SOURCE: “Eclipsing the Commonplace: The Logic of Alienation in Antonioni’s Cinema,” in Film Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 4, Summer, 1995, p. 22–34.

[In the following essay, Moore discusses Antonioni’s exploration of alienation in his films.]

Talk of alienation in Antonioni’s cinema is more often than not negative. Despite Peter Bondanella’s observation that characterization in Antonioni’s films might not be all that negative, typically Weberian interpretations of disenchantment dominate readings of Antonioni’s cinema.¹ I would like to elaborate upon Bondanella’s observation by supplying a theoretical framework, and then, noting some instances from Antonioni’s work, argue that alienation is more accurately portrayed as negativity in Hegel’s and Adorno’s sense of a reflection on value. As an instance of negativity, alienation, in this view, is a positive event promoting aesthetic progress in the face of novel experience.

In Weber’s by now classic analysis of the modern condition, alienation arises when the self becomes disenchanted with the world and retreats into itself, oftentimes to reflect upon its relations with the world and its relationship with others. In this sense, alienation implies a universal dimension to a self that sequesters itself in order to remain constant or faithful to its emotional dispositions and priorities despite alterations in the world. In retreat, the orthodox self ponders the option to embrace or retreat from a world which either meets or denies its set desires. One problem with this maneuver, however, is that the historical world is overall an exemplification and a realization of human desires, and so by retreating from the historical world, the self retreats from historical aspects of itself as well. Regardless of how we choose to understand this retreat of the self from itself into itself, it is at best paradoxical, and it is this paradox which motivates the logic of alienation and progress in Antonioni’s cinema.

Weber’s sense of alienation is by and large understood negatively, as a motivated retreat from an uninhabitable world no longer capable of providing a good home and safe haven for the human spirit. And it is this negative assessment which embodies, in a summary fashion, the notion of alienation most often deployed in interpretations of Antonioni’s work. Most critics would agree that alienation is the property of being which is the central aesthetic determiner of his representations of modern life, although it is the negative or reclusive effects of this property that are more often than not cited as thematically significant to comprehending the ambiguities of his work. To be alienated in an Antonioni film is to be resentfully situated in an overly industrialized, capital-intensive world that fails to provide a nurturing environment in which the emotions might flourish.

The chief difficulty in criticism’s near uniform application of this negative notion of alienation, however, is that it obscures a utopian gesture implicit in it. Although it is true that disconnection and its chief effects, loneliness and isolation, are thematically relevant to Antonioni’s cinema, the alienated self’s melancholic search for its lost ideal world tells only half the story. The other half is history, or the historical self’s search for an accommodation with a world it has itself produced. Rather than an end in itself, alienation, the effect of deidentification and noncorrespondence, is the beginning of a process which, ideally, re-places the self back into a world of its own devising and into a community of like-minded others as well.

The possibility that there exists a positive, communal form of alienation is affirmed by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, who writes, “In each of [Antonioni’s] films there is a positive pole and a negative, and a tension between them. The abstraction, the ‘ideology’ lies mostly at the negative pole. The concrete and actual evidence, the life of the film, is more often positive - and more often neglected by criticism.”² It is to the neglected “concrete and actual” aspects of alienation that I wish to attend in order to suggest, via hypothesis and example, that there exists a positive dimension to alienation, and that this positive dimension is as much at issue in Antonioni’s work as the negative dimension which has garnered most of the attention.

Entertaining this possibility depends, however, upon seeing the self’s relation to knowledge and to knowledge about itself in a specific way. Seymour Chatman points out that way when he notes that Antonioni’s “preference for contingency over causality suggests an epistemology.”³ Though he does not define what that epistemology could be, I will suggest that it is empirical in character and so equally the source of Nowell-Smith’s “concrete and actual evidence” which informs “the [positive] life of the film.”⁴

Rather than being “incapable of using his films to argue a political position,” as Chatman claims, Antonioni’s empirical vision constitutes a reformist political stance, one consonant with what we know of his aesthetic interests.⁵ Fundamental to this vision is Antonioni’s understanding that there is a world out there which is the source of genuine novelty. It follows that changes in the historical world promote changes in the self if the self is held to be fundamentally historical rather than transcendental. Since the historical world has perceptibly changed, the self must have changed as well, given the ratios of transformation within dialectical materialism. The suspected changes or adjustments within the emotional structure of the subject have not been recorded, thus they remain the obscure object of a speculative desire. Recording those changes requires the gathering of evidence in a series of controlled experiments, guided by the hypothesis that such changes have occurred. The discovery of new emotional states and relationships (evidence) would transform the emotional commonplace (romance) in the ways that remarkable scientific discoveries transform the physical commonplace. Such a transformation would situate the historical self in the historical world once again, thereby calling a close to its flight from history into comforting yet alienating notions of selfhood whose priorities and emotional dispostions are falsely imagined as absolute and unchanging.

