SOURCE: “The Night: On Michelangelo Antonioni,” in Raritan, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 83–108.

[In the following essay, Rudman meditates on the world of Antonioni’s films and themes such as creation, obsession, isolation, time, and perception which recur in the works.]

Summer, 1993. The worst heat wave in living memory. I lie awake all night, night after night, in Windham, Vermont, thinking about the floodwaters of biblical proportions sweeping across Kansas and Missouri; the Mississippi swollen, bursting the levees, the farmers eyeing their drowned fields from National Guard helicopters.

I go downstairs and pace the two-hundred-year-old rented farmhouse, stare out the windows and wait for the deer. Torn between ecstasy and exhaustion in the gray of dawn, any thoughts I might have had about a split between the mind and the body are destroyed in this insomniac state.

I had despaired of how to begin an essay on Michelangelo Antonioni until another long night of sleeplessness threw me a line.

I thought of Monica Vitti’s rapt gaze when she looks up as the wind strums the stark white flagpoles against the blackest sky, and of the couples in the trilogy L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse, and the photographer in Blow-Up, who stay up all night. It is only in this fragile, indeterminate state that we can begin to see for ourselves the presence of the world that Antonioni’s films relentlessly present.

The pure fact of the world. The egalitarian nature of the sensual world.

Why the night? Stay up through the night and you come to the end of something. Something that is disappearing.

At that time I slept very little; I’d adopted the habit of going to bed as soon as the day’s gradual fade-in began.

The work of the most demanding artist of the stellar group of directors to emerge in the 1950s seems to be in eclipse. The Passenger was the only film of Antonioni’s to be shown commercially since Zabriskie Point. He could not get his late films distributed or made. Identification of a Woman never opened in America after its screening at the New York Film Festival. The Crew, which intensifies Antonioni’s focus on the Third World, was never shot. Neither was Technically Sweet, his most ambitious screenplay, though many of its themes were absorbed into The Passenger. And yet the reputations of his somewhat more literary contemporaries, such as Bergman and Kurosawa, have, if anything, grown in the past two decades.

On my way to the retrospective of his work at the Walter Reade Theater I could not help but note that a building under demolition across from the café looked like a three-tiered jungle ruin: the exposed floors, the steel cables sprouting everywhere like vines. The air was heavy with an almost paralyzing humidity. And each day there was less of the site, though by the time I arrived, mostly in the late afternoon, there was no sign that the wrecking ball had been at work. Just dust and silence and the hovering presence of the ruin.

I would not mention this building’s being leveled had it not brought to mind the most riveting scene in I Vinti (The Defeated), in which to escape his pursuers a man on the run descends the scaffold of a construction site, going endlessly down and down, as if the planks and ladders had no bottom, and we switch from thinking about his escaping the other men to his escaping this dark labyrinth. Physics has sprouted a metaphysics.

There were screenings for his early films at 10:00 A.M., and one time I went with Rachel Hadas to see La signora senza camelie. We arrived anxiously, as one does to such events, and struggled to be on time, because, even if there is no one there, or just two or three desultory souls (who nevertheless take up a lot of room) scattered throughout the theater, the projectionist will run the film at the appointed time. Still, it is a shock to see only two or three people in the theater (or do “film people” have such easy access to the cosmic archives that they can see what they need to see when they want to see it, when amateurs like myself are forced to bend their schedules to fit the screening time?).

The process of creation is notoriously difficult to record on film. Writing, music, painting: all resist being captured by a machine which renders only outward appearance. As Antonioni stated in an interview: “Film is not image: landscape, posture, gesture. But rather an indissoluble whole extended over a duration of its own that saturates it and determines its very essence.” That process is most evident in Blow-Up, in which Antonioni uses photography, the least metaphorical of all the arts, to define the human condition. He takes his cue from ancient sources and quotes these remarkable lines of Lucretius: “Nothing appears as it should in a world where nothing is certain. The only thing certain is the existence of a secret violence that makes everything uncertain” (my emphasis).

From the moment Blow-Up opens, the photographer Thomas seeks that which is missing, the disappearing center. After spending the night taking photographs in the flophouse for the homeless, he is too wound up to sleep, and after asking that his clothes be burnt—shaving half-dressed in his white jeans and wide black belt while his gofers attend upon his eagerness to leave—he dons the last part of his outfit, an emblem of his youth and high spirits, a midnight blue velvet blazer, and makes his way toward a park where he revives, comes alive like a young colt under our eyes. Storming the steps, “relaxed and payin’ attention” (as the line from the Byrds’ song from that time has it), he enters a garden (one of paradise’s false trapdoors) and proceeds calmly, in full control, ready to receive the image: the mystery is ready to offer itself to him.

