Huawei Mate 50 Pro review

 

Introduction

The Huawei Mate 50 series debuted in September with four Mates hitting the shelves in China - Mate 50, Mate 50 Pro, Mate 50E and Mate 50 RS Porsche Design. Only one of these high-end smartphones eventually left its homeland - the Huawei Mate 50 Pro - and we now have its vegan leather version for review.

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro is already on sale in Europe, and it's only natural we give it the attention it deserves. Yes, it still comes without Google Mobile Services and 5G access, but it's an outstanding cameraphone and a great all-around multimedia device, so write off the Mate 50 Pro at your own risk.

There's a lot to like on the Mate 50 Pro's specs sheet. It's a thin and curved phone with IP68 ingress protection and durable glass atop the screen. The 6.74-inch OLED looks gorgeous - it uses a high-res 1212p panel with 1B colors, 120Hz refresh rate, and HDR10+ support.

The screen notch is not as an eyesore as on the iPhones as it is noticeably thinner. It does contain similar hardware, like a selfie camera, a ToF 3D scanner for proper face identification, and a speaker/earpiece. The ultrawide 13MP selfie camera offers three options for the field of view.

The back camera is the real showstopper on the Huawei Mate 50 Pro, and it's as cool as you can imagine. The primary 50MP RYYB sensor comes with a unique stabilized lens with a true variable aperture (f/1.4-f/4.0). Then there is the 13MP ultrawide camera with autofocus and macro capabilities.

The 64MP telephoto camera has a periscopic lens for 3.5x optical zoom, though Huawei promises good photo quality of up to 10x zoom thanks to the high-res sensor. The whole camera system is aided by a 10-channel multispectral sensor and laser autofocus.

Being a flagship requires a high-end chipset, and that's why the Mate 50 Pro is based on the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC, even if it's limited to 4G connectivity. You can choose between 256GB and 512GB storage.

The Mate 50 Pro's 4,700mAh battery charges at impressive rates, too - you can use 66W fast wired charging right out of the box or opt for Huawei's 50W wireless charger.

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro runs on EMUI 13, which incorporates Android 12 core inside. There is no GMS, and you can't sideload the Google Play Store or other Google apps on this phone.

Huawei Mate 50 Pro specs at a glance:

• Body: 162.1x75.5x8.5mm, 205g; glass front, aluminum frame, glass or leather back; IP68 dust/water resistant (up to 6m for 30 mins).
• Display: 6.74" OLED, 1B colors, 120Hz, 1212x2616px resolution, 19.43:9 aspect ratio, 428ppi.
• Chipset: Qualcomm SM8475 Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 4G (4 nm): Octa-core (1x3.19 GHz Cortex-X2 & 3x2.75 GHz Cortex-A710 & 4x2.0 GHz Cortex-A510); Adreno 730.
• Memory: 256GB 8GB RAM, 512GB 8GB RAM; UFS 3.1; NM (Nano Memory), up to 256GB (uses shared SIM slot).
• OS/Software: EMUI 13 (International); HarmonyOS 3.0 (China).
• Rear camera: Wide (main): 50 MP, f/1.4-f/4.0, 27mm, PDAF, Laser AF, OIS; Telephoto: 64 MP, f/3.5, 95mm, PDAF, OIS, 3.5x optical zoom; Ultra wide angle: 13 MP, f/2.2, 13mm, 120˚, PDAF.
• Front camera: Wide (main): 13 MP, f/2.4, 18mm; Depth: TOF 3D.
• Video capture: Rear camera: 4K@30/60fps, 1080p@30/60/120/240/480fps, 720p@960fps, 720p@3840fps, HDR, gyro-EIS; Front camera: 4K@30/60fps, 1080p@30/60/240fps.
• Battery: 4700mAh; Fast charging 66W, Fast wireless charging 50W, Reverse wireless charging 5W.
• Misc: fingerprint reader (under display, optical); NFC; Infrared port; stereo speakers.

Aside from the unavoidable omissions, one more thing is worth mentioning. The Orange version of the Mate 50 Pro, the one with the faux leather back, is the only one featuring the durable Kunlun Glass protection. The Black and Silver models have tempered glass on both sides, but the sheets are of unknown origin and less durable (Kunlun Glass is 10 times more drop resistant than the ones used on the Black and Silver versions).

Mind you, the European Mate 50 Pro version also doesn't offer the support for BDS Satellite Messages of its Chinese counterpart.

Huawei has already built a strong ecosystem of products, so you may find the phone being sold in a bundle with a Huawei GT3 watch, Freebuds, or other Huawei tech. If you already own some Huawei gadgets, including laptops, the Mate 50 Pro would integrate nicely with those - making a strong point of why you should consider it as your daily driver.

Unboxing the Huawei Mate 50 Pro

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro retail bundle is as rich as you'd expect. The box contains a 66W charger, a 6A-rated USB-A to USB-C cable, and a transparent soft case.

The phone also arrives with a thin curved film on its screen for extra protection, but it is quite the fingerprint magnet, so we chose to get rid of it quickly.

A TEAM IN PASSIONATE ACTION: RUTH GORDON AND GARSON KANIN, by Rosanne Welch

On Saturday, January 12, the Egyptian Theatre will host a screening of the Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy classic Adam's Rib. After the film, various contributors to the book When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry will appear in person for a signing. Below is an excerpted essay from the book by Rosanne Welch that explores the screenwriting team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.

AMANDA
Listen Adam. I know that deep down you agree with me with all I believe and want and hope for. We couldn’t be so close if you didn’t. If I didn’t feel you did.

—Adam’s Rib by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin

From the start Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin had a writing career like few other writers in the Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. Their career earned them praise as “probably the greatest pure screenwriting collaboration in all Hollywood history." They wrote all four of their films as original screenplays on speculation, not under the auspices of a particular studio producer, and the same personal friend, George Cukor, directed all four films. This resulted in the fact that none of their films underwent major studio rewrites by other writers. Gordon and Kanin were involved in the production of each film beginning in pre-production and all the way through filming and post- production periods; a privilege not granted to many screenwriters then or now.