During the filming of the Eclipse Trilogy, Antonioni had this to say about film-making and the progress of the human spirit: “What have we done up to now? We have scrutinized, vivisected, analyzed thoroughly the feelings. This we have been able to do. But not to discover new ones.”⁶ The discovery of new emotions defines the positive, utopian goal of which negative alienation is but the first stage. If we recall Antonioni’s early interest in Hegel’s and Marx’s writings and the transformative or progressivist stance either implies, or his appreciation for Italy’s ermeticismo, a poetics for which style constitutes resistance to a fascist conformism, or the theme of Makaroni, an unfilmed screenplay in which an absolute freedom empowering self and social transformation is achieved at the lawless border of collapsing personal and political domains of authority, then the pertinence of his speculation regarding novel emotions will not seem either absurd or alien to his way of thinking.⁷ In all of the above interests, the common theme is the progress of the self (of the spirit) out of the past and into the present as it seeks novel accords or relationships (identifications and sympathies) with an ever-changing world. Antonioni’s films, from Netezza urbana in 1948 to his last full-length feature, Identificazione di una donna (1982), investigate the various possibilities for representing historical difference (alienation) arising at the impressionistic and indeterminate edges of mimesis, where generic notions of selfhood are weak and subject to eclipse. In this regard, we might understand the closing words of Identificazione to speak the logos of the empirical quest exemplified in various ways by his entire canon: “E dopo?” or “What’s next? What is to come?”

It is this search for whatever is next that motivates Antonioni’s cinema experiments. The hypothesis that orchestrates the search is this: the self is fundamentally historical and therefore subject to the effects of historical transformation; changes in our emotional constitution have already arisen as a result, but they have not been registered. Our emotional tomorrow is here today, and it is only today’s interpretative norms that obscure its appearance. The camera is the microscope Antonioni deploys to discover these hidden “motions” or adjustments of the soul. As a director, or “registrar” (il registra), he seeks to record those emotional nuances that escape “Hollywood” film-making, dominated as it is by standardized, generic, and commonplace forms of romantic comprehension. His scientific method of direction and registration requires that he set up his mise-en-scenes so that optimally they will produce the effects his materialist hypothesis tells him he should see.⁸ In this way, Antonioni’s films are genuinely experimental and not solely experimentalist in the art-house usage of that term.

Suspended strategically between the quiescence of an emotional conformism with nothing left to say and the silence of future possibilities without a voice, Antonioni’s protagonists are situated on the horizon of cognition, a liminal zone where representation is unstable and subject to eclipse. It is here, at the edges of the visible, that Antonioni indirectly seeks confirmation of his redemptive hypothesis. Guided by such a vision and situated within an empirical world, his cinema is both cognitive and aesthetic, while his intention to undertake this epistemologically vexed project stems from his interest in creating a genuinely historical art.

With an understanding that these intentions and goals are the productive source of ambiguity in his films, we might quickly review his renowned Cannes statement of aesthetic intent in which he states that the world is divided between a progressive science and a regressive morality. Being is thus frozen between an arresting nostalgia and a desire for a future of difference. Modern science is humbler and less dogmatically inclined than the cultural sciences which moralize, and it is their moral norms that cinema ordinarily honors. Ideally, cinema should alienate or distance its audience from a reflexive pathos which all too easily forges identifications between the self and melodramatic norms that authorize a sick eroticism. Such a dissolution (analysis) of emotional identifications can be achieved by equating the scientific unknown, whose object is nature, with the moral unknown, whose object is human nature. The strongest impediment to human flourishing is a moral cowardice that compels cinema to abandon the adventure of investigative reporting (L’avventura) and return to generic or “classical” representations of romance and reality in which neurosis, delusion, and dreams are the only avenues of escape from the prison house of culture (Il deserto rosso).⁹

Despite inherent theoretical problems not at issue here, Antonioni’s allegiance to an empirical stance is clear. Along these lines, we might understand the intent of his neorealism to mean that he seeks to document the emotions in cognitive or psychologically actual ways, as opposed to representing them formally and conventionally, in accordance with Hollywood norms. His allegiance to empiricism situates his cinema within the domains of science and technology, where it shares the epistemological and ethical problems to which those domains are typically subject but which do not prohibit them from making the remarkable discoveries that they do.

One immediate effect of seeing his cinema as an empirical practice and his cinematography as investigative reporting within the human sciences is that we can now understand negativity (or negative alienation) “positively.” Films in the Eclipse Trilogy, for example, resist the easy identifications forged between viewer and viewed, audience and character, observer and object-subjectivity, upon which the classical Hollywood cinema depends. This methodological resistance situates the viewer in a nonvoyeuristic or objective position where reference is intentionally underdetermined rather than loaded with symbolic (i.e., fetishistic) content.¹⁰ Antonioni is out to explode or blow up all pat interpretive schemes (beliefs) regarding romance and reality by embarking upon cinematographic investigations of our perceptions of emotional perception.