Antonioni wonderfully depicts the restless waiting, the fever that precedes creation. Thomas is frustrated by the ease with which he can control the finite realm of his work and still feel there is a fragile bond, at best a truce, between what the naked eye sees and reality. Once at work, he is focused, intent: fully alive. Alone in his darkroom he blows up a seemingly innocent, yet suspicious, photograph—again and again until a gun can be made out, and it is not long till it’s clear that it’s pointing at a dead man. But as he goes on looking (as the camera pans back and forth between him and the photograph on the wall), enlarging the image, it decomposes.

Disappearance is the normal order of things for Antonioni.

“People disappear every day,” The Girl in The Passenger says. “Every time they leave the room,” Locke replies.

And the strange thing is that there’s a vague sense of guilt at the back of my conscience, I feel it flowering like a shadow, a Hitchcock-like shadow of doubt that falls on the coherence of my life.

Blow-Up returns over and over to Thomas’s photographs of the disinherited, the homeless; they are part of the larger puzzle he is trying to assemble along with the death of love between himself and his wife and the escapism of the woman in the antique shop who wants to get out of herself and find renewal in Nepal (to whom Thomas replies, wittily and wearily, “Nepal is all antiques”).

Thomas comes to understand, in the course of the film’s slippery dialectics of appearance and reality, that he is one of the disinherited—that what separates him from the men in his photographs is economics. His camera has recorded something that his sensibility could not register. By uncovering the “secret violence” that appears before him in the darkroom, he begins to learn how to live inside manifold contradictions. To exist—even as he is implicated.

It is in direct opposition to dailiness that Antonioni fastened on the night-long vigil as a way of opening his characters’ eyes. Sleeplessness awakens them to their animal nature: it peels away the folds of ego, pretense, identity. What remains is a naked eye that sees the alien strangeness of the familiar world.

The beautiful and terrible moment before dawn when the gray light signals the sky’s clair-obscur resistance. … There is a shagginess to this hour that I love.

The trees fill with wind; expand. And the all-night vigil prepares the way for the eye to see. The blindness of a sleepless night lays down the path for sight; insight—duration’s timeless time.

Last night, in the long-awaited thunderstorm, it was like driving underwater and it reminded me of two scenes in Antonioni’s films that have that “terrible beauty”: the scene in Identification of a Woman where the headlights can make no further headway in the fog, and there is no self or other in the wetness that encompasses the lens; and the crucial scene in L’eclisse in which Vittoria and Piero watch the “dire spectacle of the wrack” of Piero’s car, driven into an artificial lake by a drunk, rise from the dark water with its headlights on, casting a ghostly trail.

The night, during which Vittoria and Piero get acquainted, prepares the ground for their rendezvous at the intersection the next afternoon. They do not appear, but the camera does. In a seven-minute crescendo, a Waiting for Godot with objects as characters, it renders the independence of the world apart from an individual point of view. The sequence provides an escape, a break from the problem of other minds; a resolution, not a solution.

The director’s problem is that of embracing a reality that ripens and consumes itself, and to set forth this movement, this reaching a point and then advancing, as fresh perception.

In the tense, night-long lover’s quarrel which makes up the first scene of L’eclisse, Vittoria keeps going to the window, from which she sees the wind blowing through the stark black trees and the fiercely alien mushroom shape of what I take to be a water tower. (This suggestion of a mushroom cloud comes back in the form of a headline warning of nuclear threat in the final sequence.) Then the camera moves outside the house for the first time and we see Vittoria suddenly dwarfed by the black trees nearest the house as they lean toward her, embodying the full range of the terrible and the beautiful.

It is not the trees and water towers that grow stark and gigantic in the night but our senses that are awakened. Our working lives prevent us from indulging in the night. I pause, having taken up this essay when the temperature was rising, to listen to the wind in the trees and see if it spells some relief. …

The world Antonioni renders means something very specific to him. He deploys his art as one way of crossing “over the border of the purely physical without knowing it.”

So spoke of the existence of things,
An unmanageable pantheon
Absolute, they say
Arid.
A city of corporations
Glassed
In dreams
And images—
And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact
Tho it is impenetrable
As the world, if it is matter
Is impenetrable.

—George Oppen

More a filmmaker of place than of objects, Antonioni has gone so far as to color smoke and paint trees so that places in his films could be expressive of his character’s inner crises. He took this to an extreme in Red Desert, where yellow, factory-waste smoke insults the sky and chemicals mar the blue-green Adriatic off the coast of Ravenna. “There’s something terrible about reality,” Giuliana tellingly remarks, “and I don’t know what.”

