Word: antonioni
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...first was that the movie seemed to inhabit a genre, the mystery, that promises a solution. Antonioni wasn't sporting. He said that real life isn't an Agatha Christie novel. Stories end; life goes on. "I can feel the weariness of certain mechanisms that are resorted to in conventional films," he told a journalist. "I think those mechanisms are false." The old formulas had become as stylized as kabuki, as stale as week-old breadsticks. Hollywood stuck to boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl, but Antonioni didn't see why he had to. How about...
...second objection would be to the film's pace. There were long stretches when stuff just didn't happen. Antonioni had an answer for that too: "In certain moments, life has different rhythms. At times it's dynamic, at other times static. So why should we avoid the static moments to concern ourselves only with the dynamic ones? If a film is to take account of reality... it must also consider the rhythm of this reality." In other words, he was just being a realist. Or a neo-neo-realist...
...could have argued that the film proceeded so slowly because every image was so beautifully composed, so full of visual drama, that it was worth contemplating as one would a Piero della Francesca portrait. The dimensions of the movie screen, Antonioni suggested, have less in common with the stage proscenium than with the frame of a painting. Films are pictures on a wall, and Antonioni was one of the first directors working within the commercial cinema to make museum movies. One didn't watch his films so much as gaze at them - at a duration determined...
...word of his eminence spread far and wide, and quickly. For instance, when he let it be known he hoped to make a film about astronauts preparing for the moon voyage, he found a powerful supporter: President John F. Kennedy. "He welcomed the project with great enthusiasm," Antonioni said of JFK. "He invited me to the White House to talk about this film." This was long before Blowup, when the filmmaker was still a caviar taste in the U.S. (I'll bet Jackie urged her husband to spend some time with the dapper Italian...
...Antonioni might be an art-film director, but he was no fool. He knew that making films in English would help him reach a wider audience; hence Blowup, Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975). He spoke Hollywood's language without ever going Hollywood. Death Valley, the location for Zabriskie Point, was as close as he got to La-la Land...