Monica Vitti, RIP

[Quiggin]

Monica Vitti, "the queen of Italian cinema," died this past week in Rome. She was indeed the existential queen of four of Michelangelo Antonioni's movies – must see "events" of the the sixties, along with Antonioni's English language Blow Up, Godard's Breathless, Bergman's Persona, and Truffaut's Four Hundred Blows – and Balanchine's and Cunningham's works. (My own favorites were Eclipse with Alain Delon, and La Notte, but more for Jean Moreau's performance.) Afterwards she amazingly remade her career in light comedy films.

At the end of the Times obituary, Ms Vitti throws a little light on what was once the subject of many late night discussions, the mystery of her character's disappearance midway through L'Avventura:

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“That’s the one question the audience isn’t supposed to ask,” she explained. “It isn’t important. What is important is that Anna was carrying two books before she disappeared — the Bible and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender Is the Night.’ One suggests our concern with morality; the other was a literary experiment in which the heroine disappears halfway through the book and is replaced by another protagonist.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/movies/monica-vitti-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

[Tom47]

Quiggin, I don't know anything about Monica Vitti and I don't think I saw any of her movies, but I will look up information on her.

Tom,

[dirac]

Thank you for posting, Quiggin. I didn't realize Vitti was 90. That would have made her about thirty at the time of L'Avventura, late for a female star.

I think L'Avvventura holds up very well or at least it did when I last saw it years ago. I'm less enthusiastic about the rest of Antonioni's trilogy, but they all look good. I'd like to see them again.

It was Lea Massari who played Anna, who vanishes halfway through the movie and the mystery of whose disappearance is never solved. At least one critic complained that we lost the wrong actress.

I remember reading that the melancholy women Vitti played for Antonioni were not at all like her; she was very much a joie de vivre girl, like the light comedies she starred in later. RIP.

A photo gallery. We are all the healthier, of course, but stars just aren't the same without cigarettes.

 

[Quiggin]

3 hours ago, dirac said:

It was Lea Massari who played Anna, who vanishes halfway through the movie and the mystery of whose disappearance is never solved. At least one critic complained that we lost the wrong actress.

You're right – it's been so long since I've seen L'Avventura while the other two I've revisited several times since. They're more cinematically interesting to me – the tracking shots in La Notte and the montage of city scenes at the end of Eclipse. I remember the afternoon I saw Eclipse, cutting classes, at a small cinema on the lakefront in Chicago on a day that seemed like an exension of the end of the film. There was a bare-boned mindset to the arts those days (Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, the Cahiers du Cinéma directors), "a mind of winter," that seemed to want to strip away everything false and hokey and get to a pure and essential style.  

 Asghar Farhadi recently made a film titled About Elly whose main character, like Anna, disappears midway through the film. 

 

[dirac]

Quote

There was a bare-boned mindset to the arts those days (Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, the Cahiers du Cinéma directors), "a mind of winter," that seemed to want to strip away everything false and hokey and get to a pure and essential style.  

Beautifully said, Quiggin.

[pherank]

Thanks for posting this, Quiggin. RIP Ms. Vitti.