Blu-ray Review - L'Eclisse (1962)

The year is 1962 and Antonioni finished his trilogy of alienation and makes his last black and white feature. This film is L’Eclisse which Martin Scorsese would later call the boldest film of the trilogy which it is but it’s certainly not the best. The films are only a trilogy in the way they are thematically linked and the 3 films star Italian bombshell Monica Vitti who Antonioni was involved with at the time. The film would win the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival which Antonioni also won for the first film in his trilogy L’avventura. Antonioni wouldn’t the much sought after Palme D’Or till Blow-Up in 1967.

Vitta plays the young woman Vittoria who leaves her husband after she falls out of love with him and eventually gets involved with the materialistic stockbroker Piero (Alain Delon). The relationship is doomed from the start but they have a ionate affair due to the fact both are damaged souls. The film ends in a hypnotic climax that Scorsese called “a frightening way to end a film… but at the time it also felt liberating. The final seven minutes of L’Eclisse suggested to us that the possibilities in cinema were absolutely limitless.”

Out of Antonioni’s ’60s work its possibly of his most daring and experimental, it’s extremely detached and somewhat impenetrable and if you compared to somebody like Godard who is often considered “detached”, Godard’s films at this time are full of the vibrant fun of cinema. Antonioni is more interested in using architecture to tell the emotions of the characters than using his actors, even though both Delon and Vitta both give strong performances. It’s really a film about alienation in the modern world on a whole than a character based drama.

The film’s style comes from the beautiful photography by Gianni Di Venanzo who also shot Fellini’s masterpiece 8½ and Antonioni’s previous and superior La Notte. Nobody could a building and get a view to give such an emotional response out of it. The film also touches on Nuclear war in the most subtle way possible which was in everyone’s mind this was the midst of the cold war after all. L’Eclisse remains an enigma but not in the same that Antonioni’s Blow-Up a few years later does but it a much colder way but like his best films it will unravel more meanings on subsequent viewings. The disc is fairly barebones except a 20 minute interview with Antonioni biographer.