Through the end of the 1950s, the bourgeois protagonists of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films actively engaged their surroundings and maintained some sense of control.

Everything changed in 1960. The surroundings became monolithic and oppressive, and the world took notice as the great modernist director—in a series of films featuring Monica Vitti—cast an excoriating eye on the moral rot and entropy in contemporary Italian society.

After L’Avventura (1960) and before L’Eclisse (1962), Antonioni conjoined a triangle of great European stars—Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni, and Jeanne Moreau—for LA NOTTE (1961), dismissed by Pauline Kael as another “sick-soul-of-Europe” display, but praised by more thoughtful viewers as a feminist critique of capitalism.

Bring a sweater and a blanket for a night of LA NOTTE in The Underground Museum’s Purple Garden. This Film Foundation screening is part of a series—Purple Garden Cinema—curated by Kahlil Joseph.

LA NOTTE, Friday, September 15. Doors open at 8 pm. Free popcorn!!

THE UNDERGROUND MUSEUM, 3508 West Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles.

theunderground-museum.org

See:  benefitofthedoubt.miksimum.com/2010/10/searching-out-sick-soul-la-dolce-vita.html

From top: Jeanne Moreau (left) and Monica Vitti in La Notte; Vitti and Marcello Mastroianni; Vitti; La Notte opening title card; Mastroianni and Moreau, nightclub scene in La Notte. Image credits: Criterion.