L'Eclisse (1962) & Divorce Italian Style (1962)

L'Eclisse (The Criterion Collection) (1962)
Good condition with internal booklet, no cover artwork.

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse rolls over you and wraps you in its stylish embrace. The plot, such as it is, follows Vittoria (luscious Monica Vitti, The Red Desert) as her engagement falls apart and she slowly falls into a giddy but anxious affair with Piero (Alain Delon, Le Samourai, Purple Noon), a trader in Rome's stock exchange. Like Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage, Persona), Antonioni examines the nuances of human relationships--but where Bergman is dense and dialogue-driven, Antonioni is spare and visual (there's maybe a page of dialogue in the first fifteen minutes of L'Eclisse). Every frame is like an exquisite black and white photograph, yet there's nothing static about this movie. It's fluid, sleek, and graceful, achieving its own kind of visual music. L'Eclisse contrasts opposing elements: Light and shadow, noise and silence, laughter and death, love and money, desire and dissatisfaction. Critics often describe the movie as a portrait of modern alienation, but they focus too much on Vittoria herself; while she finds her own life wanting, all around her Antonioni's camera captures a much larger world, full of as much vitality as despair, as much hope as loss.

Audio commentary by film scholar Richard Pena
Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema, a 56-minute documentary exploring the director's life and career
The Sickness of Eros, a new video piece about Antonioni and L'eclisse
New essays by film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and Gilberto Perez

Actors: Monica Vitti, Alain Delon, Francisco Rabal, Louis Seigner, Lilla Brignone
Directors: Michelangelo Antonioni Producers: Raymond Hakim, Robert Hakim
Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Ottiero Ottieri, Tonino Guerra
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono) Subtitles: English
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only) Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Number of discs: 2 Rated: Unrated Studio: Criterion
DVD Release Date: March 15, 2005 Run Time: 126 minutes


Divorce Italian Style (The Criterion Collection) (1962)
Good condition with internal booklet, no cover artwork.

Divorce Italian Style is a comedy milestone--a brilliant, biting satire that was originally conceived as a drama; directed with nonstop inventiveness by a filmmaker who had never done comedy; and featuring an actor who, though not even among the first dozen players considered, cemented his international stardom with this performance. The movie also marked a breakthrough for foreign film in America, winning popular as well art-house success, Academy Award nominations for director Pietro Germi and star Marcello Mastroianni, and--the first of only a few foreign-language films to do so--the Oscar itself for Original Screenplay.

On the sun-blasted island of Sicily, Baron Ferdinand "Fefè" Cefalù (Mastroianni) breaks out of his heat- and boredom-induced stupor long enough to be smitten with mad passion for his 16-year-old cousin Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). But he's married--to Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), she of the unfortunate mustache--and the Italian Penal Code gives him no way out... except, of course, for catching his wife in adultery and availing himself of the patriarchal license to commit a "crime of honor." So Fefè searches for a way to fling Rosalia into the arms of another man.

Mastroianni's Fefè is an indelible masterpiece, visually and behaviorally: a portrait in painterly chiaroscuro, with brilliantined hair, eternally drooping eyelids, a cigarette holder angled in perpetual salute, and a manic, conspiratorial slouch, like Groucho Marx on painkillers. Germi's direction hustles the film along with bold, mobile camerawork, stream-of-consciousness lurches into fantasy and flashback, Fefè's feverish voiceover commentary, and a wonderfully propulsive music score by the late Carlo Rustichelli.

Pietro Germi: The Man with the Cigar in His Mouth, a 39-minute documentary by critic and filmmaker Mario Sesti
Delighting in Contrasts, a new 30-minute interview featuring Stefania Sandrelli, Lando Buzzanca, and Mario Sesti
Rare screen-test footage of actresses Daniela Roca and Stefania Sandrelli
A new essay by film critic Stuart Klawans

Actors: Marcello Mastroianni, Daniela Rocca, Stefania Sandrelli, Leopoldo Trieste
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono) Subtitles: English
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Number of discs: 2 Rated: Unrated Studio: Criterion
DVD Release Date: April 26, 2005 Run Time: 105 minutes