Former working-class girl Lucia Bosè's rich husband (costume designer Ferdinando Sarmi) hires a detective to confirm his fears that Lucia's penniless old flame, Massimo Girotti, has returned. Are the husband's suspicions simply pushing the former lovers together? Antonioni's first feature, broodingly reminiscent of Luchino Visconti's (and James M. Cain's) Ossessione, makes interesting use of spare empty spaces to convey emotion, foreshadowing the later Antonioni. (Cronaca di un amore, 1950, 35 mm, Italian with subtitles, 98 minutes)

Three morality tales, Antonioni-style: shy Jean-Pierre Mocky flashes a roll of francs to win acceptance but finds more than he bargained for, with a bitterly ironic twist; on-the-lam cigarette smuggler Franco Interlenghi meets with a different sort of trouble; and poet Peter Reynolds stops at nothing to get his name in the news. This French/Italian/British trio of stories of "unbalanced postwar youth," shot in original language in three countries, ran into censorship difficulties and imposed rewrites. (1952, 35 mm, 110 minutes)

Milanese shopgirl Lucia Bosè vaults to movie stardom, but teeters between ceding to the demands of "art" films or descending to low-budget spear-and-sandal epics, while oscillating in her personal life between a domineering producer and a suave diplomat. Antonioni's use of long takes approaches a one shot per scene treatment and provides an intriguing backstage look at Italian commercial filmmaking. (La Signora senza camelie, 1953, 35 mm, Italian with subtitles, 106 minutes)

The short Lies of Love about the "stars" of the fumetti—photographed comic strips popular in postwar Italy—precedes the feature. (L'Amorosa menzogna, 1949, 35 mm, no subtitles, 10 minutes)

Returning to her native Turin to open a salon on the heels of her Roman success, fashion stylist Eleanora Rossi-Drago painfully tries to bond with the local au courant crowd. Antonioni's loose adaptation of a Cesare Pavese story artfully charts realigning relationships amid class conflicts (the experimental highlight is a beach expedition, with camera weaving among wandering figures regrouping). Antonioni's first critical triumph won the Silver Lion at that year's Venice Film Festival. (1955, 35 mm, Italian with subtitles, 100 minutes)

Preceding the film is Superstitions, a catalogue of unusual rural customs. (Superstizione, 1949, 35 mm, no subtitles, 9 minutes)

A woman (Lea Massari) disappears along a rocky stretch of beach and her friend (Monica Vitti) and lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) try to find her. This simple stratagem is the premise for Antonioni's chic and existential breakthrough, a film that challenges all expectations for clarification or resolution, with every frame an exercise in modernist composition. When asked what really happened to Massari's character, Antonioni replied, "I don't know. Someone told me she committed suicide, but I don't believe it." (1960, 35 mm, Italian with subtitles, 145 minutes)

Nettezza Urbana, chronicling the working-class street cleaners of Rome, precedes the film. (1948, 35 mm, 9 minutes)

A day and night in the life of a modern marriage, set against the soulless architecture of Milan, find the couple (Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau) visiting a dying friend, a nightclub, and a protracted party, until their evening ends in a tormented dawn encounter in a deserted golf course. Perhaps Antonioni's most compassionate examination of the emptiness of the lives of the rich and the difficulties of contemporary relationships, La Notte is fabled for its tour-de-force set piece, Moreau's lone walk through the Milan streetscape. (1961, 35 mm, Italian with subtitles, 120 minutes)

Monica Vitti finishes an affair with Francisco Rabal but then drifts into another with her mother's stockbroker (Alain Delon). Perhaps Antonioni's most intense focus on a single individual and his most impressionistic work, with every event placed for its impingement on Vitti, L'Eclisse maintains the director's characteristic detachment. A collection of sense impressions—a trip to the provincial airport, the sound of wind in the chain-link fence, the volcanic scenes in the stock market interrupted by a moment of silence, and most celebrated of all, the seven-minute coda in which no character appears—this film is the least celebrated of Antonioni's "trilogy" but arguably his greatest work. (1962, 35 mm, Italian with subtitles, 125 minutes)

"There is something terrible about reality and I don't know what it is." Monica Vitti plays a wife and mother struggling with her own neuroses and a futile affair with an engineer (Richard Harris) amid a nightmarish industrial landscape. Antonioni's first color film—he experimented with hue as boldly as he had with narrative—designs a scheme that suggests Vitti's state of mind throughout. A final, wistfully enigmatic parable poetically relates why birds won't fly into poisonous yellow smoke. (1964, 35 mm, Italian with subtitles, 120 minutes)

Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale is a compilation of unstructured footage—flowers in bloom, overhead views of a volcano, a party in progress. (1993, 35 mm, 8 minutes)