Freed from the biases of secondary interpretation, which forge conventional identifications between sense and sensibility, knower and known, Antonioni’s films do not appear all that paradoxical, ambiguous, unmotivated, or even indeterminate.¹¹ Instead, they appear as good science insofar as they represent an empirically based investigation into real possibilities for emotional progress. Negative alienation, then, is the first stage of the investigation wherein the subject is isolated and scrutinized to see whether or not new psychic structures have arisen over time. Positive alienation, on the other hand, is the final stage, heralded by the discovery of a new emotional “fact” which, in turn, would transform the totality of such facts or culture itself in the same way that the discovery of alien or novel information mandates the reformation of the entire body of scientific facts to which it relates.¹²

As a residual benefit to his empiricist disposition, Antonioni’s methodology restores film’s original charter to scientifically represent the contemporary in motion, showing the “real” as it really is by a “technically sweet” enhancement and amplification of those invisible articulations which support the gross regularities perceived by the naked eye.¹³ The changes any discovery motivates, moreover, would be no more, though no less, startling than those that occurred when cinema shifted from theatrical gesturing to naturalistic displays as the normative center of its emotional language.¹⁴ Any power his art might forfeit by eschewing common expressive norms it would regain as the drama of science in which discovery as cognition replaces discovery as recognition as the main source of delight and suspense, method replacing form as the center of organizational interest.

Negative alienation, then, does no more than name the necessity for which positive alienation supplies the want. Thus the goal of positive alienation is correspondence and community, just as the goal of negative alienation is individuality and a contemplative isolation. The dialectic between negative and positive alienation defines the normative flow of aesthetic engagement and disengagement within healthy cultures, and so it is imperative that Antonioni emphasize the positive if he is to offer cinema as one means by which an erotically sick culture might return to moral health. Thus the backward-looking melancholia fostered by the negative alienation displayed in L’avventura finds its forward-looking counter-direction in the “adventure” or quest inaugurated in that film. That adventure concludes, I argue, in L’eclisse, when the alienated self finds an other alienated like herself, and together they disappear into the contemporary world, their disappearance a sign that they no longer stand apart from it.

While the progression from negative to positive alienation is utopian at best and creates as many problems as it tries to solve, these are nevertheless the right problems for a rationally interested cinematic investigation of the interplay between history and aesthetics. Moreover, if an argument is “weak” or even unconvincing, the type of argument that it is may be of interest because it contributes to the aesthetic achievement associated with the presentation of the argument. In the present case, these considerations are crucial if we are to progress beyond detailed rehearsals of a, by now, generic understanding of modernist alienation in Antonioni’s cinema.

The logic and goals of positive alienation are most apparent in L’eclisse. A new sensibility arises in this film, calling to a successful close the quest that Anna began in L’avventura.

Each film in the Eclipse Trilogy opens with a scene of divorce or alienation from the familiar, yet only two of the three films (L’avventura and La notte) conclude tragically, with the alienated subjects pathetically retreating back into the life-threatening world of available erotic identifications, having incurred on their quest the added burden of futility and despair. The melancholia which suffuses these two films arises from the protagonists’ failure to achieve their desired ideal of reconciliation or even to sustain the possibility for such; they remain negatively alienated. In L’eclisse, however, things turn out differently. Vittoria remains positively alienated, and she is rewarded for her resistance to the temptations of the emotional commonplace with the discovery of a new emotion or of novel emotional reserves, which is perhaps why Antonioni names her “Victory.”

L’eclisse opens by recapitulating the establishing scenes in all films in the trilogy. In effect, the experiment begins again in order to test its conclusions once more. Vittoria’s disappearance, or alienation, from the familiar recalls Anna’s, and indeed Monica Vitti plays both Claudia, the woman who substitutes for Anna in Anna’s life, as well as Vittoria, who returns to complete the quest as a victorious Anna, the woman who finds what she wants.

When we first see her, Vittoria is visibly beside herself, an emotion whose metaphysical resonance implies an internal displacement engendered by self-reflection. The self she is beside is her “old” self, constituted of those emotional “residues” and “dead feelings” which, when filming an eclipse in Florence, Antonioni noted were the chief inhibitors of emotional progress.¹⁵ At the beginning of her struggle to be free of Riccardo, her lover of ten years, and the deadening past he represents, Vittoria stands against an action painting whose conceptual indeterminacy exemplifies her internal condition. At this turning point in her life, she identifies with the sublime indeterminacy of the action painting rather than with the beautiful, determinated norms and ends of institutionalized erotic behavior. She is determined to divorce herself from her “beautiful” cultured world, and this determination inaugurates her aesthetic crisis.¹⁶

Vittoria wants to divorce herself from the deadening claustrophobia of high modern culture, represented by Riccardo at its liberal, cosmopolitan, and refined best, in order to resituate herself within the enabling conditions of authentic cultural (aesthetic) production. As good as Riccardo’s cultural world is, it is not good enough, not lively enough, to engage her emerging sensibility. Baffled by her desire to alienate herself from all that seems to him beautiful and desirable, Riccardo asks Vittoria to marry him. His offer misses its mark because it mistakes her desire for something different as a desire for a more normative role within their relationship and within their society.

