These invaluable additions to Eureka!'s admirable Masters of Cinema series help us understand the continuity between Michelangelo Antonioni's early work and what followed the controversial 1960 breakthrough of L'Avventura at Cannes. La signore senze camelie (The Lady Without Camelias) belongs in an important tradition of movies about the film industry (it was preceded and followed in Italy by Visconti's Bellissima and Fellini's Otto e mezzo) and stars Lucia Bosè as a movie star trapped between her culturally ambitious husband and her exploitative producers.

In Le Amiche (aka The Girlfriends), his first fully achieved masterpiece, the empathy for and attraction to women join a socialist critique of modern society as the dominant elements in Antonioni's work. Eleonora Rossi Drago plays a working-class beauty returning to her native Turin to open a branch of a Rome couturier. She becomes involved with four local women from the city's haute bourgeoisie and four weak, handsome men in a wonderfully confident film, superbly photographed by the great Gianni di Venanzo. It heralded the arrival of a new, post neorealist phase in Italian cinema.