Cinema's Autonomous Image in Michelangelo Antonioni and Francis Ford Coppola

Abstract

Studies of post-classical cinema, whether of the American or European tradition, commonly emphasise the newness of narrative form against an earlier formal classicism. The New Hollywood and the European modernist cinema depict the radical breakdown of continuity, several crises in sensory-motor schema, and the affect of trauma. This article reorients the study of a post-classical narrative to emphasise the relationship between image and narrative, suggesting that such a relationship is fundamentally ambiguous and open to innovative experiments with space, time, image and sound: the foundational elements of cinematic form.