L'eclisse (DVD)
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.
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