The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema

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 Fran ois 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. (June)