SOURCE: A review of The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, in Film Criticism, Vol. 32, No. 2, Winter, 1997, p. 66.

In the following review, Harrison argues that this collection of Antonioni's writing illuminates the filmmaker's objectives and emphasizes the limitations of theory.

It is difficult to overestimate the pleasures of having access, in one splendid volume, to Michelangelo Antonioni’s collected writings on film. So much remains unsaid in the work of Italy’s most intellectual director that the desire to be privy to his thoughts tends to be greater than with, say, Fellini, Pasolini, or Bertolucci. Antonioni has remained more silent in the print media than they. His films pose more problems of comprehension, often circling around unsolvable conundrums (e.g., what happened to Anna in L’avventura). His work, in his own words, records “abortions of observation” more frequently than full-fledged visions. The most abstract of...