In the introduction to his interview with Kanin in 1991, Patrick McGilligan claims, "The films the Kanins wrote together signaled, to a large extent, the high tide of American sophisticated comedy. No films were (are) more admired by other Hollywood comedy writers—few films play as well today, without embarrassing concessions to yesteryear’s artificialities.” His words are backed up by the fact that three of the four films—A Double Life (1947), Adam’s Rib (1949), and Pat and Mike (1952)—earned Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. Only one can be considered in the genre of traditional boy- =meets-girl romantic comedy (Pat and Mike) while one (A Double Life), fills the genre of Broadway- based film in that it concerns the life of an actor overwhelmed by his role as Othello. Two of the four films delve deeply into the study of marriage, Adam’s Rib and The Marrying Kind (1952). One a comedy, one a drama, yet both deal with the gender politics of the day. The diversity of the films in tone and genre shows that the Gordon/Kanins were given rare privileges by the studio system in a period when most Hollywood artists—writers, directors, and actors—were typecast in one genre or another for the duration of their careers.

The Gordon/Kanin scripts also helped invent Katharine Hepburn’s popular culture reputation for female empowerment. Upon Gordon’s death in 1985, New York Times writer Mel Gussow wrote in his appreciation of her work: “Every time you enjoy Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn sparring in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, remember who created their characters and wrote their witty dialogue. Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s contribution to the symbiosis of the Tracy-Hepburn team is inestimable." Biographers and critics of Hepburn often claimed that she based her independent women persona and characters on a combination of her mother and of Eleanor Roosevelt. I contend that the Hepburn was also, even if subconsciously, basing the women in her Tracy/Hepburn films on Ruth Gordon. As actress and writer Elaine May once observed to Kanin about his wife, “She really is about the only person who gives you the feeling that maybe it could be a woman’s world." 

Gordon and Kanin clearly had a feminist agenda at work in their films, one that focuses on the need for both members of a marriage to understand the inherent equality of the sexes and to respect the equal intellectual capacity of wives. When summarizing Kanin’s screenwriting career, author Richard Corliss says “Because of Kanin’s close collaboration with his wife on scripts written for another, very close couple - [Spencer] Tracy and Katharine Hepburn - the ‘marriages’ portrayed in Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike have a sense of natural familiarity and mutual respect rare in Hollywood domestic comedies.” In fact, the Gordon/Kanin marriage proved so intrinsic to the work and the work to the marriage that once the work infringed on the marriage, the couple chose to end the working partnership in order to save the marital partnership. Decisiveness and determination seemed to be in their individual DNA from the beginning of their separate careers.

Gordon and Kanin wrote what became Adam’s Rib with their friends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in mind to play the married lawyers. The male lawyer, Adam, is assigned by his firm to prosecute a woman for shooting at her philandering husband as the female lawyer, Amanda, takes up the defense of the accused shooter. Their original title Man and Wife highlighted the battle of the sexes theme of the story and it was purchased by MGM, not the usual way business was done in the late forties/early fifties. Studio executives thought the title too risqué, hence the change, but they loved the script. Studio producer Lawrence Weingarten said in an interview later in life, “It was the first time in thirty years that the studio had seen a screenplay that was ready to shoot immediately, without changes." Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage believes the equality represented in the fictional marriage was essential to why the film worked.

The sense of participation or partnership in their intimacy is essential to the way the film works, because it is exactly this intimacy that the woman puts on trial in taking her marriage to court. We will not understand her bravery (nor, hence, the man’s) unless we know that for her their intimacy, their privacy, their home at home, is almost everything.

Orit Kamir notes the gender transcendence in the piece when he writes, "The ancient notion of 'couple' takes on a new dimension when, in the context of Hollywood’s conventions, the viewer is invited to identify with a symbiotic pair of male-female heroes. Gender roles - both on and off screen - are transcended when the man-woman couple is posed as the fundamental unity reconciling contradictory myths."

Discussing which films he chose to analyze for his book on great romantic comedies, Kimmel calls Adam’s Rib “arguably the best of the Spencer Tracy / Katharine Hepburn matchups,” where, as married lawyers on opposing sides of a case, the question of sexism (a word not yet coined) could be addressed within in the conventions of a traditional “battle of the sexes." Later, in a chapter dedicated to the film, Kimmel reiterates that the film "never became dated because the argument put forth by Hepburn’s character still exists. Amanda’s idea that there ought not to be a double standard for men and women is born of not only Hepburn’s (and Ruth Gordon’s) independence and feistiness, but the dawning of a new attitude about women’s roles after they had contributed so greatly to the recent war effort…. Amanda’s case that women should be subjected to the same expectations as men anticipates the debates that would take place in the 1960s and 1970s."

Finally, Kimmel insists the major reason this particular battle of the sexes stays contemporary is because “this is a couple deeply in love, and part of their fun comes from their playful contention.” Several critics and film historians claim that the natural charisma between Hepburn and Tracy helped make the films they made together, including Gordon and Kanin films, so successful, and this certainly contributed. Kanin himself contributed to that idea in his own biography of the couple, Tracy and Hepburn: an Intimate Memoir (1970). The next collaborator considered in discussions of Adam’s Rib has generally been George Cukor, who directed all four of the original Gordon/Kanin screenplays and ensured the couple’s continued control over content. The trio shared an equal creative relationship. According to Cukor:

"It was a very happy and very equal collaboration. Ruth and Garson worked very closely together—no question of a writer trying to get his wife a job. Garson was a brilliant playwright and screenwriter and had the enormous advantage of knowing his métier very well—he’d already directed some successful comedies. Many of the lovely directorial touches in our films together were in the script."

ALEXANDRA BYRNE'S COSTUMING SECRETS, by Judith Resell

“I designed 2,000 costumes!” exclaimed Alexandra Byrne as she discussed her work for Mary Queen of Scots after a screening of the film at the Aero Theatre on December 5, 2018. Byrne won an Oscar for her work on Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and designed the costumes for Elizabeth (1998) as well. Byrne explained that she uses costumes to tell the contrasting stories of the queen so close to her heart - Elizabeth - and Queen Mary of Scotland.

“The nugget of the film is when the two queens meet,” Byrne said. Although the queens have been bitter rivals, in this scene Byrne uses color to forge a link between the two, with Elizabeth dressed in burnt orange to match the rust of Mary’s armor.


Married to the French sovereign, Saoirse Ronan’s Mary spent much of her life in a decadent, sophisticated French court before arriving on the rugged shores of Scotland to claim the Scottish crown. Beautiful and charismatic, Mary wears bright fabrics when she is doing well, especially the blue of the Madonna beloved in Mary’s Catholic faith. Her fortunes change, however, when her husband is assassinated and she is forced to marry and be intimate with an advisor who betrayed her; a grotesque costume combines the black of mourning from the former with the bridal white of the latter, unified by her sense of defeat. Then, in her dramatic death scene, Mary tears off a dark dress to reveal a scarlet garment beneath it, in order to be beheaded in the red of the Catholic martyrs. Byrne commented that she had to be careful in her use of red throughout the movie to preserve the strong visual impact of that scene.

