This was Michelangelo Antonioni's first film, released in 1950, and to discover it after the sublime, ultracool, painfully eloquent blockbusters he made later - in a wicked flood that ran for over 15 years, at least to 1975's The Passenger - is to see his intelligence and philosophy already fully formed. In 1960, cinematic modernism and postmodernism seemed to be born simultaneously, by Antonioni's L'Avventura and Godard's Breathless respectively, both arriving decades after modernist ideas had turned other mediums upside-down, a delay due simply to film's expense, commercial payload and popular context. But the impact both films had on filmgoing eyeballs and brain stems then, on the cusp of cultural earthquakes of every possible variety, cannot be underestimated. For many cinephiles, the two films invented two very different new ways to see the art form, and modern cinema, from the New Waves of the '60s and '70s to the current work of Hou-Hsaio-hsien, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Haneke, et al., would never be the same.

Antonioni's gift to the culture came in the form of a silk-smooth cocktail mixed from flat-out existentialism and a more specific, fascinated critique of the postwar bourgeoisie. This is not the noble Italian-neo-realist peasant cinema of De Sica, Rossellini and early Pasolini - even the penniless vagabonds in Antonioni dress well, while the vast majority of his characters are the idle rich, destroying their marriages with narcissism and lethargy, and wondering why the desolate landscapes they find themselves so accurately reflect their inner wastelands. Nineteen-fifty was still in the thick of the neo-realist era, but no major film differed from that vibe more so than Story of a Love Affair, with its instantly recognizably Antonioniesque conflict between the images' stark, angular beauty and the characters' internal miseries.

The story in question begins unassumingly enough, as a nondescript corporate flunky in an office hires an equally nondescript private eye to trail the boss's new trophy wife and find out about her semi-mysterious past. He does, lying about his intentions to each of the unseen woman's past acquaintances, and a secret is partially revealed, involving the new wife's relationship with a man and a girl who died by falling down an open elevator shaft. Bitterness and hatred seep into the discourse, from all angles - was it a love triangle murder? The movie seems to be inquisitively exploring a story that happen years before, but the detective's questions start a new chain reaction that reaches the peak-of-the-triangle man in question, Guido (Massimo Girotti), who seeks out the ex-girlfriend-slash-zillionaire's-wife Paola (Lucia Bose) to find out why this dark story of blood and guilt is being suddenly dug up out of the past.

The dominoes continue to fall, as Paola and Guido, at present on opposite ends of the economic bracket, strike up their old romance under the husband's sniffing nose, and begin to contemplate James M. Cain-style skullduggery even as they hold each others' feet to the fire of that old crime, which might have been an accident after all but for which they're both riddled with guilt and resentment. Slowly, the tale leaks into full-on noir territory, but in a manner particular to Antonioni - every gesture, every act of rationalization, and every criminal conclusion has the torque of metaphor, of a deadened modern life.

Right away, Antonioni's deep-dish visual toolbox was in operation. Exhibit A has to be the remarkable set-piece scene in which the two conflicted lovers argue about their haunted past and the impossibility of a mutual future on a long, revolving stairwell that winds around an old-fashioned steel-cage elevator(!), traveling up and down its shaft, past the fraught couple, for the duration of the sequence, the physical environment that surrounds the action taking the literal form of present-poisoning recent history. It's a breathtakingly conceived tour de force, but Story of a Love Affair is filled with lengthy Antonioni-esque tracking-shot ravishments, none of them ostentatious or self-serving, and all of them pulsing with resonance. This type of filmmaking has its origins in the silent films of F.W. Murnau and Abel Gance, but that it came into fruition completely with Antonioni makes historical sense - the Italian film industry was for most of the 20th century the only one that routinely shot their films without synch-sound and then would dub in dialogue later. (Fellini is famous for having told Marcello Mastroianni and other actors to just count numbers or recite the alphabet on set, only worrying about the actual dialogue in the editing stage.) In this hands-free milieu, where cameras were free to roam without sound-recording considerations, just as in the silent era, it seems to be destiny that someone like Antonioni would remake narrative form into a long-shot river of feeling and mystery.

He was also one of the 20th-century's great fetishizers of female movie-ness; just as he later latched onto Monica Vitti and turned her into the mask-like, fashion-plate face of '60s unhappiness, here he lavishes compositional attention on Bose, whose porcelain beauty recalls Louise Brooks's just as her thin visage and lank ebony hair suggest Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an interface made palpable when she becomes overwhelmed with bloodlust for her husband and plays at strangling Guido, a chilling moment shot entirely from behind her. Bose reeks of the bitter anomie exclusive to beautiful women who marry money, while at the same time she seems to be so young, almost teenage in her pristine and nubile features. That Paola has no chance at the happiness her beauty would seem to promise, now that she is no longer a whimsical party girl, is just one hidden tragedy among many.

For more information about The Story of a Love Affair, visit Kino Lorber.

by Michael Atkinson