Michelangelo Antonioni

Identification of a Woman

Identification of a Woman

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman is a body- and soul-baring voyage into one man’s artistic and erotic consciousness. After his wife leaves him, a film director finds himself drawn into affairs with two enigmatic women: at the same time, he searches for the right subject and actress for his next film. This spellbinding antiromance was a late-career coup for the legendary Italian filmmaker, and is renowned for its sexual explicitness and an extended scene on a fog-enshrouded highway that stands with the director’s greatest set pieces.

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Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1982
  • 130 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.85:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #585

Special Features

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by critic John Powers and a 1982 interview with director Michelangelo Antonioni by critic Gideon Bachmann

    New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by critic John Powers and a 1982 interview with director Michelangelo Antonioni by critic Gideon Bachmann

    New cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang
Identification of a Woman
Cast
Tomas Milian
Niccolò
Daniela Silverio
Mavi
Christine Boisson
Ida
Lara Wendel
Swimmer
Veronica Lazar
Carla
Enrica Fico
Nadia
Sandra Monteleoni
Mavi’s sister
Marcel Bozzuffi
Mario
Gianpaolo Saccarola
Gorilla
Alessandro Ruspoli
Mavi’s father
Itaco Nardulli
Lucio
Credits
Director
Michelangelo Antonioni
Executive producer
Alessandro von Normann
Producer
Giorgio Nocella
Producer
Antonio Macrì
Screenplay
Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay
Gérard Brach
In collaboration with
Tonino Guerra
Director of photography
Carlo Di Palma
Production design
Andrea Crisanti
Production manager
Franco Ballati
Music
John Foxx
Set decorator
Massimo Tavazzi
Costumes
Paola Comencini

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Michelangelo Antonioni

Director

Michelangelo Antonioni
Michelangelo Antonioni

Though Michelangelo Antonioni worked throughout the forties (on short documentaries like N.U., about street cleaners in Rome) and fifties (including writing the story that was the basis for Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik, and directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating films about bourgeois Italian life Story of a Love Affair and Le amiche), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force in international film. It was also then that he began to typify, alongside such artists as Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais, a new European art cinema, expressing a distinctly contemporary ennui. With their stunning visuals, ambiguous narratives, and still relevant focus on modern alienation, Antonioni’s films of this period, all starring Monica Vitti, his lover at the time—L’avventura (famously booed at Cannes for confounding its audience with its longueurs and lack of closure), La notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert—have stood the test of time. And his less iconic later films, like Identification of a Woman, have only grown more compelling and mysterious as the years have passed.

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