More measured in her use of power and better supported by the men around her, Margot Robbie’s Elizabeth begins the film in dresses that reflect her regal status, but shifts to wearing dark fabrics when smallpox so disfigures her face she can’t bear to be seen in public (the white make-up she wears for most of the 45 years of her reign is her effort to cover up her smallpox scars). She suffers a crisis of confidence over Mary, the famed beauty. Elizabeth chooses not to marry, fearing any potential suitors would be interested only in her title, and further empowers herself by using potential betrothal as a ploy. In the end, the victorious Elizabeth, a long-reigning monarch and still one of the most widely known queens in English history, dresses the part in jewel-encrusted, gold brocade and other elaborate gowns. She becomes the fully confident ruler.

“We speak the same language,” Byrne said of her collaboration with the film’s director, Josie Rourke. Both women have extensive theater backgrounds, with Rourke currently serving as the Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse Theater in London. “The storyboards are important,” Byrne continued, noting their usefulness for discussing story points that would impact costume choices, as well as a tool for the development of a single thematic idea for interpreting historical fashion.

Mary Queen of Scots comes down to the question of how a woman can maintain power in a world of men. Given a theme with such contemporary resonance, Byrne sought to make the costumes relatable to current audiences. She commented that historical costumes can create distance between the characters and the audience and she wanted to avoid that. She chose to use a very contemporary fabric - denim - to dress her queens.

Byrne concluded with kudos to her hard-working team. “Without my team, it would all just be in my head,” she said. They worked so hard, they wore off their thumbprints!" said Byrne. The results of that hard work are a crucial part of the storytelling in Mary Queen of Scots and a useful lens through which to view the movie.

Judith Resell is a volunteer for the American Cinematheque.

'TIS THE SEASON FOR CHRISTMAS MOVIES, by Susan King

The holiday season is in full swing at the American Cinematheque with screenings at the Egyptian and Aero of such yuletide favorites as 1958’s Auntie Mame (co-presented with Outfest); 2003’s Elf; the beloved 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life; and such offbeat fare as 1992’s Batman Returns and 1984’s Gremlins.

This season, film writer/historian Jeremy Arnold will be on hand at the Aero Theatre to present a series of holiday films. Besides introducing the programs, he will also sign copies of his new book, Turner Classic Movies: Christmas in the Movies.

On December 20, Arnold will present the acclaimed drama The Lion in Winter, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Set in 1183, it stars Peter O’Toole as Henry II and Katharine Hepburn as his estranged wife Eleanor of Aquitaine reuniting for the holidays.

Arnold returns on December 21 for a double bill of the 30th anniversary of the blockbuster action-flick Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis, and the 1950 rarity The Trail of Robin Hood starring Roy Rogers. The latter has been restored in 4K by Paramount Archives from the original 35mm Trucolor negatives and positive separations.

And on December 22, he’ll be presenting the most traditional of the quartet: Vincente Minnelli’s magical 1944 Technicolor musical Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland, Tom Drake, and Margaret O’Brien, who won a juvenile Oscar for her endearing performance.


A Cinematheque correspondent recently chatted with Arnold about Christmas movies and what makes these four films important entries in the genre.

What makes a film a Christmas movie?

Jeremy Arnold: It’s a movie in which Christmas or the holiday season plays a meaningful role in the story. It gives our experience of the story meaning. It’s just not the backdrop or a setting, but there’s some aspect of the season and that can encompass positives and negatives, highs and lows. It can enhance or heighten what the movies are about in the same way that we notice throughout the film. I shouldn’t say throughout the film because there are some movies like Meet Me in St. Louis where they get Christmas at the end.

Speaking of Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland’s rendition of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is such a dramatic high point in the film you forget the entire film isn’t about the holidays.

Jeremy Arnold: I think it’s actually very appropriate that Christmas in that film does happen at the end, because it’s a movie about family and Christmas is the ultimate family time. It makes sense that as a story comes to the climax, that’s when Christmas comes in. I would also say having Judy Garland sing that song would be enough to make it a Christmas movie because it’s so iconic.

Meet Me in St. Louis is the most traditional of the movies you are introducing at the Aero. It’s also the oldest -- it’s 74 years old now. Why is it still relevant to audiences today?

Jeremy Arnold: I think the themes of the film -- the idea of family togetherness, the wistfulness of the past and for an idealized type of family, the anxiety about the family moving and therefore breaking up and losing what it has - those things are relevant to families today. The intensity of the nostalgic view of the family in that film is something that I think we all crave at Christmastime especially.

Also, it’s just a beautifully crafted musical and one of the best musicals ever made. Vincente Minnelli was a genius. It was innovative in using the musical numbers to move the story along and not just stopping for a musical number. Minnelli put a lot of thought into that.

Meet Me in St. Louis shows an idealized family, but the family in The Lion in Winter is completely maladjusted.

Jeremy Arnold: The Lion in Winter I would say is relevant primarily because the cast is so renowned. Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn were great. Katharine Hepburn, of course, is an American icon, a treasure. But also, the supporting cast. It’s Timothy Dalton and Anthony Hopkins' first feature. Anthony Hopkins said he had never been in front of a camera before.

Though it’s a period setting and a costume drama set in a castle in the 12th century, it’s still about a dysfunctional family gathering over Christmas. That is relatable to just about everybody. Everyone has a dysfunctional family to some degree. It’s just that when they say they want to kill each other, they don’t really mean it.

You have more dysfunctional family dynamics with Die Hard.

Jeremy Arnold: It’s a Christmas movie because it begins as one of the most common types of Christmas films, which is some sort of dysfunctional family reuniting over the holidays and trying to work things out. That is what the movie is about until those terrorists enter the film and take over the building. The movie never lets go of those Christmas concerns and it reminds us throughout the dialogue and music and sound effects and various visual tropes that it’s still Christmas Eve and that the movie is still taking place in the world of Christmastime.

That also helps give the film a lightness and a cheeriness. [Director] John McTiernan said that when he first saw the script for Die Hard, it was a very serious, violent, dark political action film. He wanted to lighten it up. He said he wanted to inject a joy into it.

