Contempt

If you liked this

8½1963

Fellini's simultaneous meditation on filmmaking, male ego, and creative paralysis. Like Contempt, it turns the machinery of cinema into the subject itself, though it's far more baroque and hallucinatory in its execution.

But Three hours of a director's anxieties may feel indulgent if you prefer plot momentum to psychological excavation.

La Notte1961

Antonioni's equally austere examination of a marriage in crisis. Lidia and Giovanni walk through Milan and a hospital, speaking around what's really broken between them. The emotional texture is achingly similar, though Antonioni's Rome is colder.

But Very slow, very Italian. If you're watching for dramatic confrontation, you'll be disappointed—these characters don't resolve anything, they just drift.

Red Desert1964

Antonioni again, but this time in colour, and that colour is sickly, industrial, wrong. Like Contempt, it uses visual beauty as a kind of cruelty, showing us gorgeous frames of emotional emptiness and contamination.

But Abstract and hermetic. The plot barely exists; what matters is the feeling of dislocation, which isn't for everyone.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Contempt

Cast

• 
  Brigitte BardotCamille Javal
• 
  Michel PiccoliPaul Javal
• 
  Jack PalanceJeremy Prokosch
• 
  Giorgia MollFrancesca Vanini
• 
  Fritz LangFritz Lang
• 
  Raoul CoutardCameraman
• 
  Jean-Luc GodardLang's Assistant Director
• 
  Linda VerasSirene

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