Antonioni is an investigator, a diagnostician of social ills. His devotion to uncovering the truth, peeling away the layers of his characters’ self-protective armor, is a laborious, tense-making activity. His work cuts against the grain of modern life, which turns its back on time and duration and sees itself cut off from the past.

Perhaps Antonioni had to hit bottom and make Il grido, with its dour portrait in gray—in which the characters are truly in the landscape and in the grip of labor conditions in the Po Valley in winter ten years after the war—before he could in good conscience alter his focus from the social to the existential. I mean literally hit bottom—as the protagonist Aldo (played by the sluggish American actor Steve Cochran) hurls himself from a tower and for a moment his agonized cry scorches the air.

The form that “secret violence” takes is also—death.

In addition to the suicides of Rosetta in Le amiche and Aldo in Il grido, there is the death of Giovanni’s best friend in La notte; the death of a stockbroker (who was given “a minute of silence” broken by the antiphonal ringing of the phones) in L’eclisse; the murder in Blow-Up; the question of whether or not Mark killed a cop in Zabriskie Point; Robertson’s death in The Passenger (which enables Locke to assume his identity). All these are deaths about which no one cares enough; but they are deaths which galvanize action—and force the living to confront their lives.

Learning how to live is necessarily learning how to mourn.

Antonioni’s films became more and more rarefied as he came to locate, to focus on, to blow-up, to explode, the timeless human problems signified by a title like Identification of a Woman. The lives of characters freed from “the practical restraints which imprison him or her” allowed him a more intense focus on the conflicts that lie underneath the social matrices, or the “cover” of work.

Antonioni has always been incisive where matters of class are concerned, and nowhere more prominently than in the early films in the neorealist vein. Consider the nightclub scene in Cronaca di un amore where Guido, tense, sweating, as if flames were about to shoot out from the crown of his skull, looks on as Paola—the ultimate object of his desire, the rich girl, pursuit of whom is his raison d’être—carries on in a flippant fashion, bedecked in jewels and a ludicrous, absurd “leo-leopard” hat.

Profession: Reporter. Antonioni started out as a journalist, film critic, and documentary filmmaker and always approaches filmmaking as a kind of investigation. Part of his task is to give an account of certain conditions. Watching his characters try to live their lives against a background of modern verticals and horizontals that show no love for human scale, we understand why he envisions his work as digging: “archaeological research among the arid material of our times.” His worldliness and awareness of history have given him the freedom to leave it out and look more closely at the problems of living after the Second World War.

“The sun is fierce up in these hills,” writes another chronicler of those years, Cesare Pavese (whose novel Among Women Only Antonioni adapted as The Girlfriends). “I had forgotten how its light is flung back off the bare patches of volcanic rock. Here the heat doesn’t so much come down from the sky as rise up underfoot—from the earth, from the trench between the vines which seems to have devoured each speck of green and turned it to stem.”

Antonioni’s films in general—not only The Girlfriends—reflect Pavese’s tone: his obsession with real time and the feeling of being, as he phrased it in his diary, “alone, alone, alone.”

For Pavese, who committed suicide shortly after receiving the Strega Prize for Among Women Only, only others had life. He was undone by the problem of other minds. In one revealing diary entry he wrote: “6th January 1946. Gods, for you, are the others, individuals who are self-sufficient, supreme, seen from the outside.”

Pavese makes you compliant in his quest: he offers an invitation to wander, saying, come on, let’s go into the hills, it’s cool, it’s clear, and we can look back at the town and get things back into perspective. There’s the long, slow ascent, the careful deciphering of paths from natural openings in the brush that don’t go far enough, the blend of solitude and dialogue (if accompanied by a friend), self-abandonment, all tied to the ascent; then the melancholy turn homeward and the more thoughtful, darker descent, as the perspective gained from the height is lost again.

But sometimes Pavese did not want to come down. He did not want to sacrifice possibility—which seems endless when you look down at the town from far away—for the probability that he would return to the old ways when he reentered the town walls. In town, among others, he felt lonely. In the hills, alone, he felt—for a moment at least—the joy of solitude. A moment, a split-second, of solidarity with the world.

Antonioni takes this quest for perspective a step further. His characters have a lust for altitude: they “get high” by taking to the air. In a splendid digression in L’eclisse, Antonioni reveals Vittoria’s capacity for elation as she enjoys her ride as a passenger in a small plane—a scene that conveys what it feels like to fly better than any film footage I’ve seen, as if we were experiencing it from the point of view of the plane itself. Daria and Mark communicate best in Zabriskie Point while he flies a plane over her car in the azure air in slow, teasing, twisting, erotic circles against a backdrop of mountain, mesa, and the whiteness of the desert.

