What a time it was! An essay on Antonioni's L'eclisse

L'eclisse is one of Michelangelo Antonioni's most important works, but it is also representative of this remarkable epoch in the history of cinema and the world. In a sense, the three films known as the Trilogy (this one and the two preceding it) are miraculously in tune with their times, and especially the cinema of their times. They have a common subject or horizon, which is the end of the world an end of the world perceived as abstract and atomic. The sound in L'eclisse, even when it is predictable and normal and from a clearly visible cause, overflows the reassuring and known image of its source and materializes the invisible.