Rather than settle for the established best, Vittoria resists Riccardo, as well as the good life of the Roman bourgeoisie, which, the film makes clear, is predicated upon the stock market (La boursa) and the art market or culture industry (La dolce vita). Acting as a counterpoint to Italian conformist postures, she refuses to conform to the dominant passions of the day. Italy’s romance with materialismo and capital hold no interest for her. She makes her position clear later on when she asks the stockbroker Piero, “What kind of passion is that?”¹⁷ Visiting the stock market, she is the only person without a passionate concern for its world-constituting interests. Alienated from a passionately materialist culture, she is divorced from all contemporary romantic investments and so at liberty to redirect her erotic capital toward the more enlightened enterprise of aesthetic renewal.

Significantly, Vittoria first overcomes established aesthetic norms when she plunges her hand into what appears to be an abstract painting comprised of geometric shapes. As it turns out, the painting is “really” a configuration of concrete objects behind a picture frame. By rearranging the objects in the frame, she demonstrates to herself (and to us) that the aesthetic is not a realm of fixity but a fluid domain subject to choice and human determinations. By daring to pierce the frame, she acknowledges the priority of method over norms, experiment over interpretation, inquiry over explanation, practice over speculation; and these priorities will guide her as she seeks to rearrange the composition or frame of human life. Symbolically, she sets her hand against all abstract expressionisms rendered absolute and definitive by cultural norms held to be transcendental. Her rearrangement of the concrete figures within the frame returns the frozen, transcendental world of the universally human to the concrete and developing realm of particular human interests, choices, and situations called history.

Because she is willing to abstract (alienate) herself from a delusively concrete world of determinative abstract expressionisms, she becomes the only person in the film who is not alienated from the fluid, historical, and mobile “nature” of the self. Her reengagement with the concrete aspects of life, symbolized by her breaking into the frame, begins her journey out of the shelter of beautiful norms and into the empirical world of indeterminate experience. At this point in her quest, she is like that which she has pointed to: a picture of indeterminacy, a person without a frame to contain or define her desires.

Vittoria views the present as an ashen world of burnt-out passions (she even removes from the picture frame an ashtray laden with butts). Not willing to go back to such a world, she chooses to go forward. Thus, she walks an edge zone between the exhausted past and an emergent future. This zone is further defined when Riccardo asks her how she feels. She responds, “I don’t know.” Her reply suggests the nescience of the self when confronted with feelings for which there is no specific name. She feels something, but there is no available way to frame the way that she feels. At this point, she represents herself as an abstract portrait of desire without or beyond language. She will all but say this when she asserts her will to divorce herself from Riccardo by telling him that she will no longer translate for him, though she knows another woman who will. Her refusal to translate implies that she would rather remain silent and thereby preserve the integrity of her difference than deploy accommodations that would carry some of her meaning but would not communicate what she is about.

Divorced from all romances and marriages Italian-style, Vittoria becomes a radical individual who journeys through old Rome, new Rome (E.U.R.), her girlhood room, and an elegant Roman apartment like an alien visitor from the future, amazed at the antique character of the present. To represent her sense of the pastness of the present, Antonioni shoots her walking beneath a water tower that hovers over her like a flying saucer. At Marta’s apartment, Vittoria, in her desire “not to translate,” or have past conventions speak for her present self, goes so far as to pretend to be African. Decorated with things African, the apartment suggests a foreign country. The African landscapes Vittoria sees there arouse her desire to escape the contemporary into a place positively alien. Seeking to identify with the alien, Vittoria dons an African costume and paints her body black, after which she asks Marta, the in-house expert who has lived in Africa, “Do I look it?” Vittoria then dances her way into a bedroom muralled by a panorama of Lake Naivasha in Nairobi, and Antonioni shoots the sequence as though she were stepping into a picture, going “through the looking glass” into a foreign world.

Vittoria’s African dance does not, however, bring her the positive alienation she seeks. Instead, she enacts a culturally tame expression of difference, one cultivated by both modern artist and capitalist, whose “primitivist” fantasies are devoid of all historical, material substance except the desire for difference.¹⁸ The futility of her iconic appropriation of difference is made apparent in the scene immediately following, in which Marta’s black dog runs away to join a tribe of strays only to be discovered by Vittoria walking on its hind legs, paw extended in anticipation of a genteel handshake. Even the animals, it seems, are conformists whose “otherness” has been tamed.

