The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema - Softcover

Antonioni, Michelangelo; Cottino-Jones, Marga; Di Carlo, Carlo; Tinazzi, Giorgio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568860161 ISBN 13: 9781568860169

Publisher: Marsilio Pub, 1996

Synopsis

Widely acclaimed as the consummate filmmaker's filmmaker, few post-war figures in world cinema have been as influential as Michelangelo Antonioni on directors and screenwriters coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s. His 1995 Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement marks the long-overdue, official recognition of a fifty-year career of rare talent and innovation.
Here, for the first time in English, Antonioni's writings and interviews on cinema are available in a collection which is an homage to its author and a major contribution to the appreciation of his work. The Architecture of Vision is an indispensable tool for understanding the work of a cinematic giant whose investigation of the "crisis" of individuals and groundbreaking use of "visual minimalism" remains unique in contemporary culture.

About this title

Reviews

Editors di Carlo and Tinazzi collect 51 essays and interviews by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (b. 1912), the recipient of an honorary Oscar at the 1995 Academy Awards. Somewhat comparable in scope to Francois Truffaut's classic Hitchcock (1983) and, more recently, Peter Bogdanovich's This Is Orson Welles (1992), The Architecture of Vision provides a filmmaker's absorbing reflections and insights on his career. Both the essays and the much longer section of interviews (most translated into English for the first time) succeed best at taking generalizations about Antonioni?his introspective realism, his early fondness for long takes, his later innovations with color, his exploration of modernist "spiritual aridity" and "moral coldness"?and refining them rather than explaining their background and origin. Hence, the book will appeal most to readers already familiar with Antonioni's films (L'avventura, Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger) and with Italian cinema. The director sees the social neorealism of films like De Sica's Bicycle Thief as necessary for their postwar era but crafts for his own works a more psychological approach: "to see what remained inside the individual" after all the war and the upheavals that followed. Though some repetition inevitably appears, Antonioni's comments about his partly improvisational methods of shooting, his failure to ride the financial success of Blow-Up to even greater fame and his literary influences (Conrad chief among them) deepen and humanize a sometimes cerebral book.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This partial translation of a six-volume French work on director Antonioni, who won a Lifetime Achievement OscarR in 1995, collects articles by and about Antonioni in Italian and French journals, the overwhelming majority of which have never been available in English. The pieces are divided into four sections, the first two offering Antonioni's own writings and the last two offering texts of interviews by important critics and journalists. The essays are arranged chronologically in each section, helping the reader to trace the development of Antonioni's unique cinematic vision. There is some repetition, as interviewers tend to ask the same questions. But for any English-speaking scholar interested in the creator of such international masterpieces as L'avventura, Blow Up, and Red Desert, this valuable resource offers entree to material difficult to gain access to under other circumstances. Highly recommended for film collections.?Marianne Cawley, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Marsilio Pub
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1568860161
• ISBN 13: 9781568860169
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 429