So, they changed the political terrorists into thieves. And who doesn’t like a good heist film? Now Die Hard 2, which is also set at Christmas, I don’t consider a Christmas film because there’s a brutality and unpleasantness to the violence in that film that is quite different from the first Die Hard.

After Die Hard, you are screening the Roy Rogers movie The Trail of Robin Hood. I’m sure that has something to do with the fact that Willis’ John McClane compares himself to Roy Rogers.

Jeremy Arnold: He tells Alan Rickman that he always loved Roy Rogers because of those sequined shirts and he tells Al, the cop, to call him Roy. So, Roy Rogers is very present throughout “Die Hard” in that sense. So, what would be more perfect that seeing a real Roy Rogers Christmas movie?

Trail of Robin Hood may be new to audiences.

Jeremy Arnold: It’s a crazy, wacky story. It exists in its own universe like all Roy Rogers movies do. They look like period Westerns but they’re not because you see modern cars, kitchens and houses. Something about that makes it modern and timeless. It’s not a period film. It’s neither set in the period West nor really in 1950 America. It’s on some other plane altogether and somehow that keeps it constantly relevant. It’s floating around out there in some nondescript time and space and makes it easier to approach, I think.

Does Rogers have a family in the film?

Jeremy Arnold: He doesn’t really have a family in the movie - not a blood family. But when all the other Republic movie stars ride to the rescue toward the end of the film, they do feel like one big family. So, it’s a bunch of real-life Republic Western movie stars all being a family in a Republic Western.

Bring your family or film posse out to see some classic and not-so-classic films at the Aero and Egyptian Theatres this month – click for details!

Veteran journalist Susan King wrote about entertainment at the Los Angeles Times for 26 years (January 1990 - March 2016), specializing in classic Hollywood stories. She also wrote about independent, foreign and studio movies and occasionally TV and theater stories. She received her master's degree in film history and criticism at USC. After working 10 years at the L.A. Herald Examiner, she moved to the Los Angeles Times.

PRESENTERS ANNOUNCED FOR THE AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE AWARD EVENT

It won’t be long now until the American Cinematheque bestows its 32nd annual Award on four-time Academy Award-nominee Bradley Cooper. A glittering cast of famous friends are lined up to toast and roast the A Star Is Born filmmaker. Patricia Clarkson, Sam Elliott, Zach Galifianakis , Jennifer Garner, Ed Helms, Lady Gaga, Brian Klugman, Sienna Miller, Sean Penn, David O. Russell, and Vince Vaughn will appear in person to fete Cooper at the Cinematheque’s annual benefit gala. Culminating the evening, Sean Penn will present the 32nd American Cinematheque Award Sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg to Cooper, on stage at The Beverly Hilton (9876 Wilshire Blvd.) on Thursday, November 29, 2018. The award presentation will be held in The Beverly Hilton’s International Ballroom in Beverly Hills, CA. The Title Sponsor is GRoW @ Annenberg.

At the top of the award show, the American Cinematheque will honor Dolby Laboratories as the recipient of the 4th Annual Sid Grauman Award, presented to Doug Darrow. This award is presented by Hill Valley.


Funds raised at the event will benefit the year-round film programs at the American Cinematheque’s Aero and Egyptian Theatres in Santa Monica and Hollywood.

Tickets to the Cinematheque Tribute, an elegant black-tie dinner followed by a multi-media award presentation, start at $600. Call Mann Productions for tickets and further information: 323.314.7000 or click here.

Benefit Co-Chairs include: Ben Affleck, Dave Bugliari, Dave Chappelle, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Clint Eastwood, Megan Ellison, Toby Emmerich, Lady Gaga, Zach Galifianakis, Jennifer Garner, Jim Gianopulos, Wyck Godfrey, Alan Horn, Kevin Huvane, Sue Kroll, Donna Langley, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeffrey Lurie, Ron Meyer, Sienna Miller, Éric Nebot, Rick Nicita, Sean Penn, Todd Phillips, Brad Pitt, Blair Rich, Julia Roberts, Tom Rothman, Charles Roven, David O. Russell, Ted Sarandos, Steven Spielberg, Emma Stone, Kevin Tsujihara, Paula Wagner, Emma Watts and Regina & Gregory Annenberg Weingarten.

“The American Cinematheque is grateful to Gregory Annenberg Weingarten whose generous support through his philanthropic initiative GRoW @ Annenberg will help fund educational programs at the Cinematheque throughout the year,” said Rick Nicita.

GRoW @ Annenberg is the philanthropic initiative led by Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, a Vice President and Director of the Annenberg Foundation. GRoW @ Annenberg is dedicated to supporting humanitarian efforts across the globe as well as innovative projects in health, education, the arts and civic & cultural life.

“The American Cinematheque helps foster an appreciation of filmmaking through their dynamic programming and historic theatre preservation,” said Weingarten. “I am pleased to support their educational programming, as well as their efforts to utilize the power of cinema to entertain and inspire Angelenos through this treasured art form.”

ABOUT BRADLEY COOPER

Four-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper recently made his directorial debut with the critically acclaimed Warner Bros. film A Star Is Born, which he also co-wrote and produced. Additional film credits include the Oscar-nominated films American Sniper, American Hustle, and Silver Linings Playbook; Derek Cianfrance’s acclaimed The Place Beyond the Pines; The Hangover trilogy; Limitless; Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2; War Dogs; David O. Russell's Joy; Burnt; Wedding Crashers and Wet Hot American Summer. Television credits include Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, Alias, Nip/Tuck, Kitchen Confidential, Jack & Bobby, and Sex and the City.

Photo by Albert Ortega

In 2015, Cooper garnered critical acclaim and a Tony nomination for his portrayal of John Merrick in the five-time Tony nominated revival of The Elephant Man at the Booth Theater on Broadway, directed by Scott Ellis. He also performed this role during a limited run of the play in London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2015 and originally, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2012 (also directed by Ellis). Other theater credits include: Joe Mantello’s production of Three Days of Rain (2006, Broadway Debut) and the critically-acclaimed Theresa Rebeck play The Understudy (2008, Williamstown Theatre Festival).

Born in Philadelphia, Cooper graduated with honors in the English program at Georgetown University. After moving to New York City, he obtained his Masters in the Fine Arts program at the Actors Studio Drama School.

