The Antonioni Adventure

Author:   George Porcari
Publisher:   Delancey Street Press
ISBN:  

9780578513447


Pages:   250
Publication Date:   13 May 2019
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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The Antonioni Adventure


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Overview

"The Antonioni Adventure covers the work of Michelangelo Antonioni from L'Avventura to The Passenger. Antonioni, like other radical filmmakers of the immediate post-war period, most conspicuously Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, observed society from what we might call an outraged critical perspective that sought to explore the resulting tragic contradictions of communities from inside the society that created them, and thereby establish a new aesthetic paradigm through a critical analysis that was fundamentally poetic. What was understood by these artists - as common ground - was that the post-war utopian promises of universal access - via the computer, electronic communication and media, along with greater high speed mobility - all presumably facilitated a new utopia, but one that by the late sixties was in deep crisis. The Antonioni Adventure traces the Italian director's trajectory through the 1960s as he responded to that crisis in social mores, political/cultural wars, and a new emotional terrain. At the time all of this seemed very much like dangerous, uncertain, and uncharted waters. Longer essays on Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger detail the importance of those films as they explore the new contemporary social and emotional matrix. Antonioni's work fearlessly charted sensitive characters coping under the new postwar realities; conditions that are very much still with us today. What are those circumstances, and how did the characters in those works react to them - how and why did they succeed or fail? While many filmmakers would explore the complex dynamics of relationships in the thorny postwar era, such as Ingmar Bergman, only in Antonioni's work do we see characters attempt to create emotional bonds in a peculiarly hyper-realistic modern context that is fundamentally antithetical to those emotions. The result is a sense of pathos and humor that is profoundly sympathetic to his characters without being sentimental or patronizing. His profound sense of irony and disgust was reserved for those in power, as we see in Zabriskie Point, not those who were searching for how to cope in a difficult new world made in large part by technocrats and their machines. The futility of human endeavors and the permeability and fragility of the flesh were constant themes that found new ways of expression as his work progressed from its neorealist beginnings toward unexplored areas that were new to him and to his audience. The book traces the trajectory of that ""adventure"" - or that search - for a new means of expression within the context of the feature film."

Full Product Details

Author:   George Porcari
Publisher:   Delancey Street Press
Imprint:   Delancey Street Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780578513447


ISBN 10:   0578513447
Pages:   250
Publication Date:   13 May 2019
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

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Reviews

More than half a century after they were made, Antonioni's lms remain singular and charged with mystery, existing both in and outside of their time. A photographer and lmmaker himself, George Porcari's critical understanding of Antonioni is also a spiritual understanding of art and how it is made. Porcari positions Antonioni's lms within a larger cultural history without diminishing their singularity. This book makes Antonioni's work newly alive. - CHRIS KRAUS In these essays George Porcari deconstructs, historicizes and imbues Antonioni with so much of the deserved depth and intellectual consequence that each stark image of isolation virtually dances before our eyes with connotative resonance. Porcari is a ne and careful architect of the eye, breaking down and building up, leading us through reference and structure with such a uidity that we feel we are there, alongside him, building meaning with him... a great book. An active read. Pick it up. Devour it. Then re-watch the lms anew with George Porcari. - VERONICA GONZALEZ PEN A In a perfect world, every lm school would have George Porcari teaching aspiring directors about the masters, like Antonioni, who came before them. I've certainly bene ted from my informal classes with George as his friend of several years--in fact, I believe I rst saw Blow-Up with him at a Manhattan revival house--and I've recycled some of his insights in cinematic writings of my own. Now, with this book, everyone has the privilege of spending time with George as he illuminates these splendid lms in his unique--I would even say Porcarian--way. - D. R. HANEY


More than half a century after they were made, Antonioni's lms remain singular and charged with mystery, existing both in and outside of their time. A photographer and lmmaker himself, George Porcari's critical understanding of Antonioni is also a spiritual understanding of art and how it is made. Porcari positions Antonioni's lms within a larger cultural history without diminishing their singularity. This book makes Antonioni's work newly alive. - CHRIS KRAUS In these essays George Porcari deconstructs, historicizes and imbues Antonioni with so much of the deserved depth and intellectual consequence that each stark image of isolation virtually dances before our eyes with connotative resonance. Porcari is a ne and careful architect of the eye, breaking down and building up, leading us through reference and structure with such a uidity that we feel we are there, alongside him, building meaning with him... a great book. An active read. Pick it up. Devour it. Then re-watch the lms anew with George Porcari. - VERONICA GONZALEZ PEN A In a perfect world, every lm school would have George Porcari teaching aspiring directors about the masters, like Antonioni, who came before them. I've certainly bene ted from my informal classes with George as his friend of several years--in fact, I believe I rst saw Blow-Up with him at a Manhattan revival house--and I've recycled some of his insights in cinematic writings of my own. Now, with this book, everyone has the privilege of spending time with George as he illuminates these splendid lms in his unique--I would even say Porcarian--way. - DUKE HANEY


Author Information

George Porcari was born in Lima, Peru and emigrated to the US at the age of ten in 1962 with his parents who settled in Gardena, a working class suburb of Los Angeles. His father was an amateur photographer who taught him photography and darkroom magic. He moved to New York City in 1979, where he worked at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, and briefly attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He returned to LA in 1984 to attend the Art Center College in Pasadena where he received an MFA. He is a writer, photographer and collagist who has been a working artist since his first exhibit, of collage work, in New York City in 1988; his last exhibit was in 2016 titled Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and Fifty Years that covered a half-century of his photographic work at Haphazard Gallery in Los Angeles. He has been publishing regularly in various magazines since 1987 and some of his writing and photo work can be seen in his website lightmonkey.net. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

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