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

—William Blake

Antonioni was inevitably drawn to the character who is the embodiment of professional entrapment: Locke in The Passenger (originally titled Professione: Reporter). Not that Locke (Jack Nicholson)—in a segment excised from the final cut, and handed out with the director’s approval at the retrospective under the title of “The Reporter You Never Saw”—isn’t aware of how different things could be. “Yeah, it’s strange how you remember some things and forget others. If we suddenly remembered everything we’d forgotten, and forgot everything we usually remember, we’d be totally different people” (my emphasis).

There is no escape from the desire to escape.

Antonioni is nothing if not restless: he loves to let his camera pick up the other stories that appear around the edges of the story. Or to find oblique and eerie ways of detailing the inner states of his characters. Niccolo, the blocked director in Identification of a Woman, dreams of escaping to the sun. In the bravura coda, Antonioni shoots his spaceship—made of minerals able to withstand millions of degrees of heat—into the savage red.

Antonioni’s endings break free of what precedes them like rockets sprung loose from their boosters. And his characters fight against their animality; but they cannot escape (not even “to Nepal”). In Professione: Reporter, the uncut version of The Passenger, when Locke and The Girl repair to a garden, he grows quickly restless in paradise and says, “Let’s go eat. The old me is getting hungry.”

It is no small task to convey the experience of transcendence on film: in L’avventura, Antonioni builds up to it in the uninhabited town under construction, the nowhere before they reach Noto, where Claudia and Sandro wander between ancient arches in the rough whiteness—drying out the spirit.

“It isn’t a town, it’s a cemetery.”

“They designed it like a stage set.”

“Once they had centuries of life, now—twenty years.”

The nun who leads them up to the bell tower in Noto has never ascended to that physical height before even though she lives right below it. When Claudia (Monica Vitti) accidentally touches the bell rope on the tower, it sets all the bells in the ancient city ringing out in response to her love: they answer her call.

Sandro is an architect who has abandoned aspiration for commercial success—and whose life is hell on account of it; a fact which strikes with shocking force when, having come down from the tower, he knocks over a bottle of ink by letting his keys swing to and fro until the inevitable occurs, and he destroys an architecture student’s sketch. Inevitable, too, is the way the student, not yet crippled by a life of waffling, flies at his throat. It is the energy of this student that Antonioni will gravitate toward in the future when his love affair with Monica Vitta comes to an end.

I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass—the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along—to what? the Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it. … May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind m[a]y fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the Streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel—By a superior being our reasoning[s] may take the same tone—though erroneous they may be fine—This is the very thing in which consists poetry.—John Keats

Even Locke (now Robertson) has a moment of delirious freedom when he simulates flight, leaning from the funicular out over the blue waters of Barcelona harbor. But ecstasy exacts its price. In the next scene, as Locke waits in the park in Barcelona for his first rendezvous with the cipher “Daisy,” he meets a winsome yet curmudgeonly old man who sees the children playing as his springboard for this pessimistic reflection—other people look at the children and they imagine a new world but he just sees the same old tragedy begin all over again.

These sentiments recur in Locke’s bleak parable at the end of The Passenger: a man has been blind all his life is so disturbed by what he sees when he gains his sight—the dust, the ugliness, the repetition—that he kills himself.

Antonioni is trying to discover what mutations in the character of his characters have been brought about by change in the world. “The milieu … accelerates the personality’s breakdown … [but] it isn’t the milieu that gives birth to the breakdown; it only makes it show. One may think that outside of this milieu, there is no breakdown. But that’s not true.”

Seeing has been the central metaphor of Western culture ever since Oedipus plucked out his eyes, even more so since Freud fashioned his complex out of that singular action.

The art of film is not only well-suited, but may have been created, in an evolutionary sense, to get this paradox of sight out in the open. Sight, where moving pictures are concerned, requires the dimension of time, and this is where mainstream cinema most often relinquishes its claim as art. Alone among directors (with the exception of Bresson and those who responded to his gesture, like Tarkovsky in Nostalgia), Antonioni has had the courage to experiment with real time in long takes, phrased and framed within a context in which there is at least a trace of a story. He has sought “a cinema free as painting which has reached abstraction … a cinematic poem with rhyme.” Time passes. Duration is timeless; it exists out of time. “Only through time can time be conquered,” wrote Antonioni’s favorite modern poet, T. S. Eliot.

Antonioni devoted a sketch to Eliot in That Bowling Alley on the Tiber.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?” When a line of poetry becomes a feeling, it’s not difficult to put it into a film. This line of Eliot has often tempted me. He gives me no peace, that third who walks always beside you.

