“If Alfred Hitchcock‘s tombstone bore the word ‘suspense,’ what would we engrave on Michelangelo Antonioni‘s? ‘Alienation,’ probably, yet that is a word forever applied to the films, not spoken within them. You may disagree with his vision of the sexes fighting to make connections that endure, as opposed to mere spasms of desire (‘avventura’ means not just an adventure but a fling), but there is no denying the sharp, concrete form in which that vision was set.
“And so the paradoxes accrue: sex solves nothing for Antonioni, yet somehow his films, blending tactility with froideur, remain a tease and a turn-on, and, for someone insistent on human solitude, he was awfully skilled at handling group situations — look at the beach party in The Girlfriends, or the search party climbing rocks in L’Avventura. He was an urbanist, yet few can match his eye for landscape or his nose for weather.” — from Anthony Lane‘s essay, “Lone Sailors,” in the 8.27 New Yorker.
