• Bare trees, constant fog, barren industrial set pieces (that finale—astonishing)- it’s another glorious triumph for Antonioni
  • Antonioni’s only film subject set in the blue-collar working class (which in a way touches neo-realism as close as he would)
  • The set pieces and landscapes are both formally sound and indicators on character- it’s perpetually winter through the changing seasons (4 women)—life’s sadness and struggle
  • prison bars in natural life
  • Immaculately desolate photography in the gray color ranges
  • Bookends with deaths- another formal achievement
  • Welles’ influence- deep background daughter in several shots
  • Adultery- there’s certainly soap opera tendency in Antonioni’s oeuvre
  • Powerful scene Steve Cochran’s Aldo slapping of Alida Valli in the town square
  • Like L’Avventura (his next film) the women drop off- Aldo drops them and the town (daughter) and eventually himself- disintegration
  • Bare trees
  • Great shot of them standing elevated on a hill in front of a shallow basin
  • Alienation- the pull of loneliness in contrast with poisonous love
  • Muddy, rural, desolate roads, rivers, grey, harsh
  • I’d love to read a piece comparing the film with Fellini’s La Strada– this is almost like from Quinn’s character’s viewpoint. An awful father—another is Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces
  • Clearly chases his dick around, abandonment of daughter scene,
  • Four women, great shot of the 4th framed through multiple sets of doors
  • Driving away from the gas station in the bed of a car shot
  • the climax is magnificently set amidst a political land dispute- macro in the micro like Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama, Children of Men or Roma– and then we get Aldo at the abandoned factory with architecture and the barren set pieces indicating character- like Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind (1948)- then the ambiguous death
  • HR