L'eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes 1962. The film completes Antonioni's loose alienation trilogy after L'avventura (1960) and La Notte (1961) — three films built around Monica Vitti as the central female figure, all engaged in slow examination of post-war Italian bourgeois disconnection. The film entered the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier in 2022.

A young Roman literary translator named Vittoria (Monica Vitti) ends a long relationship in the opening sequences of the film and begins, slowly and without apparent narrative purpose, to drift into another with the vibrant young stockbroker Piero (Alain Delon). The film follows their attempted relationship across several weeks in Rome — the Borsa di Roma stock exchange, the EUR district's modernist architecture, an extended Saharan-cocktail party at her mother's house, the long static shots of empty Roman streets that have become foundational to the post-modernist cinema register.

The famous closing seven-minute sequence — in which the human characters disappear from the film entirely and the camera observes the EUR district's empty intersections, water taps and street lights as evening falls into night — is among the most-cited single endings in the history of cinema. Gianni Di Venanzo's photography of the EUR district produced one of the most distinctive visual registers of 1960s European cinema. Delon and Vitti's central pairing is one of the most photographed in the period.