Cooper has also been working to make a difference in the lives of patients with cancer through his foundation. When Cooper’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer, he was in the fortunate position to be able to put everything on hold and completely focus on caring for his father. While doing so, he saw so many other patients who did not have access to the same supports that he had. Through launching patient navigator programs, working to shift perceptions, and exploring innovations in the field, the Foundation is aiming to improve patients’ experience with cancer throughout their treatment. Cooper has been a long time partner to Stand Up to Cancer and numerous veterans organizations throughout his career.

GRoW @ Annenberg is the Title Sponsor.

Dolby Laboratories is the Diamond Sponsor.

Platinum Sponsors include Encore Event Technologies, Hill Valley,
Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Gold Sponsors include Comcast NBCUniversal, Creative Artists Agency, Hennessy X.O, The Hollywood Reporter, Live Nation Productions, Morgan Creek Productions, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Variety, The Walt Disney Studios.

Silver Sponsors include Atlas Entertainment/Thomas Spiegel Family Foundation,
Fandango, Netflix.

Silver Patrons include Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg, GooglePlay/YouTube, Piper-Heidsieck, Todd Phillips, Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Patrons include Brenden Mann Foundation, CinemaCon, Grace Ford Salvatori Foundation, Kempinsky Law Ltd., Rick Nicita, PwC, Heather & James Rosenfield/Jackie & John Bucksbaum and Paula Wagner.

Since 1986, the organization has annually honored an extraordinary filmmaker in the entertainment industry, who is fully engaged in his or her work and is committed to making a significant contribution to the art of the motion picture. Funds raised benefit the year-round programming of the non-profit cultural organization, the American Cinematheque.

The executive producer of the show is Paul Flattery. Irene Crinita is the producer. Corrinne Mann is the event producer. Presenters of the event will be announced as they are confirmed.

Previous American Cinematheque Award honorees include: Eddie Murphy (1986); Bette Midler (1987); Robin Williams (1988); Steven Spielberg (1989); Ron Howard (1990); Martin Scorsese (1991); Sean Connery (1992); Michael Douglas (1993); Rob Reiner (1994); Mel Gibson (1995); Tom Cruise (1996); John Travolta (1997); Arnold Schwarzenegger (1998); Jodie Foster (1999); Bruce Willis (2000); Nicolas Cage (2001); Denzel Washington (2002); Nicole Kidman (2003); Steve Martin (2004); Al Pacino (2005) George Clooney (2006), Julia Roberts (2007);Samuel L. Jackson (2008); Matt Damon (2010); Robert Downey Jr. (2011), Ben Stiller (2012), Jerry Bruckheimer (2013), Matthew McConaughey (2014), Reese Witherspoon (2015), Ridley Scott (2016), and Amy Adams (2017). Please note that this event was formerly known as the Moving Picture Ball.

Hundreds of entertainment industry notables are expected to attend the Tribute. This annual event is the American Cinematheque’s most important benefit, providing funds for the non-profit film exhibition organization’s programs throughout the year and operation of the historic landmark Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard as well as the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on Montana Avenue.


Established in 1981 as a year-round haven for film lovers, the American Cinematheque is a non-profit viewer-supported film exhibition and cultural organization dedicated to the celebration of the Moving Picture in all of its forms. In its quest to provide once-in-a-lifetime cinema experiences, the organization screens rare titles, archival prints, restorations and special formats - often combined with fascinating post-screening discussions with the filmmakers who created the work. At the historic Egyptian and Aero Theatres, the American Cinematheque preserves the big screen movie-going experience. Programming ranges from the classics of American and international cinema to new independent films, the best of new world cinema, pop culture gems and more, in all genres. The American Cinematheque renovated and reopened (on December 4, 1998) the landmark 1922 Hollywood Egyptian Theatre, the home of the very first Hollywood movie premiere in 1922. In 2005 the American Cinematheque expanded its programming to the Westside with the January 5th opening of the 1940 Aero Theatre on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica.

LUBITSCH, PICKFORD, AND THE MAKING OF ROSITA, by Cari Beauchamp

The American Cinematheque  re-opened the landmark 1922 Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood on December 4, 1998, following an extensive restoration and renovation of the historic movie palace. This December, the organization celebrates its 20th anniversary at the Egyptian Theatre, by screening a new digital restoration of the 1923 Mary Pickford  film ROSITA, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. ROSITA will be accompanied by a live orchestra, directed by the renowned musicologist Gillian Anderson. Anderson  reconstructed the film’s original score by working from a cue sheet preserved by the George Eastman Museum.  This event marks her return to the Egyptian 20 years after she conducted on the night of the grand re-opening of the theatre. In honor of the occasion, we are republishing a 2017 article by Cari Beauchamp that explores the making of Rosita. To learn more about Mary Pickford click here.

The Museum of Modern Art, with cooperation from the Mary Pickford Foundation, has restored Ernst Lubitsch’s Rosita (1923), starring Mary Pickford, from the last known surviving nitrate print found at Gosfilmofond in Russia. The Pickford Foundation provided access to our 35mm elements and The Film Foundation and The Mayer Foundation also cooperated with MoMA on the restoration.

Rosita had its restoration premiere during a “pre-inaugural evening” before the Venice Film Festival on August 29, and it will be wonderful to have the film (and the original orchestral score they are recording for it) available to audiences again.

A variety of stories have grown up around Rosita over the years; in fact, the Venice press release says, “The film was, by all accounts, a major critical and commercial success on its first release, but in later years Pickford turned against it, for reasons that still remain mysterious.” Actually, the story isn’t really “mysterious” at all, but is nuanced and a bit complicated, so this seems as good a time as any to revisit Rosita and Mary’s thinking about it.


Before even getting to that, however, it is important to note that it was Mary Pickford who brought Ernst Lubitsch to America in the first place, and, in 1922, that was no small feat. World War I had just ended and Americans who had been inundated with anti-German films and urged to “Come and Hiss the Kaiser” were not in a forgiving mood. Mary herself had ended her 1918 film Johanna Enlists with the proviso, “Don’t come back til you’ve taken the Germ out of Germany.”

Pickford had seen Lubitsch’s German films and was impressed. As she recalled in a 1958 interview with George Pratt, “I had already done the second Tess of the Storm Country and I wanted to do a grown-up role. I wanted to do an adult woman.” And she thought a director such as Lubitsch would have the “touch” to do that successfully.

But first she had to get the director to Hollywood, and the American Legion (among others) objected vociferously. Pickford recalled to Kevin Brownlow in 1974 that she was on stage when the head of the American Legion took to the podium to say: “I hear that the Son of the Kaiser is coming here. He doesn’t belong here, he is still our enemy. Why are they bringing German singers over here? Do we not have good enough singers here in the United States, without going to Germany?”

