L’eclisse

The concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s informal trilogy on contemporary malaise (following L’avventura and La notte), L’eclisse tells the story of a young woman (Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Francisco Rabal) and drifts into a relationship with another (Alain Delon). Using the architecture of Rome as a backdrop for the doomed affair, Antonioni achieves the apotheosis of his style in this return to the theme that preoccupied him the most: the difficulty of connection in an alienating modern world.

Italy
1962
126 minutes
Black & White
1.85:1
Italian
Spine #278

Special Features

High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
Audio commentary by film scholar Richard Peña
Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema (2001), a fifty-six-minute documentary exploring the director’s life and career
Elements of Landscape, a twenty-two-minute piece from 2005 about Antonioni and L’eclisse, featuring Italian film critic Adriano Aprà and longtime Antonioni friend Carlo di Carlo
PLUS: Essays by film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and Gilberto Perez, as well as excerpts from Antonioni’s writing about his work
Cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Blu‑ray 1 Disc $27.96 SRP: $39.95

DVD 2 Discs $20.96 SRP: $29.95

Digital Options

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Special Features

High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
Audio commentary by film scholar Richard Peña
Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema (2001), a fifty-six-minute documentary exploring the director’s life and career
Elements of Landscape, a twenty-two-minute piece from 2005 about Antonioni and L’eclisse, featuring Italian film critic Adriano Aprà and longtime Antonioni friend Carlo di Carlo
PLUS: Essays by film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and Gilberto Perez, as well as excerpts from Antonioni’s writing about his work
Cover by Lucien S. Y. Yang

Cast & Credits

Cast

Alain Delon: Piero
Monica Vitti: Vittoria
Francisco Rabal: Riccardo
Lilla Brignone: Vittoria’s mother
Louis Seigner: Stockbroker
Rossana Rory: Anita
Mirella Ricciardi: Marta

Credits

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Story and screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni
Story and screenplay: Tonino Guerra
with collaboration from: Elio Bartolini
with collaboration from: Ottiero Ottieri
Produced by: Robert Hakim
Produced by: Raymond Hakim
Photography by: Gianni di Venanzo
Editing: Eraldo Da Roma
Music: Giovanni Fusco
Sound: Claudio Maielli
Sound assistant: Mario Bramonti
Assistant directors: Gianni Arduini
Assistant directors: Franco Indovina
Production manager: Danilo Marciani
Set design: Piero Poletto

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Explore

Michelangelo Antonioni

Director

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.