At play in Vittoria’s blackface masque is the issue of logical precedence and experimental method. Vittoria must experience a novel emotion of her own as the sign of her reengagement with the world of experience, after which she can construct an adequate symbol to communicate its salience to others. The authentic alienation she seeks in Marta’s apartment is not to be found in modernism’s alien chic, which, rather than exceed contemporary norms, reinstates them by other means (styles). Costumes, decor, and photographs, no matter how authentic, are at best cosmetic changes. Moreover, the available past suggested by primitivist fantasies is not the place where Vittoria will find an authentic foreign or alien experience. Primitivism can suggest a model or picture of what she is looking for, but the foreignness she seeks must be her own, and can only evolve out of her relationship with the modern world.

A clue to the source of the genuinely modern emotion she seeks arises immediately afterward, when she is drawn to a strange, rhythmic sound that reminds her of the recorded African music to which she had danced at Marta’s apartment. Seeking the source of the lyrical chimes, she discovers that the music is produced “naturally” by metal highway fence poles blowing in the wind. The image is unmistakably aeolian, and the aeolean harp is unmistakably empirical in its emblemizing immediate or intuitive relationships between self and world, or, more concretely, between body and experience via impressions. As Vittoria listens in wonder to the metallic harp, we see the central icon of her empirical redemption. Indeed, the next time we see her she is flying high over the labyrinth of old Rome. She will ask the pilot to dive into a cloud which, he informs her, is actually “snow suspended in water.” The empirical emphasis in both scenes is clear: redemption arrives by our keeping in touch with the nebulous, obscure, and actual character of reality which is the source of our historical novelty and renewal.

Vittoria continues her quest for difference through a sequence of scenes exemplifying the dead and petrified emotions that dominate the present. She even purchases a flower imprisoned in stone, signalling the status of both life and art. A drunken man, who unsuccessfully tries to engage Vittoria’s attention, steals Piero’s car, loses control, and plunges to his death in the Tevere; the crowds that gather on the following day to see him fished up laugh and enjoy the event as though it were a festive occasion. The stock market collapses, bringing in its wake the passionate disappointment of millions, and a jazz pianist is noted as “good” because he is an “old timer,” left over from an age when the world and the self were attuned. Piero needs medicine to sleep; Vittoria walks through a half-built city on the periphery of Rome where she impulsively engages in role reversals, chasing after a man with a beautiful face. Just before she and Piero embrace for the first time, they are positioned in the middle of a black-and-white striated crosswalk where she tells him, “We are halfway there” (“siamo meta”). By this time it is apparent that she wants to love, but not in the old way, which would only lead to a return of the old scene of divorce with Riccardo.

Piero will invite Vittoria to his parents’ staid apartment to impress and seduce her. Yet its typical antique beauty does not impress her, and she asks him why he did not take her to his “small home,” which at least had the value of being properly his. She feels trapped and frightened in the apartment, particularly when positioned between the oval portraits of his parents. There, ringed round by the past and its inevitable return as the present in her life, she tells Piero she “loves to think one should not know the other” when in a relationship, after which she advises him, “Maybe we should not love at all?” as a way of differently relating. She will reassert her view when, later, she tells him, “I wish I did not love you or that I loved you better.” She desires either to not love him at all or to love him in a better way in order to preserve their relationship from contamination by conventional engagements. Her desire to avoid commonplace romance is another sign that she has engaged a positive form of alienation that will move her toward unconventional future correspondences.

Confirmation of the novel emotion Vittoria desires first arises in E.U.R.’s park and then in Piero’s office, after hours. As marginal areas at the center of the sociocultural system, both environments invite the engendering of novelty or difference which can only arise at the edges or outer boundaries of reference where concepts shade into sensations and impressions speak louder than words. Both the park and the afterhours office suggest this edge zone, where and when business as usual gives place to the unusual business of making love in a new way.

Vittoria and Piero arrive at the park through a sequence whose rapid dislocations suggest the immediacy of a felt intuition; after they fall on the bed kissing each other ecstatically, they awake in the park. Piero tells her that he feels he has entered a “foreign country,” to which she replies, “How strange! That’s how you make me feel.” He responds by asking, “Then you won’t marry me?” His mistake is identical to Riccardo’s. That they make each other “feel foreign” throws Piero off because he has not yet understood that this is what she wants and that their shared alienation will be the source of a novel correspondence.

This distinction is perhaps what led Antonioni to avoid a tragic ending for L’eclisse like those of L’avventura, La notte, and Il deserto rosso.¹⁹ That he changed the conclusion so that L’eclisse would not end tragically should tell us something about how to read Vittoria’s alienation. Piero, in turn, must learn to read Vittoria differently and learn to sympathize with her difference. When he later proves himself capable of understanding her, this shared understanding establishes alienation as a collective project of aesthetic renewal, the shared center of the new world of differences and the productive source of a truly modern romance. If, that is, to invent a new language would be to invent a new manner of being, as Wittgenstein has suggested, then it is equally true that to invent a new manner of being would compel us to invent a new language to suit its dispositions.²⁰ Empirically speaking, evidence must precede language, and it is just this evidence that Antonioni conceptually offers in L’eclisse.

