Michelangelo Antonioni and the Matter of Painting

Thursday 22 Oct 2020, 11:30 → 13:30 Europe/Rome

Villino Stroganoff

This talk explores the connections between Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema and 1960s and 1970s painting. The intermediality of cinema and painting problematizes notions of purity in both arts. Why Antonioni’s cinema is often considered pure and abstract?

This talk aims to challenge a dominant reading of Antonioni’s cinema as pure, and abstract, and indebted to painting. Which are the aesthetic features that make his cinema 'pure'? Why Mark Rothko’s paintings are often associated with Antonioni’s films in relation to 'purity'? How can Antonioni’s cinema be pure, and 'pictorial', if it is engaged in an intra-disciplinaries conversation?
This talk addresses the ways in which the materiality (physical, socio-historical) of painting defined Antonioni's cinema, focusing on the pro-filmic space in Il deserto rosso (1964) and on his pictorial production The Enchanted Mountains.