Overview

Influential, innovative and aesthetically experimental, the films of Michelangelo Antonioni are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key in ushering in its 'new' or 'modern' incarnation around 1960. Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity offers a radical rethinking of the director's work. It argues against prevalent understandings of it in terms of both cinematic purity and indebtedness to painting. Reconnecting Antonioni's aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s and 1970s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity brings into relief these works' crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new, 'impure', art practices of John Cage, Franco Vaccari, Robert Smithson, Piero Gilardi and Andy Warhol among others that precipitated the demotion of painting from its privileged position as a paradigm for all the arts. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via cinema, the book replaces auteuristic, if not hagiographic, accounts of the director's work with a new understanding of its critical significance across the modern visual arts and culture more broadly.

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9781474444057

Table of Contents

Reviews

"Nardelli lays the groundwork for approaches to art films which may be able to explore new areas of their textual and production ecologies beyond the horizon of critique.--Paolo Saporito, University College Cork ""Annali d'italianistica"" While the term is too frequently deployed in contexts such as this, brilliant is the most accurate word with which to describe Matilde Nardelli's book, which raises the bar for scholarship on Antonioni. It is endlessly inventive, original, and learned, while its elegant execution makes it a genuine pleasure to read. This book will stand for many years to come as the last word on Antonioni's relation to the other arts, but it is also the most interesting and challenging meditation that I know of on the question of cinema's intermediality, and is a landmark in the study of art cinema.--John David Rhodes, Corpus Christi College"

Nardelli lays the groundwork for approaches to art films which may be able to explore new areas of their textual and production ecologies beyond the horizon of critique. -- Paolo Saporito, University College Cork * Annali d’italianistica * While the term is too frequently deployed in contexts such as this, brilliant is the most accurate word with which to describe Matilde Nardelli’s book, which raises the bar for scholarship on Antonioni. It is endlessly inventive, original, and learned, while its elegant execution makes it a genuine pleasure to read. This book will stand for many years to come as the last word on Antonioni’s relation to the other arts, but it is also the most interesting and challenging meditation that I know of on the question of cinema’s intermediality, and is a landmark in the study of art cinema. -- John David Rhodes, Corpus Christi College

Author Information

Dr Matilde Nardelli is a Senior Lecturer in the London School of Film, Media and Design at the University of West London.

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