(hamish ford) antonionis ambiguity - challenging realism in the early 1960s films

7/29/2019 (Hamish Ford) Antonionis Ambiguity - Challenging Realism in the Early 1960s Films

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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.
http://c/Users/hf755/Desktop/il-deserto-rosso.htm


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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.
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2dx6papxS1qb91u6o5_1280.jpg


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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

(hamish ford) antonionis ambiguity - challenging realism in the early 1960s films

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