Architecture in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte

La notte is a stylized drama that examines the spiritual emptiness of the post-war years. Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti give compelling performances in this film expressing Antonioni”s sobering outlook on modern life. Mastroianni is the deadlocked Milanese writer Giovanni, Moreau his estranged wife Lidia, while Vitti plays the blasé vamp.

La notte exposes the exquisitely designed life of the Milanese elite – living as they do in bright modern apartments, dressing after the latest fashion and navigating the new ring roads in their sports. Yet boredom lurks behind the façade of good taste, the chime of ice cubes in the Campari glasses and polite conversation.

Marcello Mastroianni (for once not directed by his soulmate Fellini, but monitored by the austere intellectual Antonioni) plays the role of an author who feels emotionally drained; his wife Lidia (Moreau) has turned away from him and his flirts with other women fail to offer relief.

Together with L”avventura and L”eclisse, La notte is part of a “love trilogy” that made Antonioni famous as an innovator of film in the early sixties. The narrative is not propelled by the dialogue or the action, but by the meticulous montage. Antonioni expresses feelings of alienation and abortive communication against a sophisticated backdrop and in careful photographic shots of cities and landscapes.

Professor Steven Jacobs is an art historian who has lectured at several universities and art colleges in Belgium and the Netherlands. He is currently on the staff of the Department of Art History at the University of Gent. His publications include The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2007), Beyond the Picturesque (SMAK, Gent, 2009, with Frank Maes), Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and Art & Cinema: Belgian Art Documentaries (Cinematek, Brussels, 2013).

Programme in Dutch.