Festival Notes
We’ve begun our festival season activities, attending a screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse this weekend. The State is a grand old theatre, but this is the second year we’ve gone here for a film during the Sydney Film Festival, and we’ve concluded as a result that they cannot manage a crowd of eager filmgoers. This year, they also started the show 30 minutes late, which wouldn’t have been much of an issue, except that this is part of a major travelling retrospective of Antonioni’s oeuvre, requiring not one, but three introductions: one for the festival, one for the retrospective, and one for the movie itself. Which was a terrific piece of Italian cinema, even if Vittoria is one of the moodiest film characters of all time, and the final seven minutes, “the most famous seven minutes in cinema,” was the most inexplicable movie endings of all time (at least immediately following lights-up; afterward, it all started to make sense, which is what often happens in art-house movies). It’s quite stunning, the ending, after all that angst, but it’s perhaps just as well that next week we’ll be going to see documentaries on the Ramones and Charles Bukowski.