Monica Vitti [3rd November 1931 – 2 February 2022]

Monica Vitti [3rd November 1931 – 2 February 2022]

Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse

I first encountered Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, a film which I had originally obtained, bizarrely, on video tape, as it had not yet been released on DVD then. I was immediately struck by her moody-poetic screen persona, the sadness and the beauty. I simply had never encountered this kind of acting in film before – until then, I had always believed that great acting must contain some bravura, but here was a performance that dispelled my notion. Vitti’s performance made me see that there was a specifically ‘cinematic’ form of acting, that had little to do with the theatre or dramatic action. This was film acting as a state-of-being, a way of feeling the world, a sensibility.

The director of L’Eclisse, Michelangelo Antonioni, had had a romantic and creative partnership with Vitti – L’Eclisse was part of a trilogy of films that would include La Notte and L’Avventura. It was a collaboration. Monica Vitti was the embodiment of the themes Antonioni would explore in these films; “Antonioniennui”, to use a summary phrase. I was surprised to learn that Vitti had been mainly doing comedy before her work with Antonioni [and would continue to do comedy after it] because she seemed to sit so perfectly with Antonioni’s minimal, melancholy cinema. This is when an actor and a director’s aesthetic combine so elegantly together that it all seems to become one and the same, much like Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon, for example.

Monica Vitti revolutionised the meaning and purpose of screen acting for me. With her striking, sensitive beauty, she was part of that mid-twentieth century cinema that seems almost mythological now, when cinema reached it’s peak of seriousness and artistry. Like all truly great artists, Monica Vitti awakened me to something completely new, to something I had never seen before.

Thank-you and Rest In Peace.