Blu-ray, DVD Release: L’eclisse

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: June 10, 2014
Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95
Studio: Criterion


L’eclisse movie scene

Ennui lives!: Francisco Rabal and Monica Vitti in Antonioni's L’eclisse.

The 1962 Italian drama L’eclisse is the concluding chapter of Michelangelo Antonioni’s informal trilogy on contemporary malaise (following L’avventura and La notte).

L’eclisse (The Eclipse) tells the story of a young woman (L’avventura’s Monica Vitti) who leaves one lover (Viridiana’s Francisco Rabal) and drifts into a relationship with another (Purple Noon’s Alain Delon).

Using the architecture of Rome as a backdrop for the doomed affair, Antonioni achieves the apotheosis of his style in this return to the theme that preoccupied him the most: the difficulty of connection in an alienating modern world.

Criterion’s Blu-ray/DVD Combo edition of the movie, which is presented in Italian with English subtitles, contains the following features:

• New, restored high-definition digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary by film scholar Richard Peña, former program director of New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center
Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema (2001), a fifty-six-minute documentary exploring the director’s life and career
Elements of Landscape, a twenty-two-minute piece from 2005 about Antonioni and L’eclisse, featuring Italian film critic Adriano Aprà and longtime Antonioni friend Carlo di Carlo
• New English subtitle translation
• One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• A booklet featuring essays by film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum and Gilberto Perez, as well as excerpts from Antonioni’s writing about his work

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.