L'eclisse

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

1962 / 126min / 35mm

Its plaintive, bleak coda, a symphony of mutely onlooking objects found around an unremarkable corner of Rome designated for a lover’s rendezvous that neither lover shows up to, is one of the most revolutionary and justly celebrated in midcentury European cinema—and the filmmaking is no less inspired throughout L’eclisse, Antonioni’s masterful evocation of urban anomie as it infiltrates the doomed, desultory affair between a literary translator (Monica Vitti) and an ambitious young stockbroker (Alain Delon). A work of gradually insinuating and rising anxiety, whose seismic impact on international film culture Martin Scorsese described as a “step forward in storytelling.”

35mm print courtesy of the BFI