Pickford’s response: “General. Since when has art had borderlines? Art is universal. And for my pictures, I will get the finest, no matter what country they come from. The war is over. And it’s very ill-bred and stupid for the general to stand up and talk like that. A German voice is God-given if it’s beautiful. Yes, I am bringing Mr. Lubitsch over here and I’m glad I can.”

Pickford, who appreciated her power yet was careful about how she used it, had stood up for what she thought was right. Still, the woman who had put her career on hold to tour the country and sell millions of dollars in war bonds said she found herself being denounced as a traitor for ignoring our own directors in favor of the erstwhile enemy.

Pickford also told amusing (in retrospect) tales of getting Lubitsch off the ocean liner and eventually to Hollywood safely and with a minimum of publicity. The plan had been for him to direct the film Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall. He had read the script in German and had agreed, but once in Hollywood, he decided he didn’t like the story and insisted on doing something else.

Lubitsch next suggested Faust, and in retrospect Mary said she wished she had done it, but before that got off the ground, Mary’s mother Charlotte asked the director about the story. According to Mary, the conversation when something like this:

Lubitsch: “Yeah, she has a baby, she’s not married, so she strangles the baby”
Charlotte: “What? What was that?”
Lubitsch: “She has a baby, she’s not married, she strangles the baby”
Charlotte: “Not my daughter, no sir!”
As Mary summed it up, “And so I didn’t make Faust.” (Brownlow)

Mary was always happiest when she was in preproduction, production or even post production. But since Lubitsch had arrived, she had been in none of these and was starting to get anxious. She had gone out on a limb to bring him to America and she wanted to get to work. Finally, they compromised on a story about a young Spanish maiden caught in court intrigue in the late 1880s, loosely based on a French opera. Eddie Knoblock wrote the script for the romantic drama and the art director, William Cameron Menzies, went to work recreating Seville, complete with a castle and cobbled streets, all on the Pickford Fairbanks lot on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Initially, Mary was comfortable with the essence of her character, a strong-willed young woman with principles and a backbone, who supports herself and her family as a street singer. In fact, at first, that was the film’s working title: The Street Singer.

Part of what Mary wasn’t comfortable with was the flirty nature that Lubitsch wanted her to exhibit. They were both very strong-willed people, set in their ways, and had more than their share of conflicts about the story and Mary’s performance, but Pickford said she was always careful to have those discussions in private.

Mary told the story of how, early on, she and Lubitsch had a disagreement about the way the love story was developing and she visited him in his office:

“Mr. Lubitsch, this is the first time you’ve met me, as the financial backer and the producer.”
He said “Vot is this?”
I said “I am telling you that I am the court of the last appeal.”
“Vot is this?”
I said “I’m putting up the money, I’m the star, I’m the one that’s known, and you are not going to have the last word.”

Lubitsch was used to being in charge and having a star who was also the producer was a new and disconcerting experience for him. While Lubitsch’s command of English was still in its formative stages, Eddie Knoblock spoke excellent German and could be called on to clarify any misunderstandings.

In later years, Pickford reflected on her experience being directed by Lubitsch in Rosita. “Of course, the director can be as much miscast as an actor,” Mary mused during her oral history for the Butler Library at Columbia. “For instance, take Lubitsch directing me. Now of course he understood Pola Negri or Gloria Swanson, that type of actress, but he didn’t understand me because I am purely Americana. I’m not European. Just as John Ford I don’t think could direct Negri.”

The bottom line was while Lubitsch saw himself trying to get Pickford out of her comfort zone as an actress, she felt he was asking her to play a character she eventually found to be one-dimensional. Pickford tried to explain the give-and-take she experienced with Lubitsch to George Pratt. “Being a European, he liked to do naughty and suggestive things. He tried to be as moral as he knew how and I tried to be slightly naughty. And I have always thought,” she said with a laugh, “that the result was pretty terrible.”

She was speaking as an actress about her own performance, however, and when she put on her producer hat, she admired the film. She found “that the costuming, the décor and the sets are magnificent and so was the photography [by Charles Rosher].“ And then she added, “I just didn’t like myself as Rosita and I think it was my fault and not Lubitsch’s.”

So Mary’s feelings aren’t so mysterious after all. And the current restoration of Rosita allows us to see the film ourselves – Pickford’s performance, Lubitsch’s direction, Rosher’s cinematography, Menzies’s sets and all the other aspects of this 95-year-old film, thanks to MoMA and all the artists, archivists and funders who made this possible.

Republished with permission of the Mary Pickford Foundation
Photographs courtesy of:
Joseph M. Yranski
Bison Archives
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (Mary Pickford with Ernst Lubitsch photo)

You can contribute here to help fund this event. Tickets will be for sale on Fandango.

GEORGE SEGAL AT THE AERO, by Judith Resell

“He is the greatest actor I have ever seen,” commented a tearful George Segal, regarding Richard Burton’s performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). “People mention Brando, but there’s never a false moment in Richard’s performance.” Foster Hirsch interviewed Segal after a screening of the film at the Aero Theatre on August 5, 2018. Segal added that he had seen Burton’s Hamlet on stage and, for the first time, understood the character.

Photo by Sasha Lebedeva

“I can’t believe I’m still here,” smiled Segal, the only surviving actor from the film, after the applause from his standing ovation quieted down. All four actors - Segal, Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sandy Dennis - received Oscar nominations for their performances, with Taylor and Dennis winning. The film is one of only two in history that was nominated for every Academy Award for which it was eligible (the other being Cimarron). Hirsch described Virginia Woolf as an American masterpiece.

The film was Mike Nichols' first. Prior to Virginia Woolf, he had directed stage plays exclusively. When Hirsch asked Segal if he was at all aware that it was Nichols’ first film, Segal gave a one-word response: “Totally.”

Nichols was so smart, Segal sensed that he was always in the presence of impeccable taste. The film was more fun to work on than most. It was so intense and everyone knew they were working on something truly important. The cast, crew, and director were bonded more closely than usual.

Elizabeth Taylor had casting approval, so Segal was her choice. He and Sandy Dennis were both on Broadway in separate plays at the time and Taylor saw their performances. “Elizabeth was in charge,” commented Segal, "but Burton was the top of the pyramid. He elevated everyone’s acting."

