The Great Ones Vol. 1 (Side A Track 2)

The greatest piece of film acting that I have ever seen comes towards the end of Wim Wender's 1984 miracle of a film Paris, Texas. It lasts just over three minutes and the actress doesn't say a word but gives a lifetime of information just with her eyes. It's the scene where Harry Dean Stanton's Travis is finally telling the story of what happened to him to his estranged wife Jane played by Nastassja Kinski. The words were written by Sam Shepherd and it's an eloquent monologue, the kind that only a great American writer could come up with. Any other director in the world would have placed the camera on Stanton but Wenders knew that the heart of the scene was in Kinski's reaction. For over three minutes the camera films Kinski, and we just watch her listening. It's something that you rarely see in film, a person just listening and silently reacting. For three minutes all of the early comparisons of Kinski to Garbo, Dietrich and Monroe are more than justified. It's a chilling moment that I have never seen equaled in a film and then....she was gone.
The early career leading up to Paris, Texas of Nastassja Kinski was an exciting one. After a string of European films as a teenager she was cast in the leading role in Roman Polanski's heartfelt adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess. Kinski won a Golden Globe for the role and was greeted with international acclaim. Her peak came between 1982 through 1984 in which she would make 8 films and be compared mostly to Garbo and perhaps even more fitting to her favorite Marilyn Monroe. On the surface her dark European looks might have seemed the opposite of Monroe but they shared a vulnerability that most actresses simply do not possess.
The two year peak showed her as a complex and diverse actress capable of seemingly anything. The most iconic role was probably the Cat People remake but I love her work as Susie The Bear in The Hotel New Hampshire opposite Jodie Foster, who would befriend her off-screen. Here she plays a woman so convinced of her ugliness that she hides herself in a bear costume.
She often played characters that caused obsessive reactions of people around her such as Cat People, Maria's Lovers, One From The Heart, Moon In The Gutter and Exposed. It's obsession that seems to fuel all of these films and legend has it that most of the director's filming her in this period suffered from the same fixation. In hindsight it's as if you can see her splitting apart as you watch these films. Finally it's that three minute close up in Paris Texas where she seems to give all that she has left to give.
After filming the disastrous Revolution with Al Pacino in which she spent almost every scene in tears she left Hollywood for almost ten years concentrating on her children and smaller European films. There were interesting performances in this period but all of the intensity of her early work had gone.
She returned briefly in the mid 90's with two great performances in Mike Figgis' One Night Stand and Neil Labute's Your Friends and Neighbors but the relative failure of both these films stopped her comeback.
Nearing her 50th birthday Nastassja Kinski rarely works anymore. A string of terrible straight to video films and TV work hurt the fine work she did with Scarlett Johannsson in American Rhapsody or Michael Winterbottom's The Claim.
Wim Wenders has now worked with her three times in three different decades and has said that he would like to do it again at least one more time. I would love to see her in at least one more great role if only to watch her disappear again.

A Few Tricks Left Up The Old Masters Sleeve

1995's BEYOND THE CLOUDS is not one of Antonioni's more accomplished films but it is a film that remains a remarkable feat simply in that it exists at all.
Michelangelo suffered a very debilitating stroke in 1985 that robbed him of his speech and left him partially paralyzed. Since he was already 73 when this happened it appeared a sure thing that 1982's IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN would indeed be his final film and yet Michelangelo continued on and managed to make three short films in the decade following his stroke.
When word first came down that Antonioni was indeed mounting a major new film in the mid nineties the excitement was overwhelming to me, as well as many other film fans and critics. Shot on location in four Italian and French cities with a truly astonishing cast including Sophie Marceau, Irene Jacob, Fanny Ardant, Chiara Caselli, Vincent Perez, Marcello Mastroinanni and Jeanne Moreau, BEYOND THE CLOUDS would have been major project for any director but considering Michelangelo was in his mid eighties and not able to speak the film seemed like a miracle.
Assisting Antonioni was one of his biggest followers, German born Wim Wenders. Wender's invaluable book about the making of the film, MY TIME WITH ANTONIONI, is a great recourse for fans of Michelangelo. Wender's shot much of the footage involving insufferable John Malkovich narration that acted as a connection between Antonioni's elegiac and erotic sections. Antonioni wisely cut most of Wender's footage out of the film but the parts that do remain remain the weakest sections of BEYOND THE CLOUDS and I have always thought a simple anthology film with just Antonioni's footage would have worked much better. Still it is to Wender's credit that he was on the set and did assist the frail director in crafting his final major production.

The segments in BEYOND THE CLOUDS were based on pieces from Antonioni's great short story collection, BOWLING ALLEY ON THE TIMBER, but BEYOND THE CLOUDS really isn't about plotting or storyline. The joy of the film is in the visuals, with Michelangelo's amazing compositional abilities still in full power. Talented cinematographer Alfio Contini, who had shot ZABRISKIE POINT back in 1970, provides the film's striking look and it melds in perfectly with Antonioni's unmistakable direction and camera work.

