SOURCE: “Antonioni: Before and After,” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 5, No. 12, December, 1995, pp. 18–20.

In the following essay, Nowell-Smith argues that Antonioni not only created a new cinema, but that his films, even as they age, stay fresh.

The early 1960s was a great time for cinephiles. There was the old cinema, and there was the new. The old was Hollywood: not the Hollywood of new releases (good new American films were few and far between) but the Hollywood of the recent past—the great backlog of film noir, Mann and Boetticher Westerns, Tashlin/Lewis comedies, all still circulating around inner-city fleapits and in gaunt suburban Odeons on Sunday afternoons, to be hunted down relentlessly by neophyte zealots of the auteur theory. And the new? The new was also occasionally America (Cassavetes) but mainly Europe (Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Fellini, Antonioni, Fassbinder), shortly to be joined by Latin America (Rocha...