IL GRIDO (117’)
by Michelangelo Antonioni
cast: Alida Valli, Steve Cochran, Betsy Blair, Dorian Gray
Italy, 1957
Restoration curated by The Film Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna
Introduced by Adriano De Grandis
Screening in the original language.
“This is undoubtedly one of Antonioni’s best films, and the one that is the most strongly autobiographical, in the sense that it is coherent with his way of being an artist. And it is already a moment of lofty reflection upon the nature of cinema as a raw and implacable instrument for exploring an inner crisis. […] Deeply entrenched in the moral climate of figures and landscapes along the banks of the Po River, it is a journey of desperate surrender that solidifies into fate. A chronicle of solitude in the name of a secular, earthly pessimism, that finds an inner and embodied form in the protagonist’s meaningless wandering. Leading to a striking suicide, down the smokestack of a factory deserted by a strike. Everything is still rendered in terms of a harsh and intense style of things. That tends to dissolve into a freeform story. Not yet deconstructed, but already permeated by an underlying awareness that the only character is the language.” (Gianni Volpi)
