Several days ago, Scott Kirsner linked a CNET story about YouTube’s plans to automatically block all copyrighted content beginning in September. Google already pulls content based on copyright holder request, but if this ends up going through, it would have a much farther reaching impact on the kinds of fil m clips and oddities that I often link to on SpoutBlog. I think it’s a mistake. Right now, YouTube is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive online archive of 20th century culture. Just in terms of its educational potential, it’s invaluable.

So, while we can, let’s put the YouTube archive to good use. If there’s any filmmaker whose work lends itself to an introduction via YouTube, I’d say it’s Michelangelo Antonioni. At the very least, the YouTube watching experience may be the only way to transform his work for short attention spans. His best scenes worked almost as self-contained shorts; his poderous narrative pacing can make a full feature feel at best like an event, and at worst, like an unbearable slog.

Almost all of the Antonioni clips currently available on YouTube represent the last scenes of their respective films, which makes sense, as several of these are now film school staples, although I’d love to be able to show you, say, the opening of Red Desert. Still, I’ve compiled four final scenes here; consider the fifth spot reserved. If someone manages to upload a clip (ANY clip) from Red Desert (available on frill-free DVD) before YouTube’s proposed regulations go into effect, I’ll update this post.

1. Zabriskie Point (1970)

Antonioni’s much-maligned hippies-in-Death Valley film is by turns laughable and stunning. It’s most famous for its two hallucinogenic set pieces: in one, two beautiful road-tripping strangers screw on rocky desert shoal. As Fiona A. Villella noted at Senses of Cinema, this “leads to a complete breakdown in realist narrative logic as multiple couples and groups of young people engaged in sexual play magically appear throughout the valley.” Antonioni repeats the logic of multiples in the latter set piece, in which the female half of this couple watches as her boss/sugar daddy’s vacation home spectacularly explodes to sounds of Pink Floyd on the sound track. Antonioni presents the explosion in slow motion, over and over again from different angles, cut with close-ups of the innards of the house (the TV, the fridge) combusting as if part of a separate demolition. Thus hippie bliss gives way to violent, anarchic destruction. Absolutely, without a doubt, the best art film explosion sequence of all time.

2. The Passenger (1974)

After seeing this film, widely thought to be Antonioni’s “most mainstream”, critic Kenneth Tynan famously wrote in his diary, “The critic’s job–at least 9/10ths of it–is to make way for the good by demolishing the bad. Antonioni is at present blocking the street.” Ken Tynan was kind of a prick. I would actually agree that The Passenger is perhaps Antonioni’s most overrated film, but christ — I’ve watched it 100 times, and I still can’t figure out how he got that final shot to work.

3. Blow-up

A film in which a photographer attempts to use his trade to solve the mystery of a disappearing a corpse, only to solve very little and eventually vanish himself. I can’t find the original quote, but according to Roger Ebert, Antonioni considered “the disappearance of his hero as his ’signature’.” Blow-up made money due to its of-the-era sexiness, but it was only marginally more accessible than any of Antonioni’s films. Even today, it works as a serious examination of Zapruder era identity and reality.

4. L’eclisse (1962)

A woman leaves her lover, promising to see him within hours, but we can tell she has her doubts. She disappears into the urban landscape, and the camera is left to contemplate strangers caught in a rainstorm, the empty modernism of city architecture, nuclear paranoia on faces and on headlines. A bright light blows out the frame. Is it a bomb? The moon? A street lamp? Antonioni’s existential abstraction at its peak.