Antonioni resisted the bastardization of montage into shock-effect-“Mabusian”-audience-control, knowing that the time was propitious to go the other way, to get back to and rediscover the origins of an art that had developed, from a technical point of view, too quickly for its own good.

I believe I’ve managed to strip myself bare, to liberate myself from the many unnecessary formal techniques … of much useless technical baggage, eliminating all the logical transitions, all those connective links between sequences where one sequence served as a springboard for the one that followed. The reason I did this was that I believe … that cinema today should be tied to the truth rather than to logic. (my emphasis)

In place of controlling the emotional reaction of the viewer with a cut, Antonioni holds his long take until a trace of true feeling can come through, as he phrases it, in “a world where those traces have been buried to make way for sentiments of convenience and appearance: a world where feelings have been ‘public-relationized.’”

Antonioni exhibited a series of paintings, blown-up gouaches really, in Rome in the early 1980s called The Enchanted Mountains. While I found myself unable to respond much to the work, the sequence clearly alluded to Cézanne’s method of painting the same mountain again and again; which is how, in his long takes, Antonioni lets time fan out, expand, and flower, in a scene, so that truths imperceptible to the naked eye can be perceived. In film he has sought to hold the retinal focus until duration enters the work of its own accord. For his paintings he magnified the initial “image” a thousand times.

Not concentration on the “thing,” but on the scene.

(And what did Antonioni do in the short documentary Return to Lisca Bianca if not, to the bewilderment of the crew, make everyone sweat out a hot July morning on the island and wait until noon for two clouds to provide some shadow-play before saying yes to Take One.)

The fact of a secret violence that throws everything in an uncertain light is what we come to after an hour on the treeless, rocky island of Lisca Bianca, searching for Anna, the disappearing center of L’avventura who has been reading Tender is the Night. (This “disappearance” is Antonioni’s concession to plot mechanics—akin to Hitchcock’s MacGuffins.) The starkness of the rocks on the island; the steady pulse of waves broken once by a cataract that rushes up and scare-thrills Claudia; the high, direct sun, forcing everyone to squint and screen their eyes to keep the glare from blinding them; the elemental otherness of this wild outcropping of stone in contrast to what awaits them on land.

Is there something sinister or menacing about the universe? Something more—than indifference? Or is it that people are often flummoxed by the curve-balls, change-ups, and sliders that life throws them? Life is lethal; ambiguity the poison of choice.

There is a stillness that takes place in the interstices of volcanic activity.

The black donkeys move single file down the narrow lane,
hooves striking sparks on the stones,
while magnesium flares answer back from obscure peaks.

—Eugenio Montale, “News from Mount Amiata”

Antonioni’s work is perched on an active volcano: it registers the seismographic shock of the scene in Rossellini’s earlier Journey to Italy, when on a visit to Vesuvius Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders come upon a man and a woman who, while making love, were buried in the lava-flow that leveled Naples.

Sandro remains too mired in melancholy to respond to Claudia’s joy. He embodies the dangers of professionalism. Which ignores the night. He’s the “new man”—and a new kind of character for Antonioni to use.

In successive films Antonioni identifies the architect; the stockbroker; the writer; the photographer; the reporter. And then a woman—who is two women.

The architect is a paradigm of the larger human problems: how to address life, to stay in touch with the violence underlying change, rather than making something that is merely the mirror of the time. And postwar Italy is a place, as Montale has it in “News from Mount Amiata,” of “fragile architectures.”

Sandro’s character is an instance of how you do yourself no good in the long run by scaling down your ambition, artistic or spiritual, to make your life more frictionless in passage through this world.

The “novelist” Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) in La notte is similarly trapped in his (glum) idea of what it is to be a writer (like a Moravia character adrift in a novel by Pavese).

Having emerged from the womb of his room only to attend his own book party, he moves around like a ghost of himself for the rest of the day and through the night.

He notices that Valentina (Monica Vitti) happens to be reading Hermann Broch’s modernist classic The Sleepwalkers. This makes her climactic line even more pungent: “I’m not intelligent, just wide awake.”

The night allows the truth to slip in, or slip out, as in the final scene toward dawn when Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) reads Giovanni a love letter that he, ghost of himself that he is, thinks is beautiful beyond measure, unaware that it was he who had written it.

In the lyric moment that concludes this sequence Valentina tells the numbed couple that they have “exhausted” her, and then she stands, quietly alone, silhouetted in the doorway, right knee slightly bent, black hair and dress in stark contrast to the whiteness of her skin, and turns out the light.

