L’eclisse

The concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s informal trilogy on contemporary malaise (following L’avventura and La notte), L’eclisse tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) and drifts into a relationship with another (Alain Delon). Using the architecture of Rome as a backdrop for the doomed affair, Antonioni achieves the apotheosis of his style in this return to the theme that preoccupied him the most: the difficulty of connection in an alienating modern world.

Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1962
  • 126 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.85:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #278

Special Features

  • High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Audio commentary by film scholar Richard Peña
  • Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema (2001), a fifty-six-minute documentary exploring the director’s life and career
  • Elements of Landscape, a twenty-two-minute piece from 2005 about Antonioni and L’eclisse, featuring Italian film critic Adriano Aprà and longtime Antonioni friend Carlo di Carlo
  • PLUS: Essays by film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and Gilberto Perez, as well as excerpts from Antonioni’s writing about his work
    Cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Audio commentary by film scholar Richard Peña
  • Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema (2001), a fifty-six-minute documentary exploring the director’s life and career
  • Elements of Landscape, a twenty-two-minute piece from 2005 about Antonioni and L’eclisse, featuring Italian film critic Adriano Aprà and longtime Antonioni friend Carlo di Carlo
  • PLUS: Essays by film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and Gilberto Perez, as well as excerpts from Antonioni’s writing about his work
    Cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang
L’eclisse
Cast
Alain Delon
Piero
Monica Vitti
Vittoria
Francisco Rabal
Riccardo
Lilla Brignone
Vittoria’s mother
Louis Seigner
Stockbroker
Rossana Rory
Anita
Mirella Ricciardi
Marta
Credits
Director
Michelangelo Antonioni
Story and screenplay
Michelangelo Antonioni
Story and screenplay
Tonino Guerra
with collaboration from
Elio Bartolini
with collaboration from
Ottiero Ottieri
Produced by
Robert Hakim
Produced by
Raymond Hakim
Photography by
Gianni di Venanzo
Editing
Eraldo Da Roma
Music
Giovanni Fusco
Sound
Claudio Maielli
Sound assistant
Mario Bramonti
Assistant directors
Gianni Arduini
Assistant directors
Franco Indovina
Production manager
Danilo Marciani
Set design
Piero Poletto

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L’eclisse: Antonioni and Vitti
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L’eclisse: A Vigilance of Desire
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Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, h…

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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.