(hamish ford) antonionis ambiguity - challenging realism in the early 1960s films
TRANSCRIPT
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Cinemascope.it, Special CentenaryIssue: Antonioni and theMystery of Reality, No.18, July-December 2012.
Antonionis Ambiguity:
Challenging Realism in the Early 1960s Films
Hamish Ford
Cinema today should be tied to the truth rather than to logic. And the truth
of our daily lives is neither mechanical, conventional nor artificial,
as stories generally are, and if films are made that way, they will show it.
Michelangelo Antonioni
(Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Roma, 16 March 1961)
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This article explores theways in which Antonionis work, homing in on the first four 1960s films,
presents a historically embedded yet today still radical cinema in which the filmmakers famous
modernism and a highly developed form of realism coexist in provocative and generative ways.
Describing what he sees as the central contradiction and exponentially enabling antinomy of
modernist works, P. Adams Sitney writes that they stress vision as a privileged mode of perception,
even of revelation, while at the same time cultivating opacity and questioning the primacy of the
visible world. (1992, p. 2) He later quotes a passage from Maurice Blanchot that illustrates well the
resulting material, aesthetic, and conceptual reality: [P]resent in its absence, graspable because
ungraspable, appearing as disappeared. (ibid, p. 102). Such is the properly paradoxical, inherently
dialectical enunciation of modernist realism exemplified by Antonionis mature cinema.
Elsewhere I address the conceptual implications ofthe directors special aesthetic
innovations, arguing in particular for Leclisses (1962) substantive philosophical impact (Ford,
2012). But this is only possible thanks to a very immanent, far from rarefied reality presented by the
films, incorporating a very real Italy of the post-war period and the filmic image itself. More than
debates concerning much-discussed metaphysical schemas of religious or secular values, it is
ultimately through at once larger yet also inherently more quotidian forces that Antonionis cinema
mounts its repeated blows. In his bookThe Inhuman, Jean-Franois Lyotard suggests:
[W]hat is hit first of all, and complains, in our modernity, or our postmodernity, isperhaps space and time. ... The real crisis of foundations was doubtless not that of the
foundations of reason but of any scientific enterprise bearing on so-called real objects, inother words given in sensory space and time (1991, p. 112).
In Antonionis cinema, space and time as transformed by post-war modernity are the primary sites
within, upon and from which an immeasurable violence is played out. This constitutes the
historically specific world presented by the filmsthe only reality on offer.
* * *
Describing the directors remarkable first colour feature, Il deserto rosso (1964), Peter
Brunette writes:There is no sense of spirituality here, no redeeming transcendence (1999, p. 105).
IfAntonionis cinema is strikingly secular, implicitly disabling or showing as historically
anachronistic and now dysfunctional the building blocks of classical or traditional modes of both
life and filmic convention, it concurrently explores and subtly undermines post-war Italys
reconstituted discourses of surety. The material and experiential conditions of the modern world
are the films prime concern as both constituting a singular reality and yet one that is impossible to
epistemologically define and understand. Spirituality and transcendence being out of the picture,
the focus clearly set on the question of what constitutes this modern real and its conditions in fact
only increases the unavoidable sense of perceptual, ethical, political, and existential confusion and
frequent feeling of mystery. Il deserto rosso and the other films do not proselytise present-day
technologised reality and its economic-industrial dictates, nor do they morally decry the modernity
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essayed on screen in favour of a different visionthe key reason why Antonionis cinema is
ultimately not only of no solace when it comes to religious or metaphysical perspectives but also so
difficult if we seek to forge clear-cut political analyses.
Lavventura(1960), La notte(1961), Leclisse(1962) and Il deserto rosso (1964)still the peak of
Antonionis fundamental remaking of the cinematic image in my view, despite the considerable and
diverse claims of his other workdemonstrate their immediate modernitys inherent oppositions
and unreconciled problems at the same time as rendering that reality in increasingly stylised ways.
The last film of this cycle famously illustrates the world it portrays as rather uninhabitable,
environmentally but also conceptually, for the humans who build and administer it. But perhaps
remarkablyfor many viewers, often counter-intuitivelyneither Il desert rosso nor its director in
contemporaneous interviews suggest clear denunciation of the reality essayed by the film. The
uncomfortable fact is that its layered aesthetic incarnation on screen is clearly the source of real
fascination and creativity for filmmaker and viewer alike, no matter how we feel about the worldly
facts once a human presence enters the frame.
(Il deserto rosso, 1964)
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Increasingly, the critical tenor in Antonioni scholarship is to try and avoid or heavily
bracket talk of alienation, which is nowoften understandably seen as a dangerous simplifying
clich by recent commentators such as Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes (2011) following
Brunette (1998), who instead favour (as is the trend in recent academic film studies) detailed
historical contextualisation. In his prescient book, Brunette argues that the long familiar description
of Antonionis famous early 1960s cinema as offering vaguely existentialist and ahistorical fables
about alienation and loss of identity tends to undersell both the importance of the films socio-
historical embeddedness and subtly radical commentary. In stressing unknowability and
incommensurability, he writes that nothing ever seems to add up in these films beyond a vague
sense of uneasiness and alienation, and thus most critics have this to be what they are about. (ibid,
p. 3) Yet while treatment of this often misused concept and long-familiar trope as the key to
understanding Antonionis most influential work can easily have the effect of disavowingthe films
range of thematic suggestion, social critique, aesthetic form, affective impact, and their precise place
within the Italian context, there are also some more precise historical reasons for its application.