If there is a central weakness in Antonioni’s oeuvre it is that his male leads are rarely adequate to the complex parts he would have them play. He needed characters, like the architecture student, in whom the animal was still alive.

After the dissolution of his offscreen relationship with Monica Vitti, Antonioni moved his focus away from women to raw youths, like David Hemmings in Blow-Up and the streetwise nonactor Mark Frechette in Zabriskie Point, who could move like kinetic and magnetic cursors through his meditative films.

The quiet of the night awakens our sensitivity to sound-images that we are normally too preoccupied to attend to.

In Antonioni’s films you are never free from sounds. In the first scene in L’eclisse the loudness of the fan—which encroaches on the room and oppresses it like a praying mantis—is played off against the sussuration of the wind in the bushes. At the end of the scene the slamming of the gate reiterates the finality of the man’s departure.

And at the “press screening” of The Passenger to open the retrospective, which Antonioni attends with Maria Schneider on his arm, the propeller fan in the first scene whirrs like an infernal machine; whirrs so loudly I think there’s something wrong with the projector.

In Blow-Up the soundtrack replays the sound of the wind in the trees (which I imagine must have some very personal root in the etiology of Antonioni’s imagination) that accompanied the first stage of his discovery.

It is not the first time Antonioni puts wind on the soundtrack where there could be no such sound in the room.

It is like the sensation I have when I feel that it’s the shrilling of the telephone wires in the country that makes the landscape impatient. Especially in the first days of spring, when you hear more.

I think of this impatience transferred to people, peasant families for instance. It’s not true that peasants are patient. And I think of the crisscrossing of the telegrams in those lines, with all their stories. And a soundtrack based on that shrilling. …

Antonioni looks at people—not objectively, not independent of any point of view—but to investigate how they interact with objects, and to underscore how human development lags pitifully behind technology.

Technos grows. People talk to each other face-to-face less and less.

Mechanical objects are monsters of repetition. Niccolo can’t get the burglar alarm his ex-wife has installed to stop ringing.

Gadgets multiply, like the child’s robot in Red Desert which beats its head repeatedly against the wall.

During the showing at the Walter Reade Theater of his early documentary about workers on the Po river, Gente del Po, a tear appears in the screen. The bulb behind it blazes like the streetlight at the end of L’eclisse.

And all I can do is stare at the hole in the screen, the rip in the fabric, the light that cuts through the masts of the barges as they set off down the Po.

There are no long nights without an element of boredom. And boredom is an essential component of Antionioni’s work. The problem of boredom is inseparable from the problem of time. Antonioni’s use of time is the closest analogue I can think of to the use of time in the works of Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and Broch (more in Death of Virgil than The Sleepwalkers). This has to do with the ramifications of duration—moments of perception which take consciousness a long time to detail, to populate. Consciousness can never unravel all that it perceives happening in an instant.

Any inquisition into the nature of time is doomed to the use of paradoxes, analogies, which are doomed to imprecision. You’re always running up against a wall of intervening space.

That means it’s time to buy something: it’s easy, satisfying, and only begins to exert an inertial pull after it has been possessed, like the guitar Thomas tosses into the street after working so hard to wrest it from others at the Yardbirds concert.

The night and time. Things get fuzzy when you talk about time. Science is still in the process of discovering the intermittances that the body knows—“intermittances of the heart,” as Proust phrased it in his search.

At the end of August a slight breeze sets off a clicking in the dry weeds. Driving back roads, I note the change in the attitude of nature when it’s further from the highway, or well-trafficked route: fences step out of shadows and the curvatures in the hills let you see them in more detail. This is a landscape whose language is a fructive dialogue between wilderness and settlement. And yet I sense there is something perilous in the spaces between the cultivated and the wild.

I walk into the woods at nightfall, down a path I have not taken before. I walk a while, begin to feel my way and notice it is darker than when I set out. Ten, fifteen minutes have passed. The darker it grows the clearer it seems that I am walking through a tunnel, that the trees have been here so long their topmost branches touch, intertwine; and the tunnel looks like it is narrowing, but it is the absence of light that makes it look like there is less space ahead.

Only now do I note that it is (once again) darker than when I last registered the change in light as light. This is what I remember best about the walk and it occupied maybe ten seconds out of half an hour’s meander.

This is close to where duration is positioned in relation to time. Duration exists in time yet it is hard to imagine it separately from space. Duration is time as it curves into space.

The artist who lets himself be pursued by duration risks, in defeating time, defeating the tension necessary to make the work live. You believe in moments out of time, Eliot’s “moment in the rose garden,” or you do not. The latter row is easier to hoe. The sensualist argues against timelessness. Duration occurs in time but feels subjectively like it is out of time. In time you’re coterminous with yourself. In duration, you’re walking beside yourself.

