l’eclisse (w&d antonioni, w. tonino guerra, w. elio bartolini, ottiero ottieri)

The third in Antonioni’s trilogy of Europeans on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In this case Vitti and Delon, paddling between the banality of love and the imminence of crisis. Scorsese, wiki informs, rates this as the boldest film of the trilogy, perhaps because it is the least definitive in terms of narrative. Essentially, Vitti, who leaves her older lover in the opening scene, tiptoes towards Delon, who seems as vacuous and arrogant as he is pretty, resisting his advances until she doesn’t. Not a great deal happens in the meantime. There’s a stock market crash, Vitti goes on a flight over Rome, she blacks up and dances a disconcerting ‘African’ routine, she hangs out with Delon in his parents’ posh gaffe. In narrative terms, it’s inconsequential and it builds towards the puzzling final sequence as the characters themselves drop out of the film and it lingers over random (or carefully selected) images of Roman life, a pared-back predecessor to the fireworks of Zabriskie Point. If anything, Antonioini seems to be using the medium as a meditative means of exploring the limits of freedom in a European woman’s life: social freedom, sexual freedom, the freedom to determine her own identity. The headline towards the end about threat of nuclear war suggests an altogether more existential cloud, hovering at the edge of the screen, and reminds us of how much the apocalypse was part of the post-war generation’s consciousness. 

la notte (w&d antonioni, w. ennio flaiano, tonino guerra)

La Notte takes L’Avventura’s elaboration of mood (what they call clima over here) and welds it to a disciplined twenty four hour structure. Moreau and Mastroianni make for an impeccably charismatic troubled couple, as the film documents their marriage on the verge of collapse. Cinema in mid-century Italy embraced existential angst with a vigour that even the French can’t claim to match. The French fascination with the rules of form meant they were always more playful than their Italian neighbours, who seem to be perpetually chewing on the hollow bones of affluence. (Perhaps it is more than coincidence that the Godard film which feels closest in tone to the likes of Antonioni, Fellini et al was shot in Italy.) In La Notte, Antonioni pushes the ennui and angst towards a kind of perfection, a perfection which is conveyed through the cinematography and lighting, where every shot is another element in the couple’s exquisite decadence. It is at once claustrophobic, deadening and brilliant, as is the case of their marriage.

Unfortunately I was teaching on the night of the screening of LÉclisse, the third in this kind-of trilogy. But seeing the first two on consecutive days, you can see how the director had no choice but to gravitate towards colour and the fractal explosion at the end of Zabriskie Point. La Notte would appear to be pushing an aesthetic as far as it can go. Even if there was one more step, the end of this journey, the one he and his characters is on, is clearly nigh. The constrained concerns of the mid twentieth century cannot be masticated for much longer, no matter how beautiful they (and their avatars, Antonioni’s perfect actors) may be. People will soon stop wearing perfect suits, their hair will be a mess, the codes of civilisation will be challenged and overthrown, to an extent. The whole of late twentieth century thought is encapsulated in the films of Antonioni, leading to Jack Nicholson going awol on the edge of the world’s great desert. 

l’avventura (w&d antonioni, w. guerra, elio bartolini)

L’Avventura hinges on a brilliant moment of melodrama, which is also something so down to earth that the audience can readily connect with it, in spite of the fact that this is a film about wealthy socialites. A group of loose friends go on a day trip to an island in a yacht. One of their party, Ana, is in a troubled relationship with her fiancé, and disappears off the face of the earth. The group search the rocky, uninhabited island but Ana persists in her vanishing. Later there are reports of another boat in the area, and then reports of her having been seen on the Sicilian mainland. Her fiancé and friend, Sandro and Claudia, go in search of her, but there are tensions between them, which leads to the revelation of a secret which might explain Ana’s disappearance.

This story, which is echoed at the start of La Notte, is direct and straightforward in a film where so much is opaque and confusing. It gives a spine to the film’s 144 minute narrative, even if the second half of the film struggles to maintain the dramatic tension as the focus shifts to Sandro and Claudia’s relationship. As much as anything else, Antonioni is a master of mood. Scenes unfold gradually, allowing the tensions and conflicts to reveal themselves without ever needing to be underlined. The humorous character is later revealed to be heartless, the charmer is stripped bare by the end. There is a preoccupation with what we might now call toxic masculinity, but this is always crafted, never bludgeoned. This leads to the creation of what the textbooks might describe as 3-D characters, albeit the kind of 3-D characters that Anglo-Saxon moviemaking tends to shy away from: complex characters struggling with the simpler things of life like desire, faithfulness, the bricks and mortar of the (post-)Christian societies we inhabit. 

blow up (w&d michelangelo antonioni, w tonino guerra, julio cortázar, edward bond)

Blow Up is one of those films which has a constant presence at the back of the mind. You imagine you know it backwards. Which is why it’s so good to get the opportunity to see it again on the cinema screen and realise that, in keeping with the themes of the film, what you imagined isn’t necessarily the same film as the one that’s really there. 