Coincidentally written on the eve of post-war European cinemas long-brewing modernist
escalationmost famously the troika ofLavventura, bout de souffl(Jean-Luc Godard, 1959) and
Hiroshima, mon amour(Alain Resnais, 1959)Henri Lefebvre argues in a long 1958 forward to the
second edition of his Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1 that (using the gendered language) the
products of modern man and his works function like beings of nature. He must objectifyhimself
[I]f man has humanized himself, he has done so only by tearing himself apart, dividing himself,
fragmenting himself (1991, p. 71). In the main text that follows, from 1947, Lefebvre reads as if
directly addressing the disconnect but also the ambiguous possibilitycharted in Antonionis most
famous films, no matter our critical position or thematic interpretation: Man attains his own reality,
creates himself through, within and by means of his opposite, his alienation: the inhuman. (1991, p.
170). Carefully considered in light ofthe directors idiosyncratic realism, rather than a distraction,
alienation itself can be one legitimate conceptual means to a historically grounded as well as
updated understanding of the films. The problem, I think, occurs if we conflate what alienation
might mean for the characters on screen on the one hand and the film-viewer relationship on the
other (a distinction to which I will return)in particular the presumption that it inherently leads to
despair and cessation of assumed human progress. Just as alienation is often an effect or weapon
of money and political power within capitalist modernity, the complex aesthetic and spectatorial
effects of Antonionis realism as experienced by the viewer demonstrate that it can also be
harnessed to pursue very different, potentially much more critical re-forgings of reality and the
human. This ambiguity is a central key to the films essaying and critique of the reality on screen by
means of a challenging openness that is also enormously generative.
Providing a rigorously secular vision of the world, which thereby becomes only more
elusive and unknowable as presented on screen, the four early-60s films (sometimes bundled
together by critics as a Tetralogy) chart pressing challenges at the heart of everyday reality through
an appropriately unique and advanced sound-image incarnation. This filmed modernity is no less
realin fact more genuinely sofor appearing in the form of often abstract aesthetic patterns:
the spatial and temporal impact resulting from Lavventuras placement of privileged post-war
figures within both primordial nature and the historic built environment of Sicilia; La nottes framing
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of its world-weary middle-aged couple, together and especially alone, against the modernist
architectural surfaces and diverse spaces of Milano and surrounds; the intimate exchanges of
Leclisses markedly free protagonist with a palimpsestic Romas natural and human-made textures
and spaces, both the fabled centro storico and recently rebuilt EUR periphery (the latter milieu
seeming to take over the whole film in its final minutes); or Il deserto rossos variously manipulated, at
times literally painted colour palette and depth-flattening camerawork presenting the troubled
central characters experience ofRavennas industrial region, quay, and town centre. Confronted
with often mysterious situations and irresolvable problems, the films characters grapple as best
they can with their phenomenally undeniable yet conceptually vertiginous reality. Meanwhile, as
often discussed, the camera itselffrequently offers a slightly removed perspective on the human
events, regardless of spatial proximity.
Leclisseportrays the Borsa, Romas stock exchange (subsequently closed), as an
architecturally commanding space housing an intriguing but impossible-to-comprehend reality.
With the films famous stock market crash scene, this localepreviously used for both religious
worship (Pagan and later Christian) and a marketplace, now in the post-war era the centre for
secular prayer to the continuation ofItalys post-war economic miracleis treated by the camera
with fascinated detachment for a full fifteen minutes as if watching an archaic or futuristic ritual
about which it offers no inside knowledge. Thearchitecture and escalating activity of an
unattractive yet also fascinating human drama gradually eclipse a sense of narrative, making us
forget the purpose of the scene, which is so incremental and stretched out that some time elapses
before the viewer realises something is happening. As the slowly percolating action develops into
an event, more documentary-like yet still immaculately composed images take over the film,
charting the graphic attractions of seemingly chaotic movement within an Ancient Roman built
environment since renovated for allegedly modern purpose. When our presumed protagonist,
Vittoria (Monica Vitti), arrives very late in the scene, as the crisis reaches its crescendo, her
appearance is quite a surprise.
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(Leclisse, 1962)
Antonionis project as laid out in the epigraph quote necessitates a remaking of realism,
which in its classical Hollywood narrative, Italian neorealist, documentary, or politically
revolutionary forms is no longer realistic both in terms of what it shows and how. To confront this
challenge the director explores everyday realitys uncanny and even sometimes bizarre appearance
as powered by rapid economic, technological and environmental change, including that of the
heavily virtual reality of the moving image, in sustained and often surprisingly diverse portrayals of
this modern worlds physical and perceptual conditions. Such rendering of modern appearance and
experience via a medium reflexively acknowledging its own crucial role in the re-conceiving of
reality is inextricably affected by arguably the central characteristic of this cinema: a radically
enhanced ambiguity. Far from a rarefied philosophical issue, the films demonstrate this confronting
yet seductive concept and experience as at the heart of the modern everyday in all its confusion and
provocation. Lefebvre sees ambiguity as a category of everyday life, and perhaps an essential
category ofcontemporary modernity, continuing with an enormously resonant passage:
It never exhausts its reality; from the ambiguity of consciousness and situations springforth actions, events, results, without warning. These, at least, have clear-cut outlines. Theymaintain a hard, incisive objectivity which constantly disperses the luminous vapours ofambiguityonly to let them rise once again (1991, p. 18).
This evokes uncannily well both the post-war reality charted inAntonionis peak modernist cinema
addressed here and the fundamentally paradoxical lens through which we see it on screen.
