ajejebrazorf

"@ajeje and other critics: by adhering to your reading of Antonioni, we might arrive at the paradox whereby a 4-hour film that merely frames a tree, an inanimate object, a face, or anything else is considered a maximum masterpiece - since the form is sufficient and the content of the narrative is irrelevant." But if you read carefully what I wrote, I’m not saying that a film should be just empty aestheticism (which you see as "form": to me, the two things don’t seem easily separable). Instead, I say that claiming that Blow Up says nothing "because it says that reality is unknowable" (as if this weren’t nonetheless a reflection, which it certainly is) is a biased simplification. At least framed in these terms, I understand that talking about art is difficult. Then, well, the discussion is taking on the contours of a stalemate, and it all becomes less interesting.

No, I still don’t understand you, and this is a serious point in favor of Antonioni :) If we want to have a serious discussion (just for a moment, though, because then I’ll fall into ridiculousness), I’m not sure what art really is, nor especially what it’s for. Some say it’s a mirror, a way to understand ourselves (to be read in the style of Marzullo). I don’t want to venture into definitions or theories: however, I certainly don’t believe in the story of art as a "message," or at least not in the message as a trivial moral lesson. Let me explain myself better: if the meaning of a war film were only "war is bad," or if that of a drug movie were "drugs are bad, don't do drugs," or if Antonioni's message were "reality is unknowable," or if that of a pop group (an example of an ultra-politicized band) were limited to "we are all prostitutes" and everything ended there, I believe that millennia of art of any kind would be thrown down the toilet. Or what should I say, "hang on, let me jot that down," because Kubrick makes Full Metal Jacket and shows that war is a bad thing? Oh, I’ve heard those discussions about "all art is bourgeois" and things like that various times, and in the end, I can sort of understand them. However, it seems like a stretch to say, based on these grounds, that Antonioni is useless and other artists are not. Or provide examples :)

I still don’t follow you: what would be the ethical lesson of Kubrick and Argento’s films?

You say it seems masturbatory to you, but I wonder which film, which painting, which record isn’t. You say that "the intellectual must help to understand reality," and that Antonioni doesn’t do it because he says "everything is incommunicable." It seems like a stretch to me: should he have taught some moral?

Well, I find Monica Vitti wonderful, for example, in that movie. And then excuse me, you think Pasolini's films suck just because Ninetto Davoli "acts" in them? I don't get it, but whatever.

And this time I don't even agree with Happy; I consider L'avventura one of the ten most beautiful Italian films. I recently watched it again, and I still find it a masterpiece. "One of the most ridiculous films ever made" brings to mind an unspeakable, pretentious, grotesque nonsense; whether you like it or not, it's a lean film that, if it has aged as vellutogrigio says, has aged like the films of Fellini or Risi. I also found Zabriskie decidedly boring and not very successful, but for me, L'avventura is a masterpiece.

I wouldn't know how to rate it because it's been a long time since I saw it, but I remember it being a great film. And the scenes with the guitar, the close-ups of the photographs, and the final tennis match without a ball have stuck with me. I would like to understand the meaning of the velvet phrase because I can't figure it out: "It is a cinema that, while betraying an intellectual vocation, fails to tell us anything about reality—specifically failing in the description of the phantom 'poetics of uncommunicability', and for this reason, it now seems tremendously outdated." What does it mean? I'm asking without any polemic.

Thank you, isi, but it wasn't Apocalypse; it was about a review of a much lesser-known film, I think still about war. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one it was...

@cptgaio: oh definitely, seeing Nausicaa in '84 must have been a stunning visual experience. @Psycho: I totally agree about Innocence, I found it incredibly pretentious and boring. Speaking of Kon, have you seen Paprika, which I still haven't?

Thank you for the "complete idiot," but I find these two albums to be very overrated: I know a lot of albums that are more imaginative, brilliant, courageous, and so on. And I tell you that I am very skeptical of "chicologists" (those who don't appreciate an album unless it's incredibly obscure, "the gem"), but I am just as wary, if not more so, of those who would try to convince me that the mainstream view of music (which sees the usual suspects as "THE REAL MUSIC, and everything else is beneath it") is the right one. Because it makes no sense.