Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Remaking the Image in the 1960s
Matilde Nardelli
Abstract
Michalangelo Antonioni’s 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema’s ‘modern’ incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni’s aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity addresses these works’ crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new ‘impure’ art practices that emerged in the period. At the same time, the book also offers a novel reading of the films’ dialogue with postwar pictorial abstraction. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and re ... More
Michalangelo Antonioni’s 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema’s ‘modern’ incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni’s aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity addresses these works’ crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new ‘impure’ art practices that emerged in the period. At the same time, the book also offers a novel reading of the films’ dialogue with postwar pictorial abstraction. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via his cinema, the book, through both an intermedial and a transnational focus, replaces auteuristic accounts of the director’s work with a new understanding of its critical significance in late-twentienth century cinema and visual culture.
Keywords:
Modern cinema,
Antonioni,
Intermediality,
Aesthetics,
Mass media,
Art,
Experimental practices,
Avant-garde,
Photography,
Painting
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781474444040 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: May 2021 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474444040.001.0001 |