Matt Sussman pays tribute to the director:
1.
Monica Vitti in L’Eclisse was a revelation to me as a college freshman. I had a serious crush on her, perhaps more than any other film actress up to that point (certainly, as a gay man, more than any other woman up to that point). Her leonine blond mane and Roman cheekbones framed eyes that could dish out giddy flirtation and unexpected hurt in equal measure. In all the “Antonioni’s greatest moments” recaps that have been posted in the past 24 hours I don’t think any commentator has mentioned the incredibly bizarre scene in L’Eclisse where Vitti puts on blackface and dances amidst African artifacts. Echoes of Italy’s then-recent colonial past are immediately summoned in Vitti’s character’s tipsy performance of bored bourgeois privilege, but Antonioni also seems momentarily to take in the visual pleasure provided by the spectacle of the dancing Vitti. For a director famed for his ambiguity, this is perhaps one of his most ambiguous and unsettling scenes.