Once I look back and the entire path is in shadow I realize I have to gauge my progress by the sky.

Shadows put a matte finish on the path.

What is infinite about this silence if I am in the act of hearing it?

While boredom is not necessarily a component of music or the visual arts, I can’t imagine literature in some degree without it—with the singular exception of lyric poetry which destroys as it conflates the dimension of time. (That time is not a factor in, say, a sonnet is one reason why the form is so adept at arguing that nothing will outlast its “powerful” rhymes.)

Antonioni has staked his claim as an artist. I remain confounded as to why people who admit to having no problem with the boredom factor in such works as The Iliad, the confessions of Saint Augustine and Rousseau, The Prelude, Tolstoy’s novels, and the numerous more ambitious works of the modernists, object to what is a precondition of Antonioni’s long takes. They are the cinematic analogue to Proust’s way of touching on the rush of images that flooded Marcel’s sensorium.

Antonioni knows how to release the tension of a long take and release it powerfully—as when Lidia in La notte, in flight from the breezy hospital room where Tomasso lies dying, walks fearlessly (scaring a man who stares at her) through the outskirts of Milan and comes across the boys who shoot off rockets in a field and talk of reaching the moon. A phallic chant goes up: “Terrific thrust!” This thrusting off into outer space is congruent with Antonioni’s avowed desire to be in on the action and catch a ride up there as soon as possible: Kennedy, just prior to his assassination, had granted him permission to participate in a space flight.

I’ll admit that the scene at the stock market in L’eclisse, a brilliant riff on gambling, is a little too long, but how do we know that it does not shrewdly set the tone for the scene that follows, giving it maximum impact: Vittoria watches an elderly man who has just lost a fortune proceed stoically and matter-of-factly to the pharmacy, for a tranquilizer, and then down it quietly at an outdoor café, with no visible sign of grief.

It’s a risk to fashion an art that shows people in a shiftless, distracted, uneasy state; between the acts, in the mess. And yet to show them killing time in this state of anxious uncertainty is to show them at their most human—which doesn’t mean that members of the anxious audience would recognize themselves in these portraits. Antonioni is after truth, not proof; diagnosis of the problem, not a cure for symptoms.

He is the artist of the peripheries, for whom the only center is that which does not exist (except to disappear, like Anna and the victim’s body in Blow-Up). The periphery is the realm of the possible.

It’s … the sort of film I’ve always wanted to make and have never been able to, a mechanism not of facts but of moments that recount the hidden tensions of those facts, as blossoms reveal the tensions of a tree. … [I]t was one of those evenings controlled by invisible looks. In short, an unexpressed tragedy. The characters in a tragedy, the places, the air one breathes—these are sometimes more fascinating than the tragedy itself, the moments preceding tragedy and those that follow it, when the action is firm and speech falls silent. Tragic action itself makes me uneasy. It’s abnormal, excessive, shameless. It ought never to be performed in the presence of witnesses. In both reality and fiction it excludes me. (my emphasis)

Film is a hybrid, an admixture of all the arts that preceded it. Antonioni’s use of these materials is ascetic—no empty virtuosity, technique for him has always been the servant of necessity. By the time of The Passenger in 1975 he no longer wanted to “employ the subjective camera, in other words the camera that represents the viewpoint of the character.” After Locke’s death the camera, as if weary of confinement, wants to look outward again. What does Antonioni do when confronted with what had hitherto been thought of as a technical impossibility? In the final scene of The Passenger, which consists of one long take, he had his crew cut through the window bars of the hotel in Osuna so the camera could see further, emerge, look back at the scene it had just shot.

When asked in a filmed interview with Lino Micciche, Antonioni as seen by Antonioni, shown for the first time in America during the retrospective, “Does the camera have a future?” Antonioni, still spry and youthful in his seventies, did not hesitate to answer: “It will.”

postscript: Noto-Mandorli-Vulcano-Stromboli-Carnevale

As if to echo the ending of an Antonioni film, I had no sooner completed this essay than a friend lent me a documentary that Antonioni made in 1991—a film that deftly amalgamates many disparate themes that circulate throughout his work. It is an ecstatic yet lucid meditation on terror and beauty. The benign and the malevolent are married everywhere in this deft ten-minute imagist/cubist tone-poem.

The film is as relentless in its own way as D.H. Lawrence’s contrapuntal “Bare Almond-Trees”:

Have you a strange electric sensitiveness in your steel
          tips?
Do you feel the air for electric influences
Like some strange magnetic apparatus?
Do you take in messages, in some strange code,
From heaven’s wolfish, wandering electricity, that
          prowls so constantly round Etna?