A second instance of the same misperception and adjustment arises when Piero questions Vittoria about marriage, and she replies, “I am not nostalgic for marriage.” Her response is ideal in its commitment to differ from the presiding norms and values determining erotic life. She does not look back to a safe haven but forward, in the hope of arriving at a different place. Equally to the point, her not missing “missing” is, in itself, an achieved finding insofar as the absence of nostalgia implies that she has freed herself from any sense that she lacks something in not wanting what is “natural,” conventional. Her alienation is not established nostalgically, by a negative reflex toward a lost or unachieved ideal, but positively, in the expectation of finding an unfound ideal: the novel emotion.

That Piero eventually understands her alienation becomes evident when he and Vittoria “re-enact themselves as they behaved during the earlier love scene … exaggerating the comical aspects of their gestures and attitudes.”²¹ Their mime suggests an act of mastery over generic forms of romance achieved by advancing empathy to the level of critique. Beside themselves with laughter as they parody their own love-making as well as that of other couples, Vittoria and Piero methodically alienate themselves from the very force of desire that compelled them to intimate identifications in the first place. Moreover, their self-reflexive play upon a moment with generic claims to maximum seriousness in life and in art “makes light” of the weight of the traditional moment when destinies are fixed, thereby producing a qualitatively different moment empowered to differently determine their future.

Just as they laughed together at the empty box of chocolates he had offered her (a sign of the emptiness of past romantic forms), their parody compels them to remain “beside themselves” with laughter as they make love. Through parody, they exhaust and transform romance as a serious form of engagement and thereby place themselves outside the frame of institutionalized erotic practices and the emotions authorized by them. Their enlightened mimesis enables Vittoria and Piero to evade entrapment within invariant and ideologically frozen regimes of private behavior as they renew their desire for a novel emotion in whose light they now perceive the world. The play of romance, moreover, returns romance to history as but one of the many human practices subject to transformation as the world is transformed in and through the totality of those practices and the social relations they encourage. At this cumulative moment to all rescue operations in the Eclipse Trilogy, Vittoria’s relationship with Piero is sustained by the priority of difference (parody); she has found what she wants by differing, by remaining different, and then by encouraging Piero to feel the difference. In the end, then, Vittoria’s alienation becomes theirs.

This difference is further implied when, after making love in Piero’s office—a love-making that encourages him to disconnect all phones in a scene demonstrating his refusal to return to business as usual—the couple promises to meet “tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and the day after the day after that” in “the same place at eight o’clock.” Having designated the time and place of their relationship, they disappear from the scene of representation. Their disappearance from the world of negatively alienated life suggests the positive quality of their collective alienation. Thus although it is true that L’eclisse ends with a vision of a benighted and anxious world, Piero and Vittoria are not in this world. They have evolved (disappeared), and their disappearance implies that the aim of the experiment in emotional progress has been achieved. Their story, then, concludes logically where and when it should, at the time and place where alienation becomes a life-practice whose eternal return guarantees a history to the aesthetics of selfhood.

Immediately before she disappears with Piero, however, we see Vittoria walking beneath a spreading tree. When she left Riccardo, she wanted to walk alone in the woods at dawn. Then, we saw her gazing at the trees through a picture window. Now, we see her once more “walk into the picture” which is not a picture at all but the sensorium of the world, the source of all aesthetic delight. The implication here is that she is finally out there, where she wants to be, in a world of process and change. Her final walk further recalls the moment when she and Piero kissed, first behind a glass pane, then beyond the glass where their lips touched. These scenes of contact and merger with the world and with other bodies correspond to the empirical mise-en-scenes that conclude other “investigative” films such as Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, and Identificazione di una donna, in which the great sensorium of experience blows up or consumes the formal framework of conventional perception.

“Empiricism,” Kant advised, “is based on touch, but rationalism on a necessity which can be seen.”²² Vittoria’s story concludes then on an empirical note, with her touching, or getting in touch with, the empirical world. She has progressed beyond things that can be named or seen to a place where feeling precedes seeing and naming. Her and Piero’s final absence is our conceptual guarantee that they no longer stand apart from the world but have merged with it and that the long-awaited eclipse of the commonplace has arrived.

The eclipse that concludes the film reinstates the paradox of alienation which suffuses the trilogy. For Vittoria and Piero, eclipsing the commonplace is a positive, aesthetic event. For the world at large, holding on to its dissipating romantic heritage for dear life, it is a negative event. Antonioni strongly suggests this bivalence by concluding L’eclisse with the illumination of a street lamp. The street lamp bears a strong formal resemblance to the table lamp that filled the screen when the film began. Looming in close-up, the table lamp illuminates a row of books which suggest the cultured life that Riccardo and Vittoria have shared. The comparison between opening and closing scenes is furthered when we note that the table lamp illuminates an unnaturally darkened room, for day has dawned. Yet neither Riccardo nor Vittoria notice its arrival because they are engaged in a long and painful discussion regarding their imminent separation.

