Modern Michelangelo

The National Gallery of Art Salutes An Italian Master of the Cinema

For a universally acknowledged maestro, Michelangelo Antonioni is still remarkably polarizing.

That Antonioni, the subject of a current retrospective recently launched at the National Gallery of Art, revolutionized cinematic grammar is undisputed. (Antonioni died a year ago this month at the age of 94.) After a decade in post-World War II Italy making that era's signature neorealist films, he broke with the form and proceeded to create minimalist, static portraits of spiritual ennui that, with their long takes and wide, windy spaces, seemed to echo the postwar era's burgeoning anxieties and collective sense of alienation.

An innovator on a par with Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Arnold Schoenberg, Antonioni made the cinema safe for modernism, reducing the medium to its elements and liberating it from the fetters of conventional narrative. In Antonioni's hands, to paraphrase Stein, a shot was a shot was a shot.

Which isn't to say that those shots -- brooding, empty, endless, silent -- weren't utterly confounding just as often as they were poetic and provocative. Because Antonioni was so influential (we arguably wouldn't have had a Kubrick or Almodovar or Jarmusch without him), it's easy to overpraise films that, upon reflection, often seem pretentious, obtuse and inert.

A recent case in point: the 1975 film "The Passenger," a thriller starring Jack Nicholson that was rereleased in theaters a few years ago. Often hailed as one of Antonioni's masterpieces, it features at least one bravura moment (the breathtaking climax that transpires in a single seven-minute shot) but also epitomizes a directorial style steeped in self-consciousness, chilly moral detachment and quintessentially male heroics. Still, few filmmakers before or since have possessed Antonioni's gifts for staging and composition: No one films two people against a simple landscape with more expressive power.

The series underway at the National Gallery offers a terrific primer in Antonioni at his most Antonioniesque. Today's film, "The Girlfriends" (1955), marks one of the director's earliest critical successes, but far more notable is the short film that precedes it, "People of the Po," a rarely seen and poetic example of Antonioni's roots in neorealism and nonfiction. (He made several documentaries at the start of his career.) Filmed in 1943 during the war, the 10-minute documentary portrays the people of Italy's Po Valley as they work the impoverished region's waterways and fields.

The series continues through August: Don't miss "The Night" (1961), one of his most highly regarded films, which has yet to be released in a high-quality DVD package.

Michelangelo Antonioni: The Italian Treasures film series continues at the National Gallery of Art's East Building Auditorium, Fourth Street at Constitution Avenue NW, through Aug. 24. Admission is free; first come,

first seated. For more information, visit http://www.nga.gov/programs/film or call 202-842-6799.