El eclipse

These are the "impeccable" films that have shaped generations. At the beginning, the protagonist declares: "I don't know." And that’s that. It's hard to judge what was decisive at the time, apart from the partnership with Antonioni. It's so simple to elevate indecision to an art. As long as it has a shape. Given the stock market fun and the recycled performance/non-performance by Delon, I consider it average. However, the last thing I want to achieve in life is to live through the entire tetralogy. (08.06.2017)

The Adventure was about the fleeting motives of love and the passion that springs and fades in the present; The Night was about the mutual estrangement of a married couple; The Eclipse is, cynically speaking, about nothing. Monica Vitti's beautiful eyes, Alain Delon's confident swagger and the emptiness around them, here and there shrouded in Antonioni's tired symbolic intellectualism. A film that doesn’t say anything and it’s dangerously boring, this is really not what made me fall in love with stories through images. 50% (29.11.2015)

What or who did Antonioni actually alienate? The characters from each other - and thereby only doubled their actual alienation in the world? Is it, therefore, "artistic criticism of morals performed from within the bourgeois world: there is nothing in it that could interest us Marxists," as Galvano Della Volpe said? Certainly yes. But not only that. As he unveiled the mask of modern individualism, Antonioni suddenly brought into the world of film the power of image and aesthetics that existed only in the 1920s. Antonioni removes words and the intrusiveness of conventional film music and puts us in front of images that are as captivating and binding as an overly beautiful woman. Antonioni, therefore, alienated both the images and the sound from the viewer - the barren emptiness of Rome thus signifies not only the emptiness of interpersonal relationships but also evokes in the viewer a tremor with the otherness of something too perfect to identify with: empty streets captured in perfect black-and-white compositions; the silence of the deserted city and the silence in the middle of the crowd... At an exhibition or in a magazine reproduction, one often comes across photographs from films - and whenever I came across Monica Vitti, it was, of course, within the framework of the tetralogy of feelings. A coincidence? Hardly: even such a beautiful actress was elevated by Antonioni's camera to such an extent that merging with her image is impossible, and this impossibility is unsettling (it is not by chance that she appears in one of “Exposures” by B. Probst). Antonioni, therefore, managed to and had to alienate the viewer and the object of their gaze and their hearing as he liberated modern film narration (from the "classic" merging of narration and meaning, subordination of expressive means to the articulation of the plot, etc.), thereby placing the viewer in front of an otherness that calls for a new understanding. By doing so, he opened the doors to a new visual language. (28.12.2015)

Monica Vitti is incredibly beautiful and talented actress, whose personality would have stood out even more in color, but that wasn't fashionable at the time. Nevertheless, this is one of those Antonioni's films that are fairly bearable even for a normal viewer, although the plot is quite diluted. The stock market scenes are great, some editing and camera departure elements surprisingly innovative. (17.04.2015)