In Virginia Woolf, a 33-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, at the height of her beauty, takes on the role of a dowdy, middle-aged university wife. She gained thirty pounds for the part. The first director of photography quit, refusing to photograph Elizabeth Taylor with bags under her eyes. He was replaced by the great Haskell Wexler, who won an Oscar for his work on the film.

The film flies in the face of every Hollywood “don’t” of the time. It’s shot in black and white when color films were on the rise, Nichols was a stage director, the material was a long and talky Edward Albee play, the subject matter was pure controversy, and the cast was four actors trained in different traditions. Taylor was a major Hollywood star, Burton was trained in the English tradition, Segal was a Broadway stage actor, and Dennis took a natural approach to her character. Hirsch described the above as a “recipe for disaster” that became that great American film.

Photo by Sasha Lebedeva

“It broke the code,” exclaimed Hirsch. The film so stressed the limits of the censorship and ratings system then in use that it had a big influence on its demise.

Segal reflected a moment and mused that “as I think about it, George and Martha are like Taylor and Burton in real life.” Elizabeth drove the relationship and she didn’t hesitate to call out Richard in public. When he was on stage, he was flirting a little with an actress. From across the room came Elizabeth’s voice, loud and clear, “Richard!”

Nichols rehearsed the cast as for a play, which drove Taylor nuts. The film was shot in Northhampton, Massachusetts, in a house that still stands. The rehearsal stage in Los Angeles exactly recreated the house and the back yard where most of the action takes place. So rehearsal allowed staging perfectly for the final shoot. Nichols didn’t talk much during the shoot, but Segal received specific direction in the rehearsals: “don’t answer right away, he would wait a moment before he could reply” and “you should fall down at that point.”

Segal described his time working on Virginia Woolf as the happiest time of his youth. He still considers it his finest work. Segal left the stage as he arrived, to a standing ovation and Hirsch’s comment “You are in the presence of greatness.”

As stepped into the back seat of a Bentley and drove away, wistful fans waved good-bye to George Segal and to an unforgettable evening of film.

Judith Resell is a volunteer for the American Cinematheque.

AIRPLANE AT THE AERO, by Judith Resell

“We said we want to make a comedy with no comedians, so we got turned down a lot,” writer-director David Zucker said of his movie Airplane! (1980) after an August 3, 2018 screening at the Aero Theater. When the film was finally picked up, it was with industry titans Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, so it went well from that point forward.

Photo by Sasha Lebedeva

The unusual casting approach Zucker and his colleague Joel Stein insisted upon was to cast major dramatic actors in parts that parodied their own work, and also allowed them to play the character straight. If the characters in the script were played purely for comedy, it simply wouldn’t work.

At the time the film was made, Robert Stack was famous for playing Eliot Ness in TV’s The Untouchables, Lloyd Bridges for Sea Hunt, Peter Graves for Mission Impossible, and Leslie Nielsen for The Poseidon Adventure (1972), among others. So the basic concept of famous dramatic actors in comic roles was well-accomplished in that cast. Even Ethel Merman has a hilarious cameo and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar played a co-pilot.

The film combines a lot of visual humor, for which movies are the perfect medium, with tongue-in-cheek performances by major actors and a wide-eyed lead played purely for laughs by Robert Hays, who appeared with Zucker and fellow writer-director Jim Abrahams for a Q & A following the screening.

Abrahams described the humor in the film as “MAD Magazine style.” MAD would have a series of panels that were serious, with seemingly straightforward characters, and then the last panel would be the joke and pull the rug out from under the reader. "Then we cut out everything that didn’t work," Abrahams added.

Photo by Sasha Lebedeva

Hays recounts a story where he waited to board an airplane and was recognized by another passenger. “I’m not getting on an airplane with him!” exclaimed the waiting passenger, recalling the trials and tribulations of the passengers in the movie.

The original concept took five years to sell and was turned down by every major studio. Confirming Eisner and Katzenberg’s judgment, the laugh-out-loud funny satire on the disaster movie genre was a critical and financial success, making $83 million on a budget of $3.5 million. It was so successful that Zucker and Abrahams (as well Jerry Zucker, the third part of their trio) kept making films in this signature style, including Top Secret! (1984), Naked Gun (1988) and Naked Gun 2 1/2 (1991).

Like most current comedy stars, Zucker and Abrahams began their careers in live comedy. Zucker recalls the “Kentucky Fried Theater” on Pico Boulevard - a live comedy venue he created with Zucker and Abrahams in the 1970s - with fondness. It was there that they began writing the script for Airplane!.

Abrahams’ favorite line in Airplane! is delivered by Nielsen to Graves in the cockpit. The comment is punctuated with a loud fart. “And he had to keep a straight face through all that,” says Abrahams, with sincere admiration for Nielsen. After Airplane! Nielsen starred in the Naked Gun movies for Zucker and Abrahams and became what critic Roger Ebert described as “the Laurence Olivier of spoofs.”

Judith Resell is a volunteer for the American Cinematheque.

ANTONIONI: DYING IN A MATERIAL WORLD, by Scott Nye

The American Cinematheque’s retrospective Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni, begins Thursday, September 13th and runs through Sunday, September 23rd at the Egyptian Theatre.

By 1959, Michelangelo Antonioni had directed five features over ten years, none of which made very much money. He was in the midst of shooting a film that would change cinema forever. But at the moment, he was stranded on a tiny, uninhabited island - his production company having virtually abandoned him and the storms cutting him off from any other means of rescue - with a crew that was on strike, having not been paid for weeks or fed for days.

The island on which they were shooting would provide the central mystery at the heart of L’Avventura (1960) - a woman goes missing, and is never found. That it should nearly swallow its makers whole in the midst of production feels almost fitting, and establishes a vital pattern that would define Antonioni’s work going forward. In his films, people are defined physically, by they make and do and the ways they express themselves; yet the physical world in his films is forever unfulfilling, uninspiring, and is slowly, gradually eroding us until we rot.


Physicality has an important history in Italian art. In the exhibit To Rome and Back: Individualism and Authority in Art, 1500-1800, currently on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, they note a change in focus around the 18th century, away from religious iconography and towards representations of the world before them. Italian cinema went through a similar transformation, taking a renewed interest in the physical world following World War II. This came first in the form of neorealism, where the city’s ruins mirrored the broken spirits the films depicted, and in earthy melodramas like La Terra Trema (1948) and Stromboli (1950), in which volatile geological and meteorological phenomenon mirror souls in distress. As the 1960s approached, and investment from the Marshall Plan virtually forced Italy to remake their society in the span of only a few years, one couldn’t help but be taken in by a different sort of physical transformation. Entire cities were completely remade, and wealth became more widely and persistently chased.

