Michelangelo Antonioni - Identification Of A Woman

The second masterpiece from our Tribute To Antonioni Series. Identification of a Woman follows on from Story of a Love Affair. Antonioni won the 35th Anniversary Prize at the Cannes Films Festival in 1982, and was nominated for a Golden Palm.

Antonioni is the renowned Academy Award Nominee director of Blow Up and L’Avventura. As well as winner of the 1951 Silver Ribbon at the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists.

Antonioni’s films are considered to be some of the most influential in film aesthetics. This film is the quintessential recapitulation of the Antonioni look, of the Antonioni style, and the existential isolation of Antonioni characters, wandering aimlessly in a search for connection.

This beautiful and atmospheric film plays up to Antonionis key themes that run through his work – lack of communication, the mystery - as a journey-of-self-discovery links the film with the director’s earlier Blow Up (1966) and The Passenger (1975).

Visually, as the camera moves through blue rooms inhabited by bored aristocrats, through the fog on a highway, and along the lagoons of Venice, the aesthetic is beautifully Italian, but the emotional attitude is coolly French. Carlo Di Palma’s cinematography at the Venice locations is superb.

The movie director Niccolo has just been left by his wife. Subsequently he embarks on an obsessive relationship with a young woman who eventually leaves him and disappears (shades also of L’Avventura [1960]) while searching for her, he meets a variety of other willing girls (among them Antonioni’s own future wife Enrica Fico). This gives him the idea of making a movie about women's relationships. He starts to search for a woman who can play the leading part in the movie.



SPECIFICATIONS

DVD9 PAL / Dolby digital / All regions / Black & White
Originally Released: 1950
Running Time 125 minutes
Rated 18
Italian with English subtitles
Licensed from Surf Film