Susanne Schwarz 
Cold buildings – cold hearts 
The use of Milan to represent alienation through modernity in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘La notte’

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Art – Photography and Film, grade: 1, 5, University College London, course: Italian Cinema and the city, language: English, abstract: Michelangelo Antonioni is one of Italy’s most famous filmmakers of the post-war era. His films are pieces of artwork, the plot develops slowly and there is not much going on. And that makes Antonioni’s films difficult to understand for the mass audience. In his seventh feature film La notte (1961) Antonioni shot in and around Milan in a way to create a disturbing and anonymous atmosphere. This essay will analyse how Antonioni uses the city’s architecture and landscape to illustrate the alienation of people in the modern world. This essay will have a look at the setting, how Antonioni frames the architecture and the characters in one shot. Two specific sequences of the whole movie will be analyzed properly: The opening sequence and the sequence in which Lidia wanders around the city and the periphery.