Contemporaneity

"Aside from a couple of insignificant items [...], the photograph could have been taken yesterday for Esquire or Vanity Fair. And if [the director's] critical stock has fallen of late, the truth is that, as one of the century's supreme inventors of forms, his genius has been usurped by its own posterity."—Gilbert Adair, writing in Flickers, 1995, on Breathless, 1959, Jean-Luc Godard.

The image above, on the other hand, is from La signora senza camelie, 1953, Michelangelo Antonioni. The actors are Gino Cervi and Lucia Bosé. 

The subsequent sentence by Adair is: "Moreover, the evidence that not merely the cinema but the world itself has become Godardian is staring us in the face."

Let's see if it works when we make the switch: "Moreover, the evidence that not merely the cinema but the world itself has become Antonionian is staring us in the face."

Yup.

Comments

[colinr]

The world itself looks to be staring us in the face but is actually focused in the middle-distance just behind us, conveying a sense of disinterested ennui.

[Asher]

How Antonionian has the world become, really? I feel like disinterested ennui, while not a phenomenon confined to film blog readers or to, more generally, the educated and upper middle-class, isn't as widespread as one may think, if one travels in ennui-laden circles.

[Harry K.]

Aren't ennui-laden circles called ruts?

[jbryant]

Asher has a point. While a trip to Wal-Mart may fill me with ennui, I don't get an Antonionian vibe.

But he's one of my all-time faves. Need to see that La signora senza camelie one of these days.

[haice]

I wonder who's been saddled with a worse career label---Bergman with God or Antonioni with ennui? It's a sad sign of the times when BLOW-UP is now written off as a poor precursor to BLOW-OUT. I for one will stroll through a park, drive through the desert and gaze up at a block of modernist architecture and be very happy.