Antonioni’s work from 1955 through 1964 interrogates the effect of living through such sudden rejuvenation. I don’t think it any coincidence that the vast majority of his characters work in the commodification of goods. Le Amiche (1955) focuses on a woman opening a new branch of a fashion boutique. In L’Avventura, the focus is architecture. In Red Desert (1964), chemical plants. In Blow-Up (1966), photographs. Even L’Eclisse (1962), in which most people work in finance, expresses that profession in physical terms, the stock market becoming a mass of bodies yearning for each cent. Richard Peña, scholar and former director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center, described it as “orgiastic” (not the last orgy Antonioni will depict, but more on that later). La Notte (1961) can’t help but represent Giovanni’s profession as writer, an intellectual pursuit, through mass quantities of his new book that he must sell. In each film, we see some form of manufacture, and the selling of it.

Think too of where these films begin - a hallway floor in Identification of a Woman (1982). In Red Desert, the credits begin over blurry images of trees that give way to blurry images of an industrial plant. Its first clear images show us the plant bursting flames into the sky. L’Eclisse begins with a stack of books and a lamp, and famously ends with a montage of all the places its lovers have been, but are now absent from. La Notte opens with a brief montage of trucks and construction, the face of Italy being excavated before our eyes, and a sort of elevator ride down the side of Milan’s first skyscraper, the city unfolding in its reflection. This strikes me as an analogue of sorts to La Dolce Vita’s famous opening helicopter ride over the city, but where that suggested a sort of freedom, here the city is literally “through the looking glass,” out of reach, overpowered by the rush of buildings.

By the time of Red Desert, the physical world seems to suffocate Antonioni. Monica Vitti emerges at the start of the film as Lea Massari left it in L’Avventura - she seems born from the earth and its decaying corpse. The physical world, he makes clear, is killing us. Polluted water, gigantic machines, and shacks near collapse surround her. The air is thick with fog or smog or both. The fruit has turned grey, as have the buildings; only people and plastics have any color, her bold red hair setting her apart from her social set and her environment. She can’t even settle on a color to paint her shop, nor a product to sell in it. One can avoid the toxicity, but something will swallow us, some twisted rot will poison our souls if it doesn’t hit our stomachs.

This sense of being overwhelmed by the physical world gives way, in Antonioni’s next few films, to an abstraction of it. Blow-Up concerns a photographer (David Hemmings) who thinks he photographed a murder, physical evidence that gradually breaks down until his perception of reality is essentially shattered. He can no longer trust physical things. Zabriskie Point (1970) sees a student revolutionary movement reach its zenith in a psychadelic, fantastical orgy in the desert; a mass of bodies finding, for once, harmony in Antonioni’s work. It is short-lived and probably not real. The fantasy cannot be realized, so they find another, by destroying consumerist things, and possibly consumerism with it.

From here, Antonioni will push his characters further and further into a sort of limbo. The Passenger (1975, about a journalist who assumes the identity of a dead man) and Identification of a Woman (about the search for artistic and personal fulfillment in another) pick up there, where even the sense of self gives way to oblivion. This theme, of finding oneself and and what one wants from life, ran through Antonioni’s work all the way back to Story of a Love Affair (1950, as confused and bitter as that film is), but becomes increasingly surreal throughout his later works. The Passenger is one of his absolute masterpieces, and utilizes in Jack Nicholson an actor so iconic, the only criticism his unimaginative detractors can lay on him is that he always plays himself. That very fact is at the core of The Passenger - am I still myself when I play someone else? Where do I end and they begin? I’m putting this fairly academically, as a question of form, but it’s as true in everyday life, where we inevitably play the roles of employee, manager, customer, spouse, parent, child, etc. to varying degrees of success. When are we really ourselves, and how are we not ourselves?

Moreover, how do we define and express ourselves against our surroundings and amidst each other? Antonioni’s work could easily earn the tag “rich people problems,” but give him half a film’s running time and he’ll relocate wealthy characters away from their environment (to an island, a rural community, an abandoned shack, the desert) and show how little their money matters. But it runs deeper than that. Bodies are of paramount importance for Antonioni, his characters occasionally finding grace, but most often struggling with their bodies to find some way to expose themselves and make themselves known. They can’t quite fit together with one another, can’t quite find harmony within and without. His depictions of sex both successful and unsuccessful are a mass of tangled limbs that never find cohesion. It’s one of the reasons why the conclusion to L’Avventura, ambiguous though it may be, remains the most moving and iconic passage in all of Antonioni’s work. Finally, harmony.

L’Avventura was booed upon its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, but after fervent support from established filmmakers (including Roberto Rossellini), it was awarded a Jury Prize “for the beauty of its images, and for seeking to create a new film language.” Two years later, it placed second in the 1962 Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films of all time. Its reputation as Antonioni’s best film will continually be questioned, but it seems cemented as his greatest. Its reputation is beyond Antonioni, even beyond film itself. It is a singular, irreplaceable object. The nature of its production, still having a foot in the traditions of melodrama and pulp, lend it more mystery than its successors. The opening shots of L’Eclisse or Red Desert or The Passenger make clear that ambiguity will drive them, but one can still watch the first thirty minutes of L’Avventura and suspect it to be a regular film. Its title alone, which can be alternately translated as The Adventure or The Fling, offers promises that go unfulfilled; action and sex that are more alluded to than realized. It’s about a woman’s disappearance, but it’s not; it’s a critique of wealth, but it’s not; it’s a romance, but it’s a little sordid in a way that isn’t overtly acknowledged. It declared, finally and firmly, that one can set a film outside a moral universe, where sin will not damn and virtue will not redeem. Its characters’ behavior might carry spectacular significance, or none at all. Its mystery, ultimately, goes deeper than Anna’s disappearance, or the existential questions it poses. Every gesture carries a question one cannot articulate, each beautiful shot a spiritual quest without a divine guide. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, that lingers so powerfully for so many years, that urges us ever onward to travel back to its seductive island and lose oneself wandering again, searching for something that cannot be found.

Scott Nye is the editor-at-large at Battleship Pretension and a contributor to CriterionCast. He can regularly be found at Los Angeles's many repertory theaters, or on Twitter @railoftomorrow.