La Notte + Summer Matinees Launch

Celebrate the launch of our Summer Matinees program with the new 4K restoration of Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte, direct from Venice.

Set against the backdrop of a thoroughly modern Milan, a married couple played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau visit their dying friend in hospital. For the patient, the couple are his only real friends, everyone else is a mere acquaintance. The couple don't leave together – they embark on different paths.

Later that night, the couple attend a party. Taking mostly divergent paths they fleetingly connect with other people, but their brief encounters with one another become increasingly distant.

Curator's Note

The second part of Antonioni's revered and unofficially grouped Incommunicability Trilogy, La Notte makes a brilliant centrepiece.

In retrospect, it feels as though time has unfairly allowed the film to be overshadowed by the trilogy's two bookends, L'Avventura (1961) and L'Eclisse (1963), which both also star Monica Vitti. By a similar token, the film sits neatly beside Fellini's adored La Dolce Vita which was released the previous year and also stars a super-stylist Marcello Mastroianni.

For a brilliant piece of European modernist cinema to stand beside so many beacons of the era, it's perhaps fitting that a film named "The Night" should lurk in the shadows as a less obvious masterpiece, but a masterpiece it definitely is.

Certainly not starved for accolades, La Notte received the Golden Bear upon its premiere at the 11th Berlin International Film Festival. This new 4K Restoration premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it received the Venezia Classici Award for Best Restored Film.

– Reece Goodwin, Curator (Film & TV)