Uncinematic Provocations and the Pursuit of Boredom

This chapter explores how Antonioni’s persistent engagement with still photography throughout his films, and his 1960s films in particular, produces a distinctive aesthetics. This is an aesthetics which is provocatively uncinematic. The chapter considers how photography and its characteristic stillness are implicated in an intermedial re-articulation of the cinematic image through which means – or, in fact, media – usually called upon to alleviate boredom are harnessed to make boredom manifest aesthetically, and even to encourage its production during consumption of the work as a form of resistance and critique.