The most historically important discussion of ambiguity in the cinema is found within
Andr Bazins founding account of Italian neorealism, famously arguing that the late 1940s films of
Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, and Luchino Visconti transfer to the screen the continuumof
reality (1967, p. 37). This much-heralded, still enormously influential (to a substantial degree thanks
to Bazin) cinema of the immediate post-war years in Italy is in part famous for innovations later
expanded by Antonioni. Of particular importance is the concurrent liberating of both space and
time from the dictates of narrative movement so as to stress, or forge, a much more ambiguous
image the deep focus textures of which, Bazin argued, allowed the viewer an enhanced perceptual
realism and therefore a much more ambiguous image to aesthetically explore and thematically
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interpret (ibid, p. 39). Co-existent with this ambiguity, however, neorealisms lingering ethico-
political certainties and aura of commitmentalso emphasised by Bazinseem long past by the
time of Antonionis early-60s films. (His one characteristically abstract contribution to the
neorealist tradition in terms of aesthetics and featured class, 1957s Il grido, is arguably outdone by
the later Zabriskie Pointin 1970 when it comes to a heavily qualified appearance of political
engagement.) Yet at the same time, startlingly passive in their wandering and gaze as a result of no
longer having an external crisis by which to initiate and virtually centre their search, the female
protagonists at the heart of these films can be seen as gentrified, updated and gender-appropriated
versions of neorealisms wandering male seers: now middle-class figures indicative of Italys socio-
economic transformation (infamously concentrated in the countrys north). No longer part of an
agrarian, proletariat, or impoverished family fighting for external survival, a seemingly well-educated
and notionally single female protagonist like Vittoria in Leclisseis both a direct result of the
countrys post-war resurgencecoming across as much freer and more modern than her
neorealist forebears yet also riddled with ambivalence, appearing concurrently intrigued by and
fundamentally dissatisfied with such a reality. The comparablyindividuated, newly liberated
subject passively moves through and observes the exponentially modern world with no essential
purpose, unable to conceive definitive action within it.
This now overtly modern protagonist, on the one hand theoretically gifted with genuine
agency and choice yet shackled by often debilitating doubt and tenuousness when it comes to
exercising and directing such freedom, is on the one hand much more intimately felt than the often
heavily archetypal, non-individuated characters of neorealism. Yet the re-figured realism of
Antonionis early-60s films at the very same time entirely fails to support the ontological inscribing
of subjectivity and its gaze, primarily undermined by the veracity of the opaque phenomenal real
charted by the films. Just as Antonionis cinema constitutes a notably more detached, elliptical yet
also modulating examination of these questions than we see in neorealism, so is subjectivity both
more strongly sensed and essayed yet also portrayed as operating from a position of spiraling
uncertaintya crisis itself fuelled by lack of surety as to what constitutes the objective world. When
it comes to both subjectivity and mastery of the objective environment, as opposed to the latters
apparently material facticity in the films, Antonionis cinema presents a realitymade up of
conditions effectively described by Lyotard. Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist
without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the lack of reality of reality, he writes.
(1978, p. 77)The directorsradical updating of realism has the inevitable effect that physical and
human reality looks increasingly strange and stylised, hencehis cinemas historical portrayal by
some critics as primarily interested in pictorial effects rather than content. While often challenged
by Antonionis defenders, like the matter of alienation, this response can also be too quickly
dismissed.
There is certainly a lot to be gained from reading the films in the form of precise historical
portraits, as much recent Antonioni scholarship seeks to do. Yet in the process we can easily
overlook that through peak enunciation of the directors idiosyncratic modernist aesthetics the
early-60s films also effectivelytranscend any such grounded realityon and beyond the screen. In
this sense they become both heavilymysterious and virtual texts that for many viewersboth
familiar and otherwise with the directors style, or indeed the films national and historical context
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evoke what Martin Heidegger in his famous 1935 essay called the solitary work of art (1993, p.
191), one that seems to stand apart from the rest of the world, havingcut all ties to human beings
(ibid.). The films are certainly interested in the great human drama, but their way of formally
presenting the subject, its immediate spatial reality and inextricably bound relationship between the
two, requires significantviewer input to make sense of and feel. Such an engagement can bring
about the sense that, in Heideggers words, something very new, different, perhaps even
extraordinary is thrust to the surface while here the conventions of cinema, the long-familiar, is
thrust down (ibid.). The more abstract and apparently ineffable aesthetic-experiential reality and
impact of Antonionis cinema is not, however, ultimately in contradiction with the fact that it
emerges from precise historical conditions and charts a very human reality. It is, rather, the films
uncommonly developed and rigorous means of presenting the latter that can make them look so
strange and cold, in the process collapsing viable distinctions between their formally advanced
aspects (to which we can apply Heideggers rarefied terms above) and those of the historical world
they chart.
Responding to the already familiar description (and frequently, criticism) ofAntonionis
cinema as being characterised by a coldness, long-time Italian Antonioni champion and scholar
Renzo Renzi argued as early as 1957 that such a gaze is in fact a sign of self-conscious
responsibility, aware of the shortfalls of moral judgment and clear annunciations about the reality
from which the films emanate. (qtd. in Rohdie, 1990, pp. 92-3) This lack of judgment is both moral
and epistemological: not only a refusal to proclaim how things should be but also how they are.
Both are cut down through an always-shifting emphasis on the vagaries of audio-visual perception
faced by the viewer. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes of perception that it responds to a situation and
to an environment which are not the workings of a pure, knowing subject. (1964, p. 4)
Fundamentally marked by the moral, political, and perceptual ambiguities of their respective
corners of post-war Italian reality, the films female protagonists as played by Monica Vitti (Claudia
in Lavventura, Vittoria in Leclisse, and especially Giuliana in Il deserto rosso) plus Jeanne Moreau (Lidia
in La notte) are not knowing subjects. Neither, quite differently, is the viewer, who does not
confront perceptual problems with the characters of these filmseven if we sometimes feel
closer to them than the notional protagonists in most ofAntonionis later features (as Rohdie
argues of the films staring in 1966 with Blow-Up in his important 1990 book on the director). In
these films, the cameras gaze embodies and offers to the viewer an unusual opportunity to seekout
details, textures and environments adjacent to or even outside the domain of human dramamost
notably in Leclissewith its final seven minutesbut really from the very first frame and throughout,
all the while skirting it.
