Day 157: La Notte 1961

La Notte 1961

I watched La Notte three nights ago. Now I’ve watched it again. It is, in fact, far more powerful the second time around. The long patches without dialogue are testament to Antonioni’s skill as a filmmaker as well as a comment on the state of the marriage of Giovanni and Lidia. The film is slow, just like L’Avventura (1960), but not dull or uninteresting.

Although I only watched L’Avventura once, it was immediately remarkable what was extraordinary and amazing and incredible – the visuals, cleverly using straight lines at all sorts of angles, and occasionally, complex patterns. With La Notte, there wasn’t such apparent genius in the creation and juxtaposition of the images.

Nevertheless, the excellent use of locations put a lot of beauty into most frames, just by look at the city of Milan through Antonioni’s camera.

The plot, however? A decaying marriage is shown through the decay of a number of other things. I can’t see that it is very profound because there aren’t a lot of words in the film until the very end. It is another observation of a relationship going down the drain, which in European cinema, as I’ve observed in 157 days, has unfaithfulness at the heart of it. Or maybe the decay was there and unattended to, so unfaithfulness followed.