It is fairly easy to verify the claims I made. For example
http://www.cosmoetica.com/B423-DES358.htm
"There is a sense that all of the inhabitants of this end world are zombies, of a sort, and it is not without a sense of the zeitgeist of the times that during the same year, 1962, that this film was released, over in America, a B film classic with eerily similar imagery and an even more haunting soundtrack, was released. That film was industrial filmmaker and documentarian (just as Antonioni started out as a documenatarian) Herk Harvey?s lone fictional film, the brilliant low budget horror film Carnival Of Souls, in which the tale opens with a drag race that has one car crash over the side of a bridge. Its one survivor, a thin, pretty, but disoriented, blond, who has an aversion to the shallow male of the species, wanders cross-country and is haunted by bizarre beings that chase her, even as no one else is aware of them. Eventually, she is destroyed by them, and it is revealed that her dead body is still in the car, that is dredged up from the river, at film?s end. Antonioni has a similar scene in his film, although earlier in his film, where a corpse is recovered from Piero?s car, after it has plunged into a river when a drunk steals it. Harvey?s film had a profound impact on the subsequent mythos of George Romero?s Night Of The Living Dead, and its many sequel and imitators, as did another American B horror film, made in 1964, adapted from Richard Matheson?s sci fi-horror novel I Am Legend. That was the classic Vincent Price vampiric bio-terror chiller The Last Man On Earth, whose imagery of deserted and blanched out urban streets are the closest things to an Antonionian vision American film, A or B, has produced. The end of Antonioni? film has such a strong affinity with those films that it is no wonder that many critics consider his cinematic world not to be a portrayal of our own real world, but some odd universe just next door. And, there are many moments one could imagine the then current The Twilight Zone hoist, Rod Serling, emerging from beneath some enigmatic piece of architecture, and declaiming on the angst of this film?s characters."
reply
share