ROME—Few actors have navigated the currents of 20th-century Italian cinema with the nuance of Monica Vitti. Born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli in 1931, she became a defining force across both moody modernist films and biting comedies, often flipping expectations about beauty, wit, and female agency.

Her early work with Michelangelo Antonioni, most notably in La Notte (1961), cemented her place in the canon of postwar European film. Those collaborations gave shape to a cinematic language of distance and disquiet. But Vitti refused to be typecast. By the late ’60s, she pivoted sharply into comic roles, most famously as Assunta Patanè in Mario Monicelli’s La ragazza con la pistola (1968), a revenge comedy with unexpected depth and swagger. Audiences followed.

Across genres, she displayed a gift for physical nuance, whether anchoring a philosophical drama or unraveling in absurdist farce. In films like Ti ho sposato per allegria, La supertestimone, and Io so che tu sai che io so, she captured emotional tones that were often elusive, contradictory, and deeply human.

Film at Lincoln Center’s retrospective Monica Vitti: La Modernista, co-organized with Cinecittà, traced this full range across 14 films. Several newly restored 4K films were included, among them La ragazza con la pistola and Io so che tu sai che io so. The series treated Vitti not as a single type, muse, comic, beauty, or modernist emblem, but as an actor whose force came from remaining difficult to define.

Screenings – Monica Vitti: La Modernista

Film at Lincoln Center (June 6–19, 2025)

• 9 June, 2025, 6:30pm – Ti ho sposato per allegria (World Premiere)

• 10 June, 2025, 8:45pm – Deserto rosso

• 12 June, 2025, 6:15pm – La supertestimone

• 15 June, 2025, 7:00pm – Io so che tu sai che io so (World Premiere)

• 18 June, 2025, 9:00pm – La ragazza con la pistola (Encore)

Companion Exhibit: Posters of Vitti

Furman Gallery at Lincoln Center, through 19 June.

Open daily during screening hours. Free admission.