Antonioni: the man who set film free

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: the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries—or rather the mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul. That’s why I kept going back. I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures, wandering through them. I still do.

Antonioni seemed to open up new possibilities with every movie. The last seven minutes of L’Eclisse, the third film in a loose trilogy he began with L’Avventura—the middle film was La Notte, were even more terrifying. We start to see things——and we begin to realise that we’re seeing the places they’ve been, empty of their presence. Gradually Antonioni brings us face to face with time and space, nothing more, nothing less. And they stare right back at us. It was frightening, and it was freeing. The possibilities of cinema were suddenly limitless.