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'While the term is too frequently deployed in contexts such as this, brilliant is the most accurate word with which to describe Matilde Nardelli's book, which raises the bar for scholarship on Antonioni. It is endlessly inventive, original, and learned, while its elegant execution makes it a genuine pleasure to read. This book will stand for many years to come as the last word on Antonioni's relation to the other arts, but it is also the most interesting and challenging meditation that I know of on the question of cinema's intermediality, and is a landmark in the study of art cinema.'
John David Rhodes, Corpus Christi College
Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema's 'modern' incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni's aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity addresses these works' crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new 'impure' art practices that emerged in the period. At the same time, the book also offers a novel reading of the films' dialogue with postwar pictorial abstraction. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via his cinema, the book replaces auteuristic accounts of the director's work with a new understanding of its critical significance in late-twentieth century cinema and visual culture.
Matilde Nardelli teaches at the University of West London.
Cover image: Michelangelo Antonioni, Untitled Painting (c. 1958-1962), watercolour and tempera paint on paper, 50 x 35 cm © Enrica Fico, courtesy of Gallerie d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea: Fondo Michelangelo Antonioni, Ferrara, Italy
Cover design:
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edinburghuniversitypress.com
ISBN 978-1-4744-4404-0
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List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Impure Pictoriality: The Matter of Painting
2. Performing the Mind: Interiority, Television and Artificial Brains
3. (Quietly) Noisy Images: Sonic Landscapes, Audiotape and 'the New Musicality'
4. The 'Image-World' and the Reality of Photography
5. Uncinematic Provocations and the Pursuit of Boredom
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Dr Matilde Nardelli is a Senior Lecturer in the London School of Film, Media and Design at the University of West London.
Summary
The book offers a radical rethinking of Michelangelo Antonioni's work. It argues against prevalent understandings of it in terms of both cinematic purity and indebtedness to painting.
