Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Remaking the Image, 1960-1980

Michelangelo Antonioni's films are influential, innovative, and aesthetically experimental, and his work is often seen as a key figure in ushering in a new or modern incarnation of cinema around 1960. Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity offers a radical rethinking of the director's work, challenging prevalent understandings of it in terms of cinematic purity and indebtedness to painting. It reconnects Antonioni's films of the 1960s and 1970s to the ferment of their historical time and highlights their affinity with the new, impure art practices of John Cage, Franco Vaccari, Robert Smithson, Piero Gilardi, and Andy Warhol. The book replaces auteuristic accounts of the director's work with a new understanding of its critical significance across the modern visual arts and culture more broadly.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 31 August 2020
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Michelangelo Antonioni's films are widely recognized as influential, innovative, and aesthetically experimental, marking a significant shift in cinema around 1960. Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity offers a radical rethinking of the director's work, challenging prevailing notions of cinematic purity and indebtedness to painting. Reconnecting Antonioni's films of the 1960s and 1970s to the cultural ferment of their time, the book highlights their affinity with the new, impure art practices of John Cage, Franco Vaccari, Robert Smithson, Piero Gilardi, and Andy Warhol, among others. This affinity led to the demotion of painting from its privileged position as a paradigm for all the arts. The book presents a new understanding of Antonioni's work, replacing auteuristic accounts with a critical perspective that recognizes its significance across the modern visual arts and culture.

Weight: 506g
Dimension: 163 x 240 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474444040