name. A new window will open with
>> a dictionary definition or encyclopedia entry.
>> Past Coverage
>> BELIEFS; Bergman, Antonioni and the Religiously Inclined (August 4,
>> 2007)
>> Michelangelo Antonioni, Bold Director, Dies at 94 (August 1, 2007)
>> AN APPRAISAL; A Chronicler of Alienated Europeans in a Flimsy New
>> World (August 1, 2007)
>> DVDS; A Director Also Elusive on Home Video (August 1, 2007)
>> Related Searches

>

>> Motion Pictures
>> Antonioni, Michelangelo
>> Scorsese, Martin

>

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>
> I have never before walked out on a movie.
> Woody Allen's last effort "Match Point" was the biggest piece of dog-
> shit in cinema history. His selection of a gay man Jonathan Rhys
> Meyers, as the main male star failed to be the least bit convincing as
> a hetero sex symbol upon which the plot depended; the poor man reacted
> with utter terror faced with the voluptuos Scarlett Johansen. Beyong
> that Rhys' acting was wooden as the Black Forest. The references to
> class were so out of date that they might have been more appropriate
> to Victorian England, and were so obscure as to fail to convey
> intention, leaving the audience puzzled as to what the hell was going
> on.
> The entire dialouge with the investigating officers was unconvincing,
> as was the script and the final scenes where Rhys is visited with
> ghosts was fucking ridiculous - and was far too much to bear: I had to
> leave the theatre.
> Mr Allen has past his best.

taste> plus albert shanker with nuke