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Cronaca di un amore

Story of a Love Affair/Chronique d’un amour

Michelangelo Antonioni

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Fiction . 98' . Italy . 1950 . IT / ST : FR

Neorealism had taught us to follow the characters with the camera, and Bicycle Thieves was a great film, where the camera always remained external to the characters. But I was tired of this; I could no longer stand real time. I started reasoning from another standpoint. It seemed to me more important to concentrate on the characters, to go inside them, to see what, of all the things that had happened: the war, the period after the war, the things that were still happening, what, of all this, had left a mark inside them. I don’t mean psychological transformations or changes to their feelings specifically, but the symptoms of this evolution and where the changes were starting to take form, the evolution of their psychology and their feelings, and perhaps their morality too. Cronaca di un amore is the intimate chronicle of a love story in two parts: it sounds the souls of two people. I analysed the state of spiritual dryness and the moral coldness so characteristic of some parts of the Milanese bourgeoisie precisely because I thought that in their lack of interest in anything other than themselves, in their total egotism, with no precise moral counterpoint minimally able to make them understand the validity of certain values, there might, In this inner emptiness, be material important enough to study. So this seemed to be the right direction to go at that time. [
] With Cronaca di un amore, I didn’t start out with a precise theory. I just wanted to break away from a syntax that I felt was now old hat. I had long found the classic shot and reverse shot routine unbearable, and in this, my first film, I largely abandoned them, preferring to use very long movements instead. As I was moving the camera in all directions, but having to stay with the characters all the time, both in the wide shots and closer to, I had to use telephoto lenses that wouldn’t let me get too close to the characters, so close-ups were impossible. In truth, I didn’t really need them, largely because the actors’ body language, their way of moving and walking or looking, takes the place of the close-up. The same can be said for the ‘content’. The story began as that of two characters; I didn’t start out with the idea of critiquing a social class. I tried to look as deeply into the characters as possible. [
] The social milieu always remains in the background, and I think this is what distinguishes Cronaca di un amore from other Italian neorealist films, where the social setting is always in the foreground and the characters are simply a pretext for illustrating it.

Michelangelo Antonioni, My Antonioni, edited by Carlo Di Carlo, Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna 2017

STARRING

Lucia BosĂš

Massimo Girotti

Ferdinando Sarmi

Gino Rossi

Marika Rowsky

Rosi Mirafiore

Franco Fabrizi

Vittoria Mondello

WRITER

Michelangelo Antonioni

Daniele D’Anza

Silvio Giovannetti

Francesco Maselli

Piero Tellini.

DIRECTOR

Michelangelo Antonioni

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Enzo Serafin

FILM EDITING

Mario Colangeli

MUSIC

Giovanni Fusco

PRODUCTION

Franco Villani e Stefano Caretta per Fincine

Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni was an Italian film director, producer, editor, short story writer and screenwriter well-known for his intricately aesthetics and extremely thought-provoking, yet evasive and mostly puzzling films. He concentrated more on representation and design of his enigmatic cinematic productions rather than on the story and characters of the film and favored contemplation instead of action. The most notable work line of this ingenuous filmmaker who “redefined the concept of narrative cinema” and defied the conventional way of storytelling was his trilogy that included the films ‘L’Avventura’, ‘La Notte’ and ‘L’Eclisse’, all of which were made in the early 1960s.He remains one of the three directors who have bagged the ‘Golden Bear’, the ‘Golden Lion’ and the Palme d’Or, and the sole one to have received the ‘Golden Leopard’ along with the three other awards mentioned herein.

FILMOGRAPHY

1953 : LA SIGNORA SENZA CAMELIE
1953 : I VINTI
1953 : L’AMORE IN CITTÀ (TENTATO SUICIDIO)
1955 : LE AMICHE
1957 : IL GRIDO
1960 : L’AVVENTURA
1961 : LA NOTTE
1962 : L’ECLISSE
1964 : IL DESERTO ROSSO
1966 : BLOW-UP
1970 : ZABRISKIE POINT
1995 : AL DI LÀ DELLE NUVOLE

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