L'eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1962. It completes the loose trilogy on alienation that began with L'avventura (1960) and continued with La Notte (1961), three films with Monica Vitti in each and the same slow, unforgiving attention to the post-war Italian bourgeoisie and its failures of connection. In the 2022 Sight & Sound poll it placed in the upper tier.

Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a literary translator in Rome, ends a long relationship in the opening minutes and drifts, slowly and without much apparent narrative purpose, into another with Piero (Alain Delon), a young stockbroker. Antonioni follows the attempt over several weeks: through the trading floor of the Borsa di Roma, the modernist architecture of the EUR district, an extended Saharan-themed cocktail party at her mother's house, and the long static shots of empty Roman streets that a great deal of later cinema has borrowed from.

Gianni Di Venanzo's photography of the EUR district gives the film one of the most distinctive looks in 1960s European cinema, all hard geometry and open space. The pairing of Delon and Vitti was among the most photographed of the period, and Antonioni uses that glamour against itself, holding his two stars at a slight remove from each other and from us. Few films of the decade trust place and duration so completely to carry feeling when the characters cannot, and that trust is the source of its formal daring.