La notte

This psychologically acute, visually striking modernist work was director Michelangelo Antonioni’s follow-up to the epochal L’avventura. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau star as a novelist and his frustrated wife, who, over the course of one night, confront their alienation from each other and the achingly empty bourgeois Milan circles in which they travel. Antonioni’s muse Monica Vitti smolders as an industrialist’s tempting daughter. Moodily sensual cinematography and subtly expressive performances make La notte an indelible illustration of romantic and social deterioration.

Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1961
  • 122 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.85:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #678

Special Features

  • New digital restoration from a 4K film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New interview with film critic Adriano Aprà and film historian Carlo di Carlo
  • New interview with professor Giuliana Bruno on the role of architecture in La notte
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Richard Brody and a 1961 article by director Michelangelo Antonioni

    New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New digital restoration from a 4K film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New interview with film critic Adriano Aprà and film historian Carlo di Carlo
  • New interview with professor Giuliana Bruno on the role of architecture in La notte
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Richard Brody and a 1961 article by director Michelangelo Antonioni

    New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang
La notte
Cast
Jeanne Moreau
Lidia
Marcello Mastroianni
Giovanni
Monica Vitti
Valentina
Bernhard Wicki
Tommaso
Rosy Mazzacurati
Rosy
Vincenzo Corbella
Mr. Gherardini
Maria Pia Luzi
Party guest
Credits
Director
Michelangelo Antonioni
Produced by
Emanuele Cassuto
Original story by
Michelangelo Antonioni
Original story by
Ennio Flaiano
Original story by
Tonino Guerra
Director of photography
Gianni Di Venanzo
Production designer
Piero Zuffi
Music
Giorgio Gaslini
Sound
Claudio Maielli
Edited by
Eraldo Da Roma
Production manager
Paolo Frascà

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Michelangelo Antonioni

Director

Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni

Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties (on short documentaries like N.U., about street cleaners in Rome) and fifties (including writing the story that was the basis for Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik, and directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating films about bourgeois Italian life Story of a Love Affair and Le amiche), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force in international film. It was also then that he began to typify, alongside such artists as Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais, a new European art cinema, expressing a distinctly contemporary ennui. With their stunning visuals, ambiguous narratives, and still relevant focus on modern alienation, Antonioni’s films of this period, all starring Monica Vitti, his lover at the time—L’avventura (famously booed at Cannes for confounding its audience with its longueurs and lack of closure), La notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert—have stood the test of time. And his less iconic later films, like Identification of a Woman, have only grown more compelling and mysterious as the years have passed.