Like many subsequent writers (such as Rhodes, 2011, p. 290), Pier Paolo Pasolini draws
attention to what has become known as an emblematic development in Il deserto rossowhereby the
camera seems to lose interest in Corrados (Richard Harris) attempts to entice potential employees
sitting in a Ravenna warehouse to sign up as workers for his new Patagonian oil venture. The
viewer is then presented with what Pasolini influentially describes as a
stupendous close-up of a distressingly real Emilian worker followed by an insane panfrom the bottom up along an electric blue stripe on the whitewashed wall of the
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warehouse. All this testifies to a deep, mysterious, andat timesgreat intensity in theformal idea that excites the fantasy of Antonioni. (2005, pp. 178-9)
Pasolini is very precise in emphasisingthe shift from the distressingly real workers face to the
sheer abstraction of the coloured line. But the cut between the two is in fact less a shift of
perspective and focus than a mark of continuity exemplifyingAntonionis unique and inextricably
entwined modernist rendering of reality.The camerasegalitarian gaze treats a decontextualised
painted line on a wall and the weather-beatenvisage of an authentic human being as of equal
graphic and objective interest. With the cut between the supposedly human and the inhuman,
realism and modernism dissolve into one image. The wonderfully evoked insane pan, meanwhile,
isnt the end ofwhat seems like the jolting distraction away from already fragile and contestable
narrative shards and human vestiges while in fact the two domains are further intermeshed, when
the film cuts to a space presumably outside the warehouse dominated with bright blue science
fiction-looking bottles stacked on straw bedding. Initially seeming to conclude the remarkable
sequence by further enforcing abstraction, when Corrado wanders into this striking composition
from the back of the frame, dwarfed by his surroundings, we are reminded again that such a
futuristic-meets-historical environment is in fact one and the same confusing reality within which
the human figures live.
With this string of images the scene, only ever very tangentially and hesitantly connected to
the films loose central story of Giuliana, thereby apparently concludes with narrative interest and
information about Corrados work scenario itself overcome by aesthetic detailing of material space,
inclusive of human and non-human elements. With such apparent diversions into physical, spatial
and graphic reality, no matter how artificial its appearance and compositional effectsIl deserto
rossos environment and portrait of then hi-tech modernityshowing such a distinction as no longer
viableand away from a purported diegesis, important narrative information goes missing. In
compensation, the viewer is invited to imbibe and process veritable explosions of aesthetic and
conceptual material gleaned from this very precise reality, just as when the film lingers on
enormous eruptions of steam and gas emanating from an entirely artificial landscape as if from a
primordial fissure in the earths crustimages at the centre of which can again sometimes be
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glimpsed small human figures that are concurrently protagonists of this strange reality and
spectators gazing upon it.
(Il deserto rosso)
John David Rhodes writes of the Chinese Governments outraged response to Antonionis
extraordinary 1972 documentaryCina chung kuo: In a sense, the Chinese officials whether they
knew it or notwere saying something true about Antonionis cinema: it was often looking at what
seemed to be the wrong things. But such looking constitutes his style. (2011, p. 297)Through
looking at the wrong things, narrative (or ideological) attenuation and what seems like perceptual
diversion generates room for so much else: necessarily elliptical and selective detailing of an always
elusive reality. Coming at the considerable cost of its habitual epistemological privilege, thepotential opening up of the gaze, this never getting a sense of control over what we see,
paradoxically enables a much clearer and more properly inhabited vision of what modern reality
looks and feels like as characterised by opacity and fragmentation.
One rather unostentatious example is provided by a sequence from La notte, today the least
discussed ofAntonionis 60s films (despite arguably being more closely tied to historical context,
the social and cultural climate ofItalys post-war resurgence essayed at its powerful northern
centre). In a brief interlude away from the long mansion party sequence that comprises the second
half of the film, rather than giving us conventional audio access to the car in which Lidia and ayoung man appear to talk and flirt, the film offers only the sound of rain. We are left to watch the
slowly moving vehicle for over a minute, during which the tenor of what looks like an extremely
amiable conversation can be glimpsed as played out on Lidias face, distorted by water pouring
down the window.While the viewer can interpret her apparent pleasure at this hermetic, private
encounter away from both the high-decadence gathering and the viewers own sound-image, La
nottes notional protagonist and her problems have been so little fleshed out in the preceding film
(now nearing its end) that our narrative attention risks badly drifting when denied dialog in this very
beautiful scene. Instead, we are given the opportunity to explore the densely textured monochromegradations and modulating patterns made by the streaks of flowing water on the dark vehicles glass
and chassis.
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(La notte, 1961)
Taking a more auteurist line, we may seek to interpret Antonionis refusal to take us inside
this protean couples temporaryadulterous bubble forwhat it might suggest of Lidias individual
frustrations, or the privileged class she represents. But such immediate tweaking of the sound-
image into an authored or socio-historically revealingtext to be read not only involves consciously
felt hermeneutic work. The will-to-interpretation also seems to commit real violence upon the
image in all its rich materialism and elusiveness, its properly ambiguous reality. While different
readings of the sequence in the context of this narratively slack film can provide genuine pleasure
and likewise fruitful accounts of the reality offered byLa notteas a portrayal of modern Italys
business winners alongsidethe films more anguished protagonists from the intellectual sphere
such interpretive and analytical frames, while perhaps revealing and informative, are also preceded
and arguably overwhelmed when it comes to spectatorial experience by the undeniable cinematic
facts: constantly shifting patterns and transforming shapes brought about by a slowly moving car
in the rain, undulating chiaroscuro effects of a flashing traffic light, and the background architecture
of a quiet street.