BEYOND THE CLOUDS is one of the most erotic films Michelangelo ever shot and his cast, featuring some of the most beautiful women on the planet, is awesome to see. Sophie Marceau is particularly lovely in this film and Antonioni shoots her as if it might be the last time he will be able to photograph the female face and form. Irene Jacob, who shot this just after her miraculous turn in Kieslowski's RED, gives the film its emotional and spiritual center and her segment is a lovely reminder of some of the master's greatest works.
The film's most nostalgic moment comes in the scene where Mastroianni and Moreau are seen together again. Seeing the two of these greats together being photographed by Antonioni remains a powerful image and provides a fitting coda to Antonioni's awesome career.
BEYOND THE CLOUDS would open to mixed reviews and it is a flawed and slightly disconnected film. That doesn't make it any less miraculous though and in its greatest moments, such as Marceau through Antonioni's camera, it is a beautiful and moving film made by a great artist knowing he is making one of his final works.

Antonioni: Eight Disciples

Just as the career of Brian Eno is often overlooked as completely altering the modern music landscape, the films of Antonioni are undervalued in how influential they have been. It would be impossible to even began to list the number of filmmakers who have name checked, copied and paid tribute to Antonioni in the past forty years but here are eight whose films would not have been the same without the master's work. I chose eight who are all very different from one another, who span five different countries, several different generations and many different genres.

With the exception of Mario Bava, no director has had more of an impact on the films of Dario Argento than Antonioni. His first feature THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1969) immediately springs to mind as a work that owes much to Antonioni's astonishing composition and color schemes but it is Argento's DEEP RED (1975) that plays as an almost valentine to Antonioni's works, specifically BLOW-UP (1966). Argento's obsessive and penetrating study of misplaced memories and fractured personalities seem to spring directly from Antonioni's towering works on alienation such as L'AVVENTURA (1960) and RED DESERT (1964).

The handful of films that Jack Nicholson has directed since his striking and hard to see debut DRIVE HE SAID (1971) have all be indebted to Antonioni's work. Nicholson, who would give one of his great performances in Antonioni's THE PASSENGER (1975), has been one of the master's biggest vocal supporters and presented him with his honorary Oscar over a decade ago. All of Nicholson's films, perhaps none more so than the carefully designed THE TWO JAKES (1990), share Antonioni's very specific ability of presenting a past that is deliberately and regretfully being disintegrated. The final moment in the THE TWO JAKES where Meg Tilly screams at Nicholson's defeated Jake Gittes, "Does The past ever really go away?" to which he responds with a broken, "It Never Does" could have been lifted from any number of Antonioni's greatest works.

Polish director Walerian Borowczyk might be one of the only filmmakers in history who managed to match the painterly and always awe inspiring compositional skill of Antonioni. They also both knew how to use music to often devastating effect. Pink Floyd has been used in a lot of films but watch the endings of Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) and Borowczyk's LA MARGE (1975) to see two of the bands most famous songs transformed into purely cinematic works for two of the great masters to manipulate and add unquestionable dimension to.

Would Travis Bickle have been possible without the films of Antonioni? I'm not sure but I am willing to bet that the despairing alienation that Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader were able to bring TAXI DRIVER (1976) would have been a lot less without Antonioni's early black and white work. Everything from the film's striking one sheet to the many shots of De Niro's fragmenting psyche recall many moments in Antonioni's canon, specifically Monica Vitti's astonishing turn in RED DESERT.

Like Argento's DEEP RED, Brian De Palma's masterful BLOW-OUT (1982) plays like a love letter to BLOW-UP. Perhaps more noteworthy is De Palma's acceptance of cinema as an art form where extremes are not only at times welcome, but necessary. Match up the final explosion in ZABRISKIE POINT or the final ten minute tracking shot in THE PASSENGER to some of De Palma's more elaborate and breathtaking set pieces, the ending of THE FURY (1978) and the Cannes sequence of FEMME FATALE (2002) come to mind, and suddenly it isn't the ghost of Hitchcock who most often occupies De Palma's films.

When he was preparing one of his final films, BEYOND THE CLOUDS (1995), Antonioni called in German born Wim Wender's to assistant him as a stroke had taken most of his ability to speak away. All of Wender's films are clearly directly descended from Antonioni. From the loneliness of ALICE IN THE CITIES (1974) to the simultaneously searching and running away Travis in PARIS TEXAS (1984), Wender's lonely variations on the road film are unthinkable without Antonioni.

Egyptian born Atom Egoyan's characters often seem trapped in a world they feel they can't inhabit while at the same time being indebted to the convenience of it. Outside of the obvious compositional comparisons to Antonioni's films, Egoyan's fascinating look at the strife and deceptions between family members seems more than just cinematically connected to the failing marriage in RED DESERT or the doomed affair in L'ECLISSE (1962). Egoyan's best films, such as EXOTICA (1994) and THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997) possess Antonioni's ability to connect a seemingly simple gesture with a world threatening to fall apart.

When Sofia Coppola won her much deserved Oscar for her screenplay to LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) she went out of her way to thank Antonioni. Watching her three features, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999), LOST IN TRANSLATION and MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) it seems clear that the thoughtful and powerful works of Antonioni are not going to disappear any time soon. LOST IN TRANSLATION'S final moments play like a promise that Antonioni's often ambiguous art house dreams aren't as dead as so many film goers and critics like to believe.

There are many others I could have singled out but these eight all seem particularly indebted and worth mentioning as I begin my tribute to Michelangelo. I can imagine if asked what they would say to him, they would all offer the one word he had for The Academy the night he won his honorary Oscar..."Grazie."