Antonioni
Silence as Loud as Noise

April 27 - May 25, 2013

Pera Film in collaboration with Istituto Italiano di Cultura is presenting seven films and selected shorts of Antonioni beginning from the 40s until the early 80s.

Michelangelo Antonioni was born on 29 September 1912 and died in 2007 at the age of 94, having worked until almost the very end. Though he worked throughout the forties and fifties (including writing the story that was the basis for Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik, and directing his first fiction features, including the penetrating films about bourgeois Italian life Story of a Love Affair and Le amiche), it was in the 1960s that he became a major force in international film. It was also then that he began to typify, alongside such artists as Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Alain Resnais, a new European art cinema, expressing a distinctly contemporary ennui. With their stunning visuals, ambiguous narratives, and still relevant focus on modern alienation, Antonioni’s films of this period, all starring Monica Vitti, his lover at the time—L’avventura (famously booed at Cannes for confounding its audience with its longueurs and lack of closure), La notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert—have stood the test of time. And his less iconic later films, like Identification of a Woman, have only grown more compelling and mysterious, as the years have passed.

Antonioni deftly manipulates the quieter, indirect edges of cinematic structure, often so discretely that his existential puzzles are felt before they can be intellectualized. The negative space is as prominent as the positive, silence as loud as noise, absence as palpable as presence, and passivity as driving a force as direct action. Transgressing unspoken cinematic laws, Antonioni frequently focuses on female protagonists while refusing to sentimentalize or morally judge his characters and placing them on equal footing with the other elements within his total dynamic system, like sounds or set pieces. Together with Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni is credited with defining the modern art film. And yet Antonioni’s cinema is also recognized today for defying any easy categorization, with his films ultimately seeming to belong to their own distinctive genre.

In collaboration:

Story of a Love Affair

Story of a Love Affair

Red Desert

Red Desert

Zabriskie Point

Zabriskie Point

Identification of a Woman

Identification of a Woman

L’Avventura

L’Avventura

Blow-Up

Blow-Up

The Mystery of Oberwald

The Mystery of Oberwald

Shorts

Shorts

Program Trailer

Antonioni
Silence as Loud as Noise

Pera Film in collaboration with Istituto Italiano di Cultura is presenting seven films and selected shorts of Antonioni beginning from the 40s until the early 80s.

Five Unmissable Istanbul Paintings of Félix Ziem

Five Unmissable Istanbul Paintings of Félix Ziem

Félix Ziem is accepted as one of the well-known artists of the romantic landscape painting, and has been followed closely by art lovers and collectors of all periods since. He had a profound influence on generations of artists after him, and was the first artist whose works were acquired by the Louvre while he was still alive.

Mark Požlep

Mark Požlep

Our Cold Front from the Balkans exhibition focuses on different generations of artists and art groups from the Balkan region. Throughout the exhibition, we keep sharing detailed information about the artworks. Take a look at Mark Požlep’s “Stranger than Paradise” video installation. Also you can check our interview with the artist on our YouTube channel! 

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Pera Museum presented a talk on Nicola Lorini’s video installation For All the Time, for All the Sad Stones, bringing together the artists Nicola Lorini, Gülşah Mursaloğlu and Ambiguous Standards Institute to focus on concepts like measuring, calculation, standardisation, time and change.