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The images material-aesthetic autonomy is a crucial part of this cinemas distinct realism.
Each shot inLeclisse, for example, has an undeniable solidity in rendering a particular material
reality within Romasvarious inner and outer regions (plus the small Verona airport where Vittoria
enjoys a lyrical interlude), all the while intimating an unstable flux between the clarity and vaporous
ambiguity Lefebvre describes as comprising post-war modernitys experiential real. With the films
final minutes, in which the viewer is denied its protagonists, we are confronted with the most
famous loss of fullness, character and drama or fiction in Antonionis cinema. The viewer is left to
pursue other interests that while seemingnew are in fact comprised of the same environment that
dominated much of the film but now taking on an explicitly starring foreground role. Highlighting
just one brief moment from Leclisses aesthetically and conceptually unprecedented and still
unmatched final minutes, the camera looks into a rusty barrel within which floats debris including
what looks like a piece of wood that Vittoria had earlier tossed in at an awkward moment of
indecision and stasis with potential boyfriend Piero (Alain Delon), the vain young stockbroker, at
the now familiar EUR intersection alongside a battened-down building site.
Following a cut, an extravagant tracking shot shows water leaking out from the barrel
along the ground. Other images of the immediate surrounds follow, including some shots featuring
human figures that as filmed from the back could be our protagonists but upon turning around are
revealed as strangers. Another interior shot of the barrel is then followed by two exponentially
decontextualised close shots, presumably showing the leakage on the ground as it forms a slick,
made up of increasingly abstract shapes both gleaned from within a very real environment yet
escaping it. In the wake of the earlier barrel and water tracking shots, this miniature sublime
double-image in many ways crystallises the way the whole sequence replaces narrative and thematic
developmentshaky from the very startwith a descriptive and inherently ambiguous detailing of
the immediate world.
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(Leclisse)
The images of this seven-minute coda together comprise a freshly dripping canvas
offering up the challenge, or chance, to wash away our memories of the recognisably human
through looking directly upon the phenomenal world by means of the camerasdocumentary or
experimental rendering of material space as transforming through time. The familiar street corner
and milieu now emerge as an ever modulating set of material facts the contours and nature of
which are changing beyond recognition before our eyes. Concurrently unremarkable, confronting
and revelatory, this physical reality is appropriately presented as always in flux and beyond our
grasp, cosmic yet absolutely quotidian, apparently post-human yet entirely immanent. In other
words, the only home we have. Like an enormously elongated incarnation of Pasolinis insane pan,
or what others have often called temps mortor dead time those moments where time is most
strongly felt, typically at the end of a scene that continues despite events pertaining to the central
story having apparently concluded, effectively thereby killing narrative purpose and movement
Leclisses ending is likelyAntonionis boldest sequence. Yet it merely makes explicit what is present
throughout: the reality of the filmed world as very consistent yet epistemologically destabilising
ground upon which a genuinely modern realism is forged.
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Sam Rohdie argues that the true productivityof Antonionis films lies in the new shapes,
the new stories, the new, the temporary, subjects which they permit. (1990, p. 2) He immediately
follows with a crucial distinction between the dramatic dictates of the purported diegesis and the
aesthetic compositions on screen, and by implication the situation of the viewer: To lose
perspective, to lose identity, which are often open tragedies for Antonionis characters, are
opportunities for the films. (ibid.) Yet things are also, as ever, not so clear. In Leclisses final
minutes and throughout Lavventuras second halfit is the viewer who is challenged to overcome the
tragedy ofprotagonists being evicted from the film, to see if another opportunity can be grasped
through such loss. This risky film-viewer relationship is inaugurated with Lavventura, which caused
initial scandal before remarkably quick canonisation (being voted second best film ever made after
Citizen Kanein 1962s Sight and Soundpoll of international critics) for the same essential reason.
For the May 1960 Cannes festival audience first confronted with Lavventura, infamously
jeering at its premiere (a second screening, after petitioning by Rossellini, Janine Bazin and many
other European cinema luminaries, resulted in the film being awarded a custom-made Jury prize
for the beauty of its images and for seeking to invent a new cinematic language), and for countless
viewers over subsequent years, the island sequence clearly outlives its stay in narrative termsthe
search for Anna, who has already disappeared from the filmand enters into a realm of
increasingly abstract and de-narrativised yet also potentially suggestive thematic essaying. The
framing and choreography of bodies within this particular, sublime spacemade even more
obviously so by way of a genuinely threatening tornado and stormcomprised of volcanic rock
can generate enormous resonance for the viewer watching these privileged figures of post-war
Italian modernity (also clearly marked by the continuity of historically inherited wealth and power)
dragging weary and cynically maintained human investments across primordial volcanic ground,
dwarfed by the overwhelming environment of the Aeolian sea, which may have taken one of their
number. There is, however, a more modern and logical yet perhaps also in a way equally unnerving
and ambiguous answer to the mystery of Annas disappearance, one only available to the viewer.
Like Vittoria and Piero in the final minutes ofLeclisse, she has simply left the film; or more
precisely still, it has left her.
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(Lavventura, 1960)
From La nottes renowned credit-sequence tracking shot down the then-new Pirelli tower,
showing central Milano reflected in endless glass, and then throughout the films first half, the
striking modernity of this built environment takes the place ofLavventuras island (and later, Sicilias
crumbling architecture). The ultra-modern world of Italys northern metropolis is no more
comprehensible or reassuring than what William Arrowsmith calls natures deep primordial time in
reference toAntonionis nature indexes (1995, p. 55) such as Lavventuras volcanic edifice that so
looms over the human presence. In a more overtly reflexive fashion, formal play with line, focus,
texture, bodieshuman and otherwiseand above all colour, dominates Il deserto rosso. Yet the
directors unique modernist appropriation of realism, or vice versa, and with the latter film the
absolute flattening of distinctions between historical and filmic realities, means that none of these
rather tactile, at times seemingly3Dor virtual images are per se beyond reality. Rather, they
present the various shocks and radical modifications of familiar experience within this
technologised world, irrespective of how different we feel our gaze to be from that of the films
troubled, closely felt yet never truly accessible protagonist.
