The DVD is Region 4 (Australia), put out by Madman Films, part of their Directors Suite series. The print is superb, stunning, breathtaking. It could have been filmed yesterday for, as mentioned, the look has not dated. It’s in a 16:9 aspect ratio, has the fifty-five minute documentary called Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema, also available on The Criterion Collection’s Region 1 release of L’Eclisse.

The DVD also features highly readable golden subtitles. These are simply a must, especially for film companies that are too cheap to include an English dubbed soundtrack. The highlight, in terms of features, is a quite good audio commentary by Rolando Caputo, an Australian film professor and co-editor of the website Senses Of Cinema.

He discusses the cinematography’s application well, although he often errs by falling into the trap of thinking Antonioni shunned narrative for imagery, rather than building it via color and imagery. He does not atomize the narrative from the color and scene, for the latter two must serve the narrative; what else would or could they serve? Antonioni did not lack interest in narrative, he just employed a different form of it.

Like many others, he speaks of Antonioni’s ‘language of cinema,’ even as he downplays the screenplay and character exposition; yet again showing the near total inability of film critics and historians to acknowledge the primacy of the written word’s power over the image in what is usually thought of as a primarily visual medium.

Another error he makes is in conflating Antonioni’s use of color with that of the Abstract Expresionist painter Mark Rothko, falling for the psychological and spiritual psychobabble that defenders of Rothko’s monochrome paintings proffer. Yet, Antonioni’s film is the best sort of argument against the claims Rothko acolytes make, for without characters and narrative to lend meaning to the color, there is no emotional import to the scene.

Yet, there is no denying that Antonioni avoids cheap sentimentality; but this lack only adds to the deeper takes that his camera eye allows the viewer. The characters do not willfully slough off emotions with ease, as in so many wannabe droll Postmodern Hollywood takes (think any Bill Murray film and character).

Instead, as in the best films of Stanley Kubrick and Theo Angelopoulos - two other filmmakers accused of lacking character insight and narrative strength - this allows Antonioni’s characters to fully humanize, not merely artificially preen before the camera. We see them think, reject, regret, observe, and many other things. While this bores some simply for the act of doing so, to an astute lover of art, it is how these things are done that matter, not if they are done. And Antonioni does these things superbly, making every glance, facial tic, sigh, etc., count for something that is a throwaway in lesser films.