Earlier tonight I finished watching Antonioni's L'Eclisse, which I had started a few nights previous. It wasn't as thrilling an experience as I recall it being the first time around, but there is still a familiar charge to the images, and to Antonioni's way with movement and space. Such beautiful, haunting images. And he stages his scenes like dances, the cuts and the movements of the actors & camera.
And yet there is still something a bit staid and stuffy about Antonioni, even despite his occasionally puckish radicalism. There is a bit of the lofty scold in him, at times, looking down a bit too neatly in disapproval of the empty, soulless modern condition. At other times, he just seems lost.
And yet, overall he is an inspiration and a touchstone. But what came later was even more revelatory, and has reignited and re-focussed my own aesthetic sensibility, vis-a-vis cinema. I began to watch Maurice Pialat's A Nos Amours. While I'm not as swayed by his self-conscious effort to avoid sentimentality, his fluid, lapidary naturalism (aided in great part by his subtle yet precise framing and smart, elliptical cuts) is, like I said, revelatory. A very perceptive and deeply sensitive filmmaker that has offered me a way back to my own key interests and concerns.
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