New Restoration

“[The] missing link between Italian neorealism and Antonioni’s later work … The camera’s spare, stunning compositions and the tone of loss and disaffection anticipate Antonioni’s later, brilliant explorations of bourgeois anomie.”

Leslie Camhi, Village Voice

Before L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni made what many consider to be the most pivotal film of his career, a transition between neorealist-inflected dramas and modernist odysseys, which charts the life-changing comedown after the end of a longterm relationship. Irma (Alida Valli) receives news that her long-estranged husband has died. She shares a daughter and a seven-year history with Aldo (Steve Cochran), but immediately severs their relationship. ​“It was all true,” she says in place of an explanation, and this lack of closure stalks Aldo’s wanderings through the outskirts of the Po Valley, daughter in tow, as he reservedly meets women, distances himself from friendship and worker solidarity, and fails to cauterize his romantic wounds. Antonioni made Il grido after the end of his 12-year marriage to Letizia Balboni. During the film’s production, he first met Monica Vitti, who dubs the voice of the character Virginia. The stark cinematography is by Gianni Di Venanzo (8½).

In Italian with English subtitles

“Il grido [is] reflective of a complex, opaque, and profound system of expression … Antonioni’s mise-en-scene is tangible rather than ambiguous.”

James Brown, Senses of Cinema

“I’m trying to probe the souls of the characters [in Il grido] … I watched it again, and I was surprised to find myself before so much nakedness, so much solitude, like those mornings when our face in the mirror terrifies us.”

Michelangelo Antonioni
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