(La notte)
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(Il deserto rosso)
Brought to life by viewer engagement,Antonionis early-60s films each offer a distinct
reality comprised of a doubled vision that becomes flattened into one ambiguous modernist-realist
image comprised of the on-screen world closely tied to real contemporary Italy in its distinct
regions and cities in context of which the notional characters live and move, and the often abstract
framing of all this before the viewer. The result is that while the films offer loosely character-based
narratives, the tentative presence offeeling and meaningas construed and gleaned by the viewer is
ultimately tethered less to the characters and their drama and rather more to the nexus famously
stressed by Walter Benjamin in his Work of Art essay: the camera. (1992, p. 672) We sense this
more strongly than usual with Antonionis most famous films, perhaps because their images seem
to have at least a partial stake in the human drama but as a frequently detached onlooker also
equallyor sometimes much more sodrawn to other potential interests.
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There are moments where the viewer can feel Claudia, Lidia, Vittoria or Giuliana within
reach (or at least the performative embodiments of Vitti and Moreau). In terms of proximity, this
is often thanks to the camera seeming to skirt the personal space of the favoured bodyalbeit
typically in unusual and tentative ways that allowher to negate the viewers gaze by turning away
from uswhile denyingclear and sustained identification, despite this usually being an on-screen
subject privileged over all others.Whatever the shots precise formal characteristics, however,
placement of this body within the surrounding world, be it nature or built environment, is crucial.
In La nottethe frustration and jaded ennui of Lidia and her husband Giovanni (Marcello
Mastroianni) is palpable from the start, but only through a very broad sketching of the couple as
representing a formerly idealistic intelligentsia. No matter how much time we spend with these
figures, they remain out of reach as subjects. In Leclisse, the dialectical fascination-meets-
dissatisfaction exhibited by Vittoria when confronted with historic Roma and the modern, in-
progress rejuvenated EUR is strongly felt, and the viewer may feel more for her than anyone else
(including perhaps throughoutAntonionis entire work). Yet we understand hardly anything of her
desires, ideals or intentions throughout.
In Lavventurawe are able to perceive Claudias anguish, sometimes up close but more
usually at a kind of respectful distance, on the island following Annas disappearance and later on
the Sicilian mainland. But we never reallycomprehend our eventual protagonists actions, or even
discover basic biographical information, despite becoming incrementally more invested in her fate
than that of any other character. Disturbingly, this includes Anna, whose potential return we may
also come to fear along with Claudia late in the film when she awakes at dawn and runs down the
corridor of a Taormina hotel, one of the shots greeted at Cannes by shouts of Cut, cut! from the
frustrated audience.
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(Lavventura)
Rather than sharing the protagonists perspective, we observe her predicaments from a not
disinterested but also not entirely committed distance as played out within evocative yet always
recognisable and real post-war space. The camera travels along nearby the favoured human figures
observing them, Ian Cameron suggests, not from a clearly subjective perspective, but rather from
deep-not-quite-subjective-shots (1968, p. 10) that can appear to offer, but never totally allow,
identification in part because there is no entirely convincing subject on screen with whom we can
relate. If up until Leclissea mid-way camera position makes the viewer work at gleaning a sense of
character on screen (even if she generally seems lacking the kind of depth, biography and
development typically required of more classical types), with Il deserto rosso a heightened sense of
the subjective seems both more palpable and dysfunctional. Through what can appear a kind of
neo-expressionist aesthetics, protagonistic subjectivity is here at a dual apogee and crisis point from
which it will not recover. In addition to exaggerated and denuded colour, out-of-focus and deep-
focus shots, flattened depth-of-field, and compositions mixing high-tech industry and polluted
nature, this also plays out within unhomely, often decidedly sterile ultra-modern interiors the
frequently science fiction-like appearance of which crosses various work and domestic spaces.
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(Il deserto rosso)
If such aesthetic form might initially be seenor justified by way ofexpressingGiulianas experiential reality asthe most apparently neurotic of Antonionis protagonists,
Seymour Chatman asks of this film: But who is the subject? Subjectivecan refer to the psyche of the
character, or to that of the camera, the films mute narrator, or to both concurrently (1985, p. 131)
to which I would add, the viewer. Even where we might seek to order and explain the filmic
reality in front of us as accessing our protagonists psyche, she is concurrently never more in
doubt or felt as so directly borne of the films distinct formal construction. Emphasising this unique
reflexive foregrounding, Rohdie argues that though the camera is often subjective even as what
this means is never truly clearthat subjectivity and subjective look is in turn objectivelyregarded; Giulianas subjectivity is more an object observed than a subjectivity to identify with.
(1990, p. 185) Regardless of how objective or subjective the gaze or doubling thereof can appear
in a given instant, Il deserto rosso and the other films make perceivable the actuality of such a moment
as generated for the viewer through special and distinct cinematic procedures.