For example, I remembered the fake tennis match at the end, but hadn’t remembered that it came, precisely, at the end. It’s an act of sheer brio. A dozen painted-faced youths turn up and play pretend tennis and that’s that. An act of consummate narrative brilliance, pulling all the theoretical threads of the film together whilst making it crystal clear (or crystal opaque) that there’s no use hoping for a neat plot resolution. 

In case you hadn’t got it, this is a film about perception. What we see, what we think we see, what we imagine we see and what we don’t see. Reading some of the notes about the film, there seems to be a suggestion that Antonioni wasn’t interested in dialogue, but this seems like another oversight. Besides the famous “I am in Paris” line, one of the great pre-Lynchian Lynchian moments, there are also some nailed on exchanges as Hemmings’ Thomas talks to Sarah Miles about what he has or hasn’t seen. At other moments the dialogue feels like another musical note in a film that is so obsessive about composition. The lines might feel as though they’re discordant, but that’s part of the film’s deliberate discordance. As is Hemmings’ hyper-active acting, which rather than being forced, feels representative of a time when there was a furious energy at play, but an energy which was never clear as to what its objectives were. 

There is even a latent energy in the propeller which Thomas buys, the implication of a movement which has been stilled. Which is also a way of viewing photography. Roland Barthes’ punctum: the moment which the photograph captures and the unseen life contained within that image’s crystallisation. It might be that Antonioni’s film contains a plea for us to look harder, to penetrate the hidden corners of the visible in order to glimpse the supposedly invisible. Something which a society which has become increasingly image-dependent, without in any way improving its faculty for reading those images, would do well to heed. Further to that, you can see in Blow-Up the way that history’s tendrils stretch back to that supposedly revolutionary time of the swinging sixties, which was far from being all that it appeared. Rather than being the advent of a utopic freedom, it was actually the dawning of advanced materialism. Another Antonioni quote states that he didn’t want the film to be a London film, but the images which capture a city at the beginning of a process of transformation towards the modern behemoth it is still becoming, make it unequivocally a London film. And one of the greatest, without a shadow of a doubt. 

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Note - Edward Bond has a scriptwriting credit for English dialogue, adding to the impression that the film’s dialogue was something that was taken more seriously than has been suggested. With the director, Guerra, Bond and Cortazar on the script side, one wonders if there’s ever been a stronger script team put together for a movie. 

the red desert (w&d antonioni, w guerra)

A film washed in a desaturated glow of genius. Almost impossible to say with any degree of certainty what this is about. Mental illness/ environmentalism/ marriage. Riddled with moments of brilliance. At its heart a performance which leapfrogs the extraordinary. Monica Vitti, given license  to be peculiar, febrile, feminine. A figure on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A landscape that glows with a meaning which is never revealed. Through a pall of fog. Industrial. Maritime. Psychological. Psychosexual. Make out. The film's longest sequence ... a strange dockside shack which the characters end up literally deconstructing. Ripping its red planks to pieces. Was this the desert? Who knows. Not even the author. Amoral bourgeoisie or outliers for the swinging sixties. The postwar hedonists we have all become. Scope for interpretation vast. Excessive. Text over-ripe with signifiers. Desolate industrial wasteland. The boy that couldn't walk. A woman seeking to determine what shade of paint to put on the walls of a shop with nothing in it. 

No-one created atmosphere in the movies like Antonioni. Walking into his various scenes is like walking into different rooms. Never knowing what to expect. Is it a good party? Is it a bad party? You can never be sure. His movies are balancing acts, constantly on the verge of teetering into the ridiculous, constantly resisting. I have nothing intelligent to say about this movie. It is sublime, but fails to fit into any normal cinematic discourse. It exists in a language of images. If words were still pictograms I might have stood a chance. Of making sense. Of making sense of it.