Fri 20 at 8:00 Morton 235

La Notte

Italy, 1960, 122 mins, 16mm print
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti


The night of "La notte" is literally the long night of a party, which ends at dawn on a bleak prospect of marital misery. The film is one of Antonioni's most flawless works, a tender but clear-sighted analysis of the death of middle-aged marriage. It depicts an exhausted novelist and his disenchanted wife during one day and one night. He cannot resist the temptation of a nymphomaniac's pathological "passion" just two steps from his dying friend's hospital room and he also rejects her for another woman at the party. At the end she confesses that she no longer loves him and all she feels is pity. Refusing to accept the truth he rapes her. La Notte is a key work of modernist cinema showing perhaps the most magical images of love in the history of moviemaking. It is also the most intensely architectural of all Antonioni's films. The cityscape is the true protagonist. Shorts to follow from Charlie Chaplin.

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