Milan as a Site of Social Anxiety: Negotiating Notions of Modernity and Gender in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961)

Alberto Lo Pinto

This project investigates the effects of modernity on the social reality of Italy during the economic miracle, using the quintessential modern city, Milan, as the focus of the investigation. In particular, it treats modern architecture as a means to understand historical processes of social changes. It does so by employing the cinematic text as the means for the reconstruction and comprehension of the socioeconomic and cultural parameters of the built environment. For this project, I consider the case of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961) as a starting point for a wide-ranging inquiry. I elaborate on how the filmic space of La Notte enacts the shape of Milan as well as of the modern Italian city by depicting specific architectures and urban spaces. My aim is to combine an architectural and urban perspective with an analysis of the spatial dynamics of Antonioni’s mise-en-scène and Gianni Di Venanzo’s cinematography. I argue that feelings of anxiety and fear experienced in modern society are directly connected to the aesthetics of space, being themselves the results of modern architectural and urban developments. I trace the role of architecture and urban space in the production of anxiety and focus in particular on how cinema represented the experience of this phobia in the screen. Furthermore, I deal with notions of gender by looking at buildings and other filmic architecture as representations of women’s problematic place and role in modern social reality.