New 4K Restoration

Years before his international breakthrough, L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni crafted his first masterpiece with IL GRIDO—a raw expression of anguish that remains one of Italian cinema’s great underappreciated gems. Bridging Antonioni’s early, neorealism-inspired work and his hallmark stories of existential rootlessness, IL GRIDO centers on Aldo (Cochran), a sugar-refinery worker in the Po Valley. When Irma (Valli), his lover of seven years, learns that her estranged husband has died abroad, Aldo hopes they can finally marry. These plans are ruined, however, when Irma declares she’s fallen in love with another man. Shocked and demoralized, Aldo leaves town with his daughter, Rosina (Girardi), and attempts to woo an old girlfriend (Blair), only to find himself rebuffed. As Aldo continues to drift through the Po’s small villages, his prospects dwindle and his connections with other women—including a gas-station owner (Gray) and a sex worker (Shaw)—fizzle out into alienation and despair. Strikingly composed and boldly using environment to convey character—like Antonioni’s later classics—IL GRIDO reveals a director in the process of discovering his artistic signature and applying it to this most personal of statements about the human condition. – Janus Films