Like the heavily qualified enactment and skirting of subjectivity, objectivity for these films
is itself an always-ambiguous domain of lived experience. Merleau-Ponty describes the capacity for
objectively observable behaviour as a site for meaning to an extent no less than within the realm
of subjective experience, provided that objectivity is not confusedwith what is measurable. (1964,p. 24) No matter how seemingly objective they become, Antonionis films never equate the gaze
with measurability. Their dissolution of distinctions between objective and subjective gazes, realism
and modernism, drama and abstract documentary interests, space and intentional graphic detailing,
both enormously challenges and energises perspective. Pascal Bonitzer writes of the importance in
what seems like a non-human perspective shared between the camera and viewer with Lavventura:
Beyond the basically human point of view incarnated in the protagonists, there isanother point of view. That abstract point of view is picked up in a nonhuman way by
the camera in random movementsexplosions, clouds, Brownian motions, spots,indeed, a neutral space filled with any movement whatsoever within which the flow ofAntonionis film comes to rest. (1989, p. 217)
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While strongly marked by a sense of autonomy and non-anthropocentric concerns, this other point
of view in which thefilms come to rest is still ultimatelyhuman but in an often very unfamiliar
sense. For Gilles Deleuze, allAntonionis shots, including the most seemingly inhuman or
objective images, offer what he calls an invisible subjectivity. Here objectivity becomes
internalised, Deleuze writes, so that it is formed through becoming mental, and going into a
strange, invisible subjectivity of feelings which go from the objective to the subjective, and are
internalised in everyone. (1989, p. 8)The films allow us to gaze upon bodies in and of the world,
human and otherwise, so as to see this reality for all its oscillation of clarity and ambiguity, in the
process internalising objectivityincluding its most alien, subject-challenging elementsjust as
subjective desire transforms our understanding of the material world.
I feel the need to express reality in terms that are not completely realistic, Antonioni says
ofIl deserto rossos technical and aesthetic innovations (1996, p. 28). In each of the early-60s films,
the world is rendered through a focus on the objects, places, spaces and forms of a physical reality
in front of the camera as transformed by its inherently artificial gazea new but now essential
component of modern reality and how we see it. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier writes of
Lavventuraat the time of release: In Antonionis work the world is never merely a setting or a
symbol. (1989, p. 194) Instead, the ineffable presence and confronting ambiguity of space and time
takes over. Throughout the films specific environments in all their objective power and genuinely
mysterious resonance seem to overwhelm the characters, dwarfing the human drama and subjective
frame. Ground zero in terms of nature is Lavventuras island search. But the film goes on to enact
realitys more challenging, often human-derived power as the architectural and topographical spaces
of Sicilia somehow come to overwhelm the original purpose of Claudio and Sandros road tripto
search for Annawith creeping, and in many respects everyday, nihilistic effect. If there is a central
moment of this extraordinary development, it begins with their visit to the modern Fascist-built but
never occupied workers village when looking for Noto, the scene concluding with the palpable
sense of an eerie gaze or presence evoked by a slow tracking shot down an exterior corridor
towards the couple as they get in the car and drive away, gradually coming to a full stop after the
human presence has completely left the frame.
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A very surprising, genuinely radical cut then ushers in their first embrace shot from a low
angle against blank sky then from above and side-on as the new lovers lie on a grassy knoll and kiss,
their bodies fragmented by abstractly framed close-ups often showing mainly skin and hair. The
combination of these brief, extraordinary adjoining sequencesmore precisely the enormous
lacuna between themperhaps best explains Deleuzes description of Antonionis cinema as
uniquely taking up the Nietzschean project of a real critique of morality. (1989, p. 8) Any such
philosophical account can only come about, however, because the filmed reality of Sicilia, the
deserted village and the stretched tracking shot through its stark, never-used contours, followed by
a spatially and temporally indeterminate ellipsis into surprising untrammelled euphoria and eros,
can be read as forging this morally confronting event.
(Lavventura)
For this cinemas protagonists, but even for the viewer watching images that give an
unprecedented role to the power of primordial, centuries-old, and modern time, along with
natural and human-made spaceall such distinctions voided by the technology of filmthe
world seems, to borrow Merleau-Pontys description ofexperience, already there before
reflection beginsas an inalienable presence (1989, p. vii). Antonionis films suggest this in the
prominence given to the world in all its quotidian imminence and ubiquitous sublimity, its
historically located modernity and intimations of deep time prior to, during, and particularly after
the humans have played out their drama. By tying perception to the actual shape and status of the
external world, Rohdie writes, Antonioni made them both equally subject of his films, and equally
ambiguous and tenuous. (1990, p. 72) This joining makes neither any less impactful. On the
contrary, reality as viewed becomes more imposing and ineffable than ever.
A consistently modern source of filmed realitys uncannypower can be strongly sensed
throughoutLeclisse, not only during its famous conclusion but also in a small moment such as
when Vittoria seeks out the source of strange sounds made by flagpoles in the nocturnal breeze of a
deserted EUR boulevard, as seen in the still at the top of this article. Featuring a series of quite
abstract chiaroscuro compositions placing Vittoria/Vittis body, frequently seen from behind,
against the concrete and steel of this built environment (again dating from the Fascist era), this
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short playing out of a modern human-derived scenario against the imposing cosmic opacity of a
jet-black sky concludes with a shot of our protagonist gazing out from a vantage point at the
graffiti-marked base of an oversized statue and its inky shadows.
(Leclisse)
The presence and primacy of the physical world is emphasised in these films through the
unusual prominence of location, space, time, and the world of objects. In Theory of FilmSiegfried
Kracauer characteristically describes the tremendous importance of objects,writing that the actor
too is no more than a detail, a fragment of the matter of the world (1960, p. 45) and pointing out
the potential in rendering real life complexes which the conventional figure-ground patterns usually
conceal from view. (Ibid, p. 53) The first image ofLeclissestrikingly evokes this effect with a verysurprising but entirely appropriate establishing shot: a graphically dense composition showing a
desk lamp, books, and cluttered objects flattened against a textured wall covering in paintings. The
subsequent pan then reveals part of the object-mass of this everyday yet somehow strange-looking
reality to be the shirt sleeve-covered arm of a male body, which we now see staring off screen right
yet in remaining immobile retains the appearance of an object.
