Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Remaking the Image in the 1960s

• Critically and comprehensively explores the relation between Antonioni’s cinema and art in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time of profound transformation in, and dialogue between, both cinema and art
• Moves away from traditional readings of Antonioni’s cinema in terms of ‘purity’ by addressing its engagement with mixed and mass media
• Approaches Antonioni’s work through a comparative – trasnational and transmedial – lens
• Addresses the legacy of Antonioni’s cinema in contemporary art

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema’s ‘modern’ incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni’s aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity addresses these works’ crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new ‘impure’ art practices that emerged in the period. At the same time, the book also offers a novel reading of the films’ dialogue with postwar pictorial abstraction. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via his cinema, the book replaces auteuristic accounts of the director’s work with a new understanding of its critical significance in late-twentieth century cinema and visual culture.