The street lamp that concludes the film takes us back to this illuminating beginning, only now Antonioni casts the entire world as Riccardo’s artificially lit study. Cultural discourses, the comparison suggests, and the art of interpretation are helpless to move things forward (or to move Vittoria at all); beauty offers enthrallment, not liberation. By attending to culture’s rational, cognitive interests, however, we break free of exhausting hermeneutic circles in which emotional understanding is repetitious, fatiguing, and conventional because universalistic myths of the self deny histories to personhood. By implying a sense of history to the self, we begin to think concretely about the historicity of the spirit, after which we can investigate the self scientifically, “experimentally,” and experientially. This is what Antonioni has attempted in this film, which, as its title suggests, belongs to the science of art and aesthetics.

To reinforce this awareness, Antonioni concludes L’eclisse with a montage that displays the constructed character of perception. In the montage, we see images we have seen before, only now we see them differently, in a new and alien way, our alien vision perhaps approximating Vittoria’s when, at the beginning of her quest, she plunged her hand into the picture frame and rearranged the items within. Tellingly, the montage is comprised of mostly circular images of repetition, exhaustion, and incompletion: a jockey in his traces, the sports arena at E.U.R., the bus route at the end of the line, half-built modem buildings, and a water barrel emptying into a gutter. Overall, we can assume that Vittoria’s experiment in life has succeeded because she is absent from a world dominated by scenes of emotional repetition and exhaustion. Like Anna, whose disappearance opened the quest for difference in the Eclipse Trilogy, Vittoria also uses disappearance, but this time in order to conclude that quest. Yet unlike Anna, who disappears alone, Vittoria disappears with Piero.

To this epistemically graphic representation, Antonioni supplies two written texts, both appearing as headlines in L’espresso. The first reads: “The Atomic Age,” suggesting the radical particularity of sensation free of the concept, the putative source of experience in art and science; and the second reads: “The Peace Is Weak,” implying that all accords are temporal, negotiable, and volatile, thus asserting the methodological value of science and the aesthetic. The headlines also evoke thoughts of nuclear destruction unless novel social accords are reached, as well as the dawning of a new era—for which new relationships are appropriate but weak, because experimental, and subject to further scrutiny and renegotiation (further eclipse).

In the concluding montage, we witness form uniting with content to reveal method as theory of knowledge. Poised in the eternally returning time and place of alienation (the transformative position within the logic of structure), L’eclisse closes with a global image of negativity in which all established orders are on the verge of becoming atomized, blown up, or erased—and with good reason. In this respect, L’eclisse ends where and when it logically should by suggesting the two alternatives that the trilogy has established: either the present fades as the future emerges or the present remains imprisoned within universalistic interpretive schemes, the modern becoming the postmodern and so on and so forth into the night. And in understanding the aesthetic options presented by paradox, we see that Vittoria’s quest has exemplified a form of alienation which, rather than negative, is a positively inclined “life politics concerned with human self-actualisation, both on the level of the individual and collectively.”²³ Such a life politics can only be achieved, Antonioni implies, within an empirical framework, and it is from within such a framework of knowledge that Vittoria emerges from “the shadow which emancipatory politics has cast” on the emotional commonplace, and then goes forward to realize a genuinely contemporary identity, one consonant with the historical world and not alienated from it.²⁴

Notes

1. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1994). Neurosis, for Bondanella, arises in Antonioni’s work when his characters fail to adapt to the modern world. He writes, “Guiliana’s neurosis [in Red Desert] is caused by a failure to adapt to the new world. Her alienation is not the result of her supposedly dehumanized and hostile surroundings,” but of her inability to appreciate a technologically remarkable world. p. 218.

2. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Shape Around a Black Point,” Sight and Sound 33 (Winter 1963–64), p. 17.

3. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni or The Surface of the World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 78.

4. Understanding Antonioni’s cinema as empiricist-tending is not new; understanding it as strictly and idealistically empirical is. See, for example, David Cook’s summary assessment of Antonioni’s “new style” as partly due to his emphasizing “the overwhelming importance of the material environment on the interior life of his characters,” in David Cook, The History of Narrative Film, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 627.

5. Chatman, p. 78.

6. Michelangelo Antonioni, Screenplays of Antonioni (New York: Orion Press, 1963), p. x.

7. Ermeticismo is a poetic movement specific to Florence between the two world wars. For writers such as Gadda, Vittorini, Montale, Landolfi, Contini, and De Robertis, style constituted a formal polemic against realistic representational modes of ordinary mimesis. Antonioni’s Makaroni (1958), written with Tonio Guerra, has as its premise the polling of soldiers recently returned from World War II. The interlocutor asks the men to describe the best and the worst period of the war for them. The worst was, predictably, the concentration camps, but the best, surprisingly, turns out to be the period immediately following the peace, when the Germans had fled and the Americans had not yet arrived. Then, “disorder and chaos reigned; it was freedom in its ultimate state.” See Makaroni, in Ted Perry and Rene Prieto, Michelangelo Antonioni: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986), p. 202.

