RIP Monica Vitti (1933-2022)
I’ve only seen a couple of films starring Monica Vitti, but her iconic status in cinema makes her a very familiar face even if you’ve seen her films or not.
There have been so many beautiful photos and clips of her being shared online (I doubt there’s a bad photo of Vitti in existence), and when I was looking for photos of her, I was struck by the number of photos that include her reflection.
I also found this video by Catherine Grant featuring Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966).
It’s a companion video/trailer for her written essay titled 'Notes on Mirror Visions in MODESTY BLAISE (Joseph Losey, 1966)' which can be found here. An excerpt:
"MODESTY BLAISE (Joseph Losey, 1966) travels the cinematic distance between an opening shot of the seemingly contented sleeping face of its star Monica Vitti and an extreme close-up of her eponymous character’s over-stimulated, rapacious look directly at the camera in the film’s final frames. This is a deceptively simple journey, perhaps. But, while making it, what she and certainly we do with our eyes repeatedly involves mirrors, as is so often the case in Losey’s looking-glass cinema.
What Losey and his cinematographer Jack Hildyard achieve with reflective surfaces in this pop and op art spy film, a ‘remediation’ of Peter O’Donnell’s much loved comic strip (1963-1986), however, has not been nearly as well received as the director’s earlier signature experiments with those forms, for example in THE SERVANT(1963), or in EVE (1962), another of his ‘cosmopolitan’ films. In the latter work, locations in Venice afforded him the challenge of photographing, for the first time, ‘reflected surfaces: mirrors – one of his most cherished symbols – and water, in baths, fountains, canals and the sea’ [De Rham, JOSEPH LOSEY (London: André Deutsch, 1991), p. 133]. Are MODESTY BLAISE’s multiple mirrorings a symptom of unrestrained and muddled fetishism, or, integral to what Durgnat takes as Losey’s film poetry?”
A different side of Monica Vitti can be found in this audiovisual essay by Pasquale Iannonen which highlights Monica Vitti’s style. It starts with an audio of her voice from an interview where she “discusses the criticism leveled at her from all sides for both her ‘serious’ films and her work in comedy”. You can read more about it here.
By focusing on her comic performances, Comedy Vitti Style serves as a reminder that Monica Vitti was not only a muse for one of cinema’s great auteurs, but also a comedienne of extraordinary playfulness and versatility.
I leave you with this by Glenn Kenny from In Memoriam Monica Vitti, Enigmatic Beauty and Exquisite Icon of Alienation.
Let’s give Vitti the last word, again from an interview with Alain Elkann: “Love is love. For me, it’s a necessity. I couldn’t live without it. Love is a physical and mental condition that is in the blood and hormones. There are those that don’t know and can’t love. There are those that have fun with it and need it. I need it. I’m passionate.”