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(Leclisse)
The lack of distinctions in such an image between form and content, subject and object,fiction and documentary, figure and ground, narration and reflexive thematising, demonstrate the
central tenets of Antonionis re-conceived realism as both challengingand genuinely liberating in
the sense Bazin described of deep focus and times entry into the filmic image.This results in
aesthetic juxtapositions that, to borrowKracauers advocacyof cinema as objective realism
irrespective of any purported fictional or dramatic content, reveal configurations ofsemi-abstract
phenomena (160, p. 54).The majority of Antonionis semi-abstract phenomena, including his
most painterly or abstract looking images, do not in fact show something strange per se. Rather, the
historical palimpsest of post-war Italy is photographed in a way that brings out both the startlingmodern beauty and flattening power of its interconnected spaces, no matter their origins or
intended purpose.
One brief example is the moment in La nottewhen Lidia/Jeanne Moreau is transformed
into a tiny figure barely visible in a far bottom-left slither of the frame, almost evicted by a giant
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expanse of stark concrete wall as seen from many floors abovea possible vantage point that may
or may not be the apartment in which her husband lies listlessly. If the angle of Giovannis
subsequent gaze out the window suggests the preceding image is probably not easily understood as
his point-of-view shot, the ambiguous combination of these two images demonstrates again the
true proximity ofor indeed impossible-to-delineatehuman and object worlds, while also
putting a distinct protagonist or subject per se further into doubt.
(La notte)
* * *
As viewers of Antonionis films, our engagement with the world as presented on screen is
one in whichto once more utilise Merleau-Pontys phenomenological language, so suggestive of
cinemas virtual powerthe mind goes out through the eyes to wander among objects (1964, p.
166). To indulgethe visual in all its confronting and enabling ambiguity is at the core both of this
modernist cinemas re-configured realism and its enormous seduction. Antonioni says that his
visual technique is in moving from a series of images up to a state of things. (qtd. in Tinazzi, 1996,
p. xvii) The viewer also collates these images into a whole state of things. Each of us brings not
only customised order but also heavily qualified meaning to the reality of this film-world. More
than usual, however, in the process we also realise that such a manoeuvre remains both tenuous
and viable only for an audience of one.
What prevails is the space and time of the world in all its ambiguity as manifest both on
and as film. In his famous Dear Antonioni open letter celebratingthe directorsfragility, Roland
Barthes saw in these films a discernment that never confuses meaningwith truth. (1989, pp. 209,
210) WithAntonionis cinema of the early 1960s, modernism and realism thereby achieve the
richest and most historically appropriate union, driven by still challenging ambiguity and freedom.
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Works Cited
Antonioni, Michelangelo (1996) The Architecture of Vision: Writings and interviews on Cinema(eds. Carlo, Carlo di& Tinazzi, Giorgio), New York: Marsilio.
Arrowsmith, William (1995)Antonioni: Poet of Images(ed. Perry, Ted), New York: Oxford University Press.
Barthes, Roland (1989) Dear Antonioni (trans. Nora Hope), re-printed in Chatman, Seymour & Fink, Guido(eds.) Lavventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director: New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, pp.209-214.
Bazin, Andr (1967) The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, in Hugh Gray (ed. & trans.) What isCinema?: Volume I, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 23-40.
Benjamin, Walter (1992) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (trans. Harcourt BraceJovanovich), reprinted in Mast, Gerald, Cohen, Marshall and Braudy, Leo (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism(4thedition), New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 665-681.
Bonitzer, Pascal (1989) The Disappearance (on Antonioni) (trans. Beyer, Chris, Moses, Gavriel & Chatman,Seymour) in Chatman, Seymour & Fink, Guido (eds.) Lavventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director: NewBrunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, pp. 215-18.
Brunette, Peter (1998) The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cameron, Ian & Wood, Robin (1968) Antonioni, London: Studio Vista.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image(trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta), Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.
Chatman, Seymour (1985)Antonioni, or The Surface of the World, Berkeley: University of California Press.----- (1989) All the Adventures, in Chatman, Seymour & Fink, Guido (eds.) Lavventura: Michelangelo Antonioni,Director: New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1992, pp. 3-15.
Ford, Hamish (2012) Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time, London & New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heidegger, Martin (1993) The Origin of the Work of Art (trans. Albert Hofstadter), in Basic Writings: MartinHeidegger(ed. Krell, David Farrell), Routledge: London, pp. 139-212.
Kracauer, Siegfried (1960) Theory of Film: The Redemption of Reality, London: Oxford University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois (1978) Acinema; Wide Angle, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1989, pp. 169-80.----- (1991) The Inhuman(trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby), Stanford: Polity Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964) The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays(trans. William Cobb), Evanston,Illinois: Northwestern University Press.----- (1989) The Phenomenology of Perception(trans. Colin Smith), London: Routledge.
Rohdie, Sam (1990)Antonioni, London: BFI Publishing.
Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire (1989) Lavventura (trans. Chatman, Seymour & Morel, Renee) inChatman, Seymour & Fink, Guido (eds.) Lavventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director: New Brunswick andLondon: Rutgers University Press, pp. 191-5.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo (2005) The Cinema of Poetry from Heretical Empiricism(trans. Lawton, Ben & Barnett,Louise K.), Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, pp. 167-186.
Rascaroli, Laura & Rhodes, John David (2011) Interstitial, Pretentious, Alienated, Dead: Antonioni at 100fromAntonioni: Centenary Essays, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-17.
Rhodes, John David (2011) Antonioni and the Development of Style, in Rascaroli, Laura & Rhodes, JohnDavid (eds.)Antonioni: Centenary Essays, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 276-300.
Tinazzi, Giorgio (1996) The Gaze and the Story, in Antonioni, Michelangelo, The Architecture of Vision:d C d l l d T k l