8. A controlled mise-en-scene and random information gathering are both essential to scientific film-making. This process is nicely summarized by Sean Morris in this way: Once you frame your experiment and put the cameras in place, “you take a shot of a thing without really knowing what its going to do … other than you know the beginning stage and the end stage you’re aiming at. But in between that, it’s fairy-tale land. It’s a surprise every minute.” Sean Morris, “Still Motion,” Nova (Oxford Film Institute, 1981).

9. A summary of Antonioni’s Cannes statement can be found in Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink, L’avventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 177–79.

10. Underdetermination of the sign is central to empiricist epistemology as well as to realists such as Andre Bazin, who claim that “the immanent ambiguity of reality” occasioned by our awareness that “events have an undetermined outcome” is the genuine source of cinematic realism’s power and mystery. See Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California (Press, 1967), p. 46.

11. Sam Rohdie is the most recent critic to summarize at length these stylistic effects of Antonioni’s cinema. See Antonioni (London: BFI Publications, 1990).

12. This is Willard Van Orman Quine’s picture, and it has become extremely widespread because of his influence. Quine describes robust empiricism this way: “The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field.” (42) The drama of Antonioni’s films is occasioned by the conflict between sensation, experience, and concept or, as Quine would have it, between the periphery and interior of the self. See W. Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed., rev. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 20–46.

13. “Technically Sweet,” or technicamente dolce, is the title of an unfilmed Antonioni script written shortly after L’eclisse. Antonioni changed the screenplay’s title from La giungla (The Jungle) shortly after hearing this comment of Robert Oppenheimer’s regarding the atomic bomb: “In my opinion, if one has a glimpse of something that seems technically sweet, one attacks this thing and achieves it.” Technically sweet portrayals of world-dissolving “blow-ups” are central to films from L’eclisse through Zabriskie Point and Identificazione di una donna. R. T. Witcombe, The New Italian Cinema: Studies in Dance and Despair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 80.

14. Charles Musser briefly discusses the shift in early cinema from presentational or theatrical acting styles, set designs, and visual compositions to naturalistic representational modes. I see no reason why we should not see Antonioni as continuing this line of “realistic” development by his shifting from “naturalistic” representations become generic to more finely grained or cognitively accurate representations than those offered by standard cinema. Such an updating of emotional representations would perhaps be as difficult for audiences to see or comprehend as were the “modern” naturalistic styles for audiences used to presentational or theatrical styles of representation, and this might be a further source of ambiguity or incomprehension in Antonioni’s films. See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Volume 1 of The History of American Cinema, Charles Harpole, gen. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), p. 3.

15. Antonioni, Screenplays, p. x.

16. In the regard, Vittoria initiates Adomo’s project for aesthetic renewal, which he characterizes in this way: “‘How lovely!’ becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze failing on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. … All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity.” Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974), p. 25. We should keep in mind, too, that in La notte, Tomasso writes an article on Adorno for Europa Literaria which Giovanni Pontano declares to be very good. Adorno’s position, that the culture of beauty is unlovely, seems to be at issue in the entire trilogy.

17. All translations from the Italian are mine, except where otherwise noted.

18. Two points are at issue here. First, modernist primitivism is a mannerism which contains rather than liberates the desire for or even a genuine appreciation of difference or otherness. Second, as a continuation of the dominant tendencies of romantic art, primitivism “cultivates” rather than deviates from neoclassicism’s aesthetic authority. For an instructive account of the normative content of modernist primitivism, see Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (Fall 1985), pp. 45–71; for a critique of the normative role of interpretation which denies art a role in the construction of difference, see Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchment of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 81–117.

19. Ian Cameron and Robin Wood, Antonioni (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 104.

20. In this light we might see Vittoria as the femme fatale in a feminist drama of alienation from patriarchal values and views regarding romance and the crotic. Were this the case, my argument would then be the same as Mary Ann Doane’s: “Since feminists are forced to search out symbols from a lexicon that does not yet exist, their acceptance of the femme fatale [in noir films] as a sign of strength in an unwritten history must also and simultaneously involve an understanding and assessment of all the epistemological baggage she carries along with her.” It is the importance of this “epistemological baggage” and the politics of empiricism which I have been at pains to elaborate. Doane, “Gilda: Epistemology as Striptease,” Camera Obscura 11, p. 15.

21. Antonioni, Screenplays, p. 353.

22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, in The Library of Liberal Arts (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 14.

23. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 7.

24. This is Giddens’ summary assessment of the most urgent political agenda for the self in late modernity (see p. 7).