The Tender Lives of Vitti/Vittoria

In this final chapter, the Italian actress Monica Vitti is read as the generous form of life par excellance in three of Antonioni’s most important films: L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse. The generosity she evinces is registered in the way that Antonioni shows her repeatedly grasping and releasing objects such that a distinction between possession as grasping and non-possession as release emerges. That same distinction appears later as a strategy that Vitti adopts in playfully evading her capture by Antonioni’s apparatus.