Noto. Synthesizer bells and bird songs. The faces of gargoyles, ranging from the beatific to the loutish. The female gargoyles gaze upward like aspiring angels; the males leer from the balconies. These gargoyles are brutish but shrewd: not moral. They indicate that the human conception of what it is to be human has not changed so much over the years.

He reacts, he loves, he hates, he suffers under the sway of moral forces and myths, which today, when we are at the threshold of reaching the moon, should not be the same as those that prevailed at the time of Homer but nevertheless are.

The meditation on their expressions link up with the carnival masks at the end of the film. And they bring to mind the coarse faces in the stock market scenes in L’eclisse, where it is easy to mistake the human lust for activity with greed.

Mandorli. There is nothing terrible about the blossoming almond tree in this segment as it fills the lens. Only the world surrounding it is terrible. And yet this Edenic moment, like the grove that Locke and The Girl enter in Professione: Reporter, owes everything to history, violence, and chaos.

Vulcano-Stromboli. The volcanoes come as an interruption but they are in themselves interruptions. Volcanoes are populated. They are not at the core, they are the core. As children we pretended that molten lava flowed between the volcanoes of our adjacent cots. We wrestled. And the loser would be dissolved in the infrared flow.

I have walked the cracked, sulfurous lava crusts on the island of Hawaii where several thousand small earthquakes occur every day, and while they don’t shake you up, you pick up the activity in your nerves. It is not unpleasant—because it is real, an inviolable seismographic reminder that life is fragile, robust, dangerous; a reminder that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, like the murder in Blow-Up which the camera—more sentient than the man who wields it, yet without any moral authority—records.

Antonioni is asking us to ask: what can be done with information? Can I act on a received image? I? Vittoria can transform herself after looking at some photographs of lions at home in the bush in Africa, but can lions react to photographs of us? Can lions be deceived by images, like Stevens’s men eating images of themselves?

How else explain the force of distraction in Antonioni’s films? The volcano is a silent witness to history, to the explosions of news and eros.

In most films violence is erotic, often delicate to the point of being balletic in execution: that is part of its allure. With Antonioni sex and violence occur with volcanic force, as when Guido comes under the spell of the nymphomaniac in La notte, or Rachel Locke’s feral boyfriend crowds her in The Passenger.

And there is always Mount Aetna, brooding over Claudia’s hesitant caress of Sandro in the last shot of L’avventura.

Volcanoes: female when they smoke; male when they erupt.

The camera approaches the crater slowly, circling, trying out various approaches. The volcano changes with every new angle. The gorgeous green-gray verges on the comforting, like the park in Blow-Up that looked so “peaceful and still” to the photographer even as a murder was being committed. Murder and death are allied within the seething center here.

The camera does wonderful things with the craters; they’re ridged; entry is blocked. Sulphurous fumes rise continually from the vents around the rims. A hovering precedes descent. Bare, barren. Curvaceous. The lens caresses the black igneous rock, revealing now a whale’s hump, now the concave look of a sarcophagus. Everything has a double life: the steam around the craters’ rims recalls the deus ex machina “fires of hell” at the end of Faust, and the refining fires which the lovers pass through in The Magic Flute.

Gradually a center is revealed, steaming on all sides. Closer and closer the camera moves toward the heat at the center.

I am violent by nature. A doctor told me so when I was a boy. And I must give vent to this violence one way or the other.

Carnevale. The grotesquerie is not to be taken lightly. The masks are vastly less ambiguous than the gargoyles. There is something inexorable about the slow, mechanical movement of the shark’s jaws as it bites the empty air; and the tinsel-breathing, lean, intent face of the dragon grows ferocious in its glittering. Time does not move on the charming, feline, papier-mâché clockfaces.

These shots marry the heat of the volcanic cones and this reflected light that then—in a quick cut—blazes as a sunflower, with lights strung along all of its paper petals, like steam rising from the rims of craters. Like light on light, reminiscent of the final shot of L’eclisse: a close-up of light itself; energy in radiant form. And yet the center of the sunflower is dark. …

Night is threatened. It is not what it used to be. The night is what we can see of the volcanoes: a night that offers no repose is terrible. It is an incendiary night, about to burst into flames,

Either now or tomorrow or the day after that.

—Wallace Stevens

Once again, silently, definitively here, an inquiry into perception.

Note

NOTE: All quotations unless otherwise noted come from interviews with Antonioni or from his prose, especially That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director, translated by William Arrowsmith.