Antonioni - Aux origines du Pop

The Cinémathèque Française in Paris feels like home, to me. 
Especially these last months, since they have consecrated to two of my favourite film-makers of all time their biggest exhibitions. Truffaut in the Fall/Winter season and now Michelangelo Antonioni in the Springtime/Summer season (April 9-July 19).
Life is beautiful!

Lucky enough to be invited to the vernissage of the exhibition last Wednesday night, I have enjoyed every minute of it and I was very curious to see what the friends at the Cinémathèque were able to do: a great job, as usual!
The space at the 5th floor, very often divided into different corners, have been left completely open, giving the exhibition a particularly free and energetic look (it is not by coincidence that the exposition has been called The Origins of Pop):

The life and the career of Antonioni are followed chronologically in a circular itinerary that suavely run along the Cinémathèque walls.
Everything is there: from his first steps as cinema critic at the Corriere Padano to the first movies written for Rossellini and Fellini, to letters, books, pictures, records, paintings, original screenplays, all the passions of the Ferrara film-maker are shown in the exhibition.
With some surprises too!
I didn't know Antonioni had a huge collection of cinema postcards... and that he used to "store" them in very big books (great idea, now I know where I could collect mine!):

I really loved the niche consecrated to my favourite Antonioni's movie (and my favourite Italian movie tout court), La Notte, part of the famous "Trilogia dell'incomunicabilità" together with L'Avventura e L'Eclisse:

Lidia (Jeanne Moreau)

Antonioni sul set di La Notte, a Milano

Foto dal set con J. Moreau, M. Mastroianni, Antonioni e M. Vitti

Antonioni e la Vitti discutono sul set di La Notte

Antonioni's movies with Monica Vitti are so special that after seeing these pictures I just wanted to watch them all over again...

Vittoria (M. Vitti) e Piero (A. Delon) - L'Eclisse

Aggiungi didascalia

The two sections dedicated to Deserto Rosso and Blow up were painted in bright and vivid red and green colors, which was a pretty simple but very beautiful idea:

Antonioni e Vanessa Redgrave sul set di Blow Up

The exhibition also displays a number of letters that important film-makers and artists wrote to Antonioni about his movies, showing how much love and respect his cinema was able to generate. In particular, there is a letter by Fellini where the director sketches a short but powerful description of Antonioni and talks about his melancholic way of being, that I found really moving (and God knows if these two were very different kind of artists!).

Very moving was also seeing his cameras and the prizes he won for different movies (the Golden Bear for La Notte, the Palme D'Or for Blow Up, the Golden Lion for Deserto Rosso and a honorary Oscar for his entire career):

If you are an Antonioni's fan, this is an unmissable exhibition, and even if you don't like his movies, this is still a great exhibition about a film-maker who really changed cinema history with his modern vision of contemporary solitude.

If I were you, I would run to the Cinémathèque to be taken away by Antonioni's world... and watch all his movies that are going to be screened between now and the end of May.
The incomunicabilità has never been so communicative!