Customer Reviews

Antonioni

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It is some DVD acquisitions that propelled me to read this books (and another one) about Michelangelo Antonioni, the great man of film. I had acquired two of Antonioni`s films as DVDs which are among my favourite movies EVER, namely "Blow-up" and "Zabriskie Point". I had seen "Blow-up" when it came out in 1966 and, back then, I had found this epochal film difficult to understand fully, although I enjoyed it heartily "right from the get-go", as most movie-goers then did, too; "Blow-up" was an huge commercial success, its complexities and perplexities not deterring the average cinema fan from seeing and enjoying it. Therefore I wanted to return to "Blow-up", reading up on it and also on "Zabriskie Point", then, more enlightened, to view the DVDs of the two motion pictures, including a a second time for "Blow-up" with that films`s DVD`s running commentary. The strategy worked! These films are even more profoundly affecting and interesting for having the extra perspectives on them. The same surely applies to all of Antonioni`s films that the book covers, which is not quite all of them, since Antonioni, despite hurdles of age and disability, produced a little more before death silenced his cinematic voice once for all. However, Sam Rohdie`s 1990 book does cover Antonioni`s early and the really great years and is not outdated by the slight incompleteness of coverage that the march of time made inevitable.

Sam Rohdie remarks, in the brief introductory essay part of his book`s bibliography that he "found little material of any value in English on Antonioni." There is, on the other hand, much of great value about Antonioni`s life and art in Italian, especially, and in French, which I mention to encourage those who are proficient in those languages and can access the literature cited, whether in good library collections or, also through a library, by means of inter-library loans. Certainly, Sam Rohdie`s own book is of very solid merit. It can seem, however, both "solid and stolid" to the average movie-fan reader, not because Rohdie`s insights are lacking in solidity and pertinence, but because such a reader probably will find that this book`s level of heavy-going technical and aesthetic analysis is more than the said average film lover and reader will care to bear with, the more so as Rohdie`s approach mostly is thematic rather than a straightforwardly film-by-film way of discussing Antonioni`s movies and career (as a writer on film as well as a film-maker).

If the reader is sufficiently motivated, Rohdie`s study is the book for him. Other readers, however, may be content with only such a less technical and very attractive (highly and beautifully illustrated), as well as even shorter book at 96 pages (compared to Rohdie`s 213 densely printed pages), by Seymour Chatman, the entertaining and clear "Michelangelo Antonioni, the Complete Films" (Taschen, 2008), which, of course, has the added value of complete coverage of Antonioni`s career right to his demise in 2007. Chatman`s approach proceeds mostly film-by-film and the book`s back matter (chronology, filmography, and bibliography) are quite helpful and almost as readable as Chatman`s main text itself. For the really devoted and patient fan, or for the film scholar, critic, or practitioner, both Rohdie`s and Chatman`s books alike would be essential reading.