L'Eclisse (English: "The Eclipse") is a 1962 romantic drama film co-written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, with Francisco Rabal, Lilla Brignone, and Louis Seigner.

[3][4][5] L'Eclisse won the Special Jury Prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d'Or.

"[7] On a Monday morning in July 1961, Vittoria, a young literary translator, ends her relationship with Riccardo in his apartment in the EUR residential district of Rome, following a long night of conversation.

As she wanders the deserted streets, Riccardo catches up and walks with her through a wooded area to her apartment building, where they say their final goodbyes.

A young stockbroker, Piero, overhears an inside tip, rushes to purchase the stocks, and then sells them at a large profit.

Vittoria dons blackface and mimics an African tribal dance until Marta, unamused, asks her to stop.

The next morning, Vittoria and Piero meet by a lake and watch as a crane lifts the car with the drunk man's dead body out of the water.

The next day, while Vittoria is waiting by the construction site, Piero arrives and tells her he has bought a new BMW to replace his Alfa Romeo.

David Sin wrote: "The intervening years appear not to have diminished its impact as an innovative work of cinema, nor as a wider critique of the age in which we live.

The film retains a formal playfulness, with its open form offering different ways of watching and projecting onto the characters...and the overall atmosphere of ennui, so beautifully constructed through sound and image, still feels heavily familiar".

[11] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called the film "visionary" and argued "Antonioni opens up a sinkhole of existential dismay in the Roman streets and asks us to drop down into it.

[16] Jon Lisi of PopMatters criticized the work as "strictly intellectual" in its returns to the viewer and wrote that viewing the film "isn't exactly like watching paint dry, but the pace is so deliberately slow that it might as well be".

[17] Conversely, Susan Doll wrote that if Antonioni's works are "out of vogue with movie goers captivated by postmodern irony and fast-paced editing...we are the worse for it.

His visually driven style and provocative approach to narrative raised the bar of what constituted popular filmmaking, and audiences at the time rose to the occasion to embrace it".