At the end of the 70s, Michelangelo Antonioni wrote a screenplay with American author Rudy Wurlitzer, titled Two Telegrams. The story takes place in a large American city, where a woman, torn between two men, experiences an existential crisis. In the early 1980s, producer Paulo Branco met Antonioni and agreed to produce the film in the United States. Unfortunately, Antonioni suffered a stroke, and the film was halted. Ten years later, producer Stéphane Tchalgadjieff took up the torch, but while the whole team was in Los Angeles for location scouting, casting dragged on and on, and the project stalled once again. Based on both this double failure and the story told in Two Telegrams, our documentary is both a game of extrapolation, which allows us to imagine what Antonioni’s film might have been like, and an investigation into a project by the great Italian filmmaker which remained without images. In a way, it was a question of making a mirror film of a ghost film. The epilogue is provided by Antonioni himself in the extract from the documentary Chambre 666, in which, like a spectre trapped in the mesh of time, he talks about cinema and its future…
DIRECTOR: Alexandre Gouzou, Jean-Claude Taki
NATION: France
YEAR: 2023
RUNTIME: 66′
Original version with subtitles