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**May Gain Spoilers**

Buy,Download, Or Stream L’Eclisse – Criterion Collection! Click Here

After years of seeking out acceptable VHS copies of L’ECLISSE, at last this elusive, enigmatic, haunting film has approach to DVD. To be aesthetic, some VHS copies were not so bad-looking, but few were letterboxed, so many viewers have never seen the film in its new widescreen format. Criterion presents L’ECLISSE in widescreen format and in a spruce, beautifully restored print. There is a worthy amount of fleet flashing in the opening scene, but as we are engulfed in Antonioni’s vision of the world this becomes less noticeable. The soundtrack also has the recessed quality familiar from many Criterion releases, but that can be remedied by a volume boost. Apart from these minor criticisms, this is an exemplary release. It may indeed surpass Criterion’s edition of L’AVVENTURA in terms of the supplementary material.

On disc two, there is a pair of estimable features: “The Sickness of Eros” features interviews by Antonioni scholars and associates. These people actually have grand things to say about the film and the director. The other feature, a documentary, “Michelangelo Antonioni: the Explore that Changed Cinema” is a perfect example of its kind. There is a lot of footage of the director discussing his films (and saying spellbinding things about them) as well as other relevant comments by scholars and collaborators. Of even greater interest are the numerous clips and stills of the director on the location of many of his works. Both these documentary features are eminently re-playable. There is also an informative, film-length commentary by Richard Pena.

Buy,Download, Or Stream L’Eclisse – Criterion Collection! Click Here

L’ECLISSE seems to sum up the ideas that evolve in Antonioni’s earlier films from LE AMICHE through LA NOTTE. But it also pares down these ideas and renders them in an abstract, or nearly abstract method. This is why the film is so intelligent for some viewers. From the opening shot, we are in Antonioni’s world: a collected still-life of a room and its ordinary contents; the camera pans honest (here we glance the encourage of the widescreen format) and a shirtsleeve is glimpsed; immediately, it moves and we perceive Francisco. This opening seems to say: humans are share of the world. They live in it, but they are allotment of it too. Vittoria is then introduced, first from below, the we are allowed to stare her whole. The film continues to piece the characters in this draw, cutting off our thought of their complete bodies, as if to say the people themselves are not complete. Vittoria’s first trusty action in the film is to adjust a shrimp, empty relate frame and to approach through it to proceed some objects on the desk within the scope of the frame. This is another typical Antonioni theme. He expresses it many times with frames, both picture- and window, and with doorways and arches. Humans need to study a shape to reality, a formality of some kind, to construct it comprehensible.

Monica Vitti is Vittoria in this 1962 film. She is the ultimate Antonioni existential protagonist. Presumably sometime shortly before the film begins, Vittoria has become aware of a basic human dilemma: life is constantly in a residence of change; we try to own onto emotions and ideas, but the forward-moving nature of existence can render them meaningless’ also, there is some mystery under the surface of life. Vittoria ends a relationship that clearly was ‘going nowhere’, worthy to the fright of her nearly immobile lover (Franscisco Rabal) . She leaves him and begins a wandering paddle, an exploration that makes up the body of the film. Along the blueprint, she will reply in different ways to her gradually evolving spot of mind. One response Antonioni’s characters often have is to try to flee, symbolically perhaps to transcend their existence. Vittoria accepts an invitation from a friend to flee to Verona and aid to Rome in a private plane. The experience is exhilarating, but ultimately empty. She also dresses in native African costume and dances quite well in an attempt to transcend her normal world and normal self. This too is ultimately devoid of sincere meaning. Very typically of an Antonioni protagonist, Vittoria allows herself to perceive the possibility of romance as a kind of run or distraction. She meets, and apparently becomes emotionally enthusiastic with the impossibly splendid, but empty Piero (Alain Delon) . Through his association with Vittoria, Piero too becomes aware of the incompleteness of life. At one telling point, Vittoria and Piero are crossing a street; she stops and says “siamo in media” (“we are halfway”) with a clear portent in her screech and expression. The film is made up of many shrimp moments like this that seem to mutter the whole of it. Human experience is only “halfway”—there is more to life than what we notice or consider we know. Something else lies under the surface. Antonioni explores this theme in all his films, most famously four years later in BLOW-UP. Here, the style of the film is so rarefied and so nearly abstract that it may steal more than one viewing to indulge in it. Vittoria and Piero, together, realize that truly connecting, finding a meaning beyond the fleeting sexual one (which is yet another empty attempt to transcend) may be impossible. So Antonioni, in perhaps the most well-known sequence, permanently removes the characters from the film. As if to emphasize the universality of his theme and the interchangeablility of human experience, we are shown a woman who closely resembles Vitti, but who passes anonymously from the frame as she did. The distinguished wordless sequence creates an uncanny, almost unpleasant sense of anticipation: we feel we are waiting for something to happen, for someone to reach in this neighborhood of unfinished buildings, circulating city buses, and symmetrical crosswalks, but only a situation of pure being seems to exist now. It’s almost an Eastern draw of looking at the world. The film leaves the viewer with a lot to survey and calls many support to gape more in it than can be addressed in a brief review like this.

This novel Criterion DVD of L’ECLISSE should not be overlooked by anyone alive to in novel film.

Michelangelo directed a trilogy of sorts in the 1960s, beginning with his breakthrough film L’Avventura, continuing with La Notte, and ending with my personal approved, L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) . All were preoccupied with the theme of alienation, and all featured more or less neurotic and disaffected performances from the striking actress Monica Vitti (as a blond in L’Avventura and L’Eclisse, and as a brunette in La Notte) . L’Eclisse begins with the Vitti character’s romantic breakup, and continues with her affair with a young stockbroker. The affair is destined for failure, however, as she ultimately finds it impossible to experience meaningful contact with other people. There are several distinguished sequences in the film – the monotonous fatigue of the opening breakup scene, raucous and frenetic scenes in the stock market, even Vitti and her friends dressing up and dancing as African natives! The most striking for me, however, is the final several minutes, in which the lovers have agreed to meet but neither shows up, and we peep a series of deserted spots (mostly locales from earlier scenes) in a mounting crescendo of emptiness and apathetic dismay. The stark and impersonal “recent” sixties architecture, headlines about nuclear panic, and a quietly eerie and horrific musical obtain combines to manufacture this one of the most considerable sequences ever filmed. It shocks me to learn that when originally released in America the sequence was slice as extraneous!

Buy,Download, Or Stream L’Eclisse – Criterion Collection! Click Here

It’s a shame that this masterpiece is currently out of print. There are copies floating around that are dubbed from British sources, and there are also some from an American release several years ago, which had generally very wonderful describe and subtitle quality. I can only hope that someone, maybe Criterion, chooses to release L’Eclisse on DVD – I would give my lawful arm to net it!
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