SOURCE: “The Consuming Landscape: Architecture in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni,” in Architecture and Film, edited by Mark Lamster, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000, pp. 197–215.

[In the following essay, Schwarzer analyzes the metaphorical use of architecture in Antonioni’s films.]

In day-to-day experience, the sight and feel of buildings is subject to extreme shifts of attention, duration, and familiarity. We experience buildings on pragmatic excursions, in the rounds of routine, and via flashes of discovery. In the representation of architecture (through drawing, model, or rendering), by contrast, the approach to buildings is abstract and ideal. With film, the experience of architecture is more directed than in everyday situations and less focused than in architectural representation. In a dark auditorium whose seats point toward a fixed screen, great demands are made of a viewer’s attention and vision. Images of buildings unfold off reels in a linear sequence, yet this succession is guided not by the steady flow of experienced time but by the choices of the filmmaker. The camera has the capacity to associate buildings with a great many objects and events, moods and atmospheres, locations and relations. Film brings architecture into focus only to disperse it within the hubbub of life.

No filmmaker has used architecture to greater effect than Michelangelo Antonioni, who studied architecture before becoming a film director and remained fascinated by the built world throughout his career. Many of his films depict famous buildings or sites, and several feature architects as characters. Nevertheless, the larger statement Antonioni makes about architecture has less to do with buildings designed by famous architects than with the expanses and particles of building and landscape. Following in the tradition of Italian neorealism, Antonioni first picked up on the acute observations of the Italian poor as they anxiously wandered through cities and the countryside. In Il grido (The Cry, 1957), shot mostly out-of-doors, his camera chronicled the events of a road journey along the Po River, and established a connection between the starkness of the landscape and the futility of the characters’ actions.

In the tetralogy of films that followed, Antonioni undertook a sustained critique of the lives of affluent and middle-class Italians. In L’avventura (The Adventure, 1960), La notte (The Night, 1960), L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962), and Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964), the director explored architecture and the urbanized landscape as the physical soul of modern humanity.

Unlike such celebrated “architectural” films as Metropolis (1926), The Fountainhead (1949), and Blade Runner (1982), the architecture and landscapes explored by Antonioni are real. And unlike most directors, who confine their renderings of real settings to title sequences and small interludes in plot, the forms and spaces of architecture and the city stalk the viewer throughout this tetralogy. In fact, since Antonioni is so unconcerned with plot, character development, and dialog, he shifts the viewer’s attention to the wide-open confinements of the modern mise-en-scène. Architecture both contributes to the events taking place among actors and acts independently with other objects in motion and in space. Architecture is protagonist and antagonist, nucleus for the slow collapse of perception into a space between the actors’ lines, a visual language with a power all its own. As Frank Tomasulo has noted, for Antonioni, architecture “enunciates themes of ancient vs. modern, nature vs. culture, atheism vs. Catholicism, woman vs. man, and even socialism vs. capitalism.”¹

In the opening credits of La notte, Antonioni explicitly announces that architecture will serve as much more than a background. We first see a noisy street, bursting with traffic and the ornamental excesses of a late-nineteenth-century facade. A sudden cut transports us skyward to the unoccupied and sharply defined upper terraces of Gio Ponti’s Pirelli Tower of 1957, Milan’s tallest building. In these first two shots, Antonioni establishes the oppositions of turmoil and order, of crowds and silence, and of historicism and the modern movement that run throughout both this film in particular and the tetralogy in general.

From the tower’s summit, the camera begins a slow descent down the facade. This scene has been often interpreted as a commentary on the fall from the high ideals of modernism to the earthly chaos that modernism sought to eliminate. But beyond this metaphor, Antonioni fixes architecture as a means of constructing the mood of the film. As the camera gradually makes its way down the sheer walls it looks head-on at the building’s glass and steel surfaces, creating an analogy between the shots on a reel of film and the stories of a building. Both reflect the city with varying degrees of opacity; despite the tower’s monolithic stature, we see that the windows of some floors are transparent, whereas others are cloudy, and others still are divided by venetian blinds. Midway down the building, the camera abruptly pans ninety degrees and looks out toward the city. The shot is a split image divided between the camera’s view of the city and the camera’s view of the city as reflected by Ponti’s building. Architecture becomes object viewed and frame for viewing.

With the first scene of L’avventura, Antonioni introduces what will be one of his central themes: the destruction of tradition and community by the forces of industrial society. A year before Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accatone (1961) chronicled the seedier side of the Roman demimonde, Antonioni had already unveiled the calamity of Italy’s burgeoning urban periphery. We first see Anna, the protagonist who will later disappear on the island of Lisca Bianca, walking out of an old walled garden into a noisy and vacuous urban space. There, on unpaved ground in view of nearby construction sites, she meets her father, who has just commented to a workman that his peaceful villa will soon be torn down to make way for a modern housing development. Seconds later, as a background of menacing housing projects is scanned, Anna’s father remarks on the growing distance between him and his daughter. The collapse of family occurs amidst the demise of a family home. Antonioni’s vision is not completely despairing. Positioned (for a moment) over Anna’s left shoulder is the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, the seat of the Papacy and the center of the Catholic community. An archetypal image, the dome serves as a counterpoint to the present chaos in both architecture and society, hope out of the distant past.

Soon afterward, Anna, her boyfriend, Sandro, her friend Claudia, and a group of decadent acquaintances take a yacht trip around the Lipari Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Despite the idyllic setting, they are almost universally afflicted with modern maladies of the emotions—ennui, anxiety, restlessness, and disorientation—and these are set against the tumultuous gray of the sea, the brilliant sunlight, and the jutting rocks of the islands. After arriving on Lisca Bianca, Anna vanishes without explanation and is never seen again. In the subsequent disinterested search for her, we see several times the pyramidal shape of a volcano on the nearby island of Stromboli. In one sense, the volcano may be read as a metaphor for the inner flame that might (or might not) still burn within the souls of Anna and her friends. In another, as a mountain that has existed for millions of years in the form of one of architecture’s most potent archetypes, a pyramid, Stromboli is a counterpoint to the corrupting specter of indifference and indolence displayed by the human characters. As is the dome of St. Peter’s, the pyramidal mountain is a symbol of humanity’s connection to lasting meaning. Together, such archetypes contrast with the chaotic foreground scenes in which they appear, and provide a measure of hope that there is perhaps divine guidance in the modern world after all. A similar device is later used in La notte, where the camera views a tragic scene in a hospital room from behind the round, steady head of a silent mother. For a brief moment, motherhood provides a foundation of meaning and security in a world where words no longer provide answers.

Antonioni again and again poses the upheavals of modernity against the order of religion, family, and nature. Toward the end of L’avventura, the troubled Sandro, an architect who has sold his creative soul to become the pawn of a real estate developer, intentionally knocks over a bottle of ink onto the drawing of an architectural student. The drawing, following the intricate details of a shell niche on the Sicilian Cathedral of Noto, is a reflection of a lingering aspiration for beauty within modern society. But inasmuch as Sandro has renounced the search for beauty elsewhere in his life, he is driven to destroy it here. Interrupting the inevitable confrontation between the angry student and the embittered architect is the sudden appearance of a linear procession of children emerging from the door of the cathedral, among them, perhaps, a future artist.

Antonioni is skeptical, however, of attempts to create archetypes in modern times. Claudia and Sandro’s Sicilian search for Anna and their own developing relationship leads them to a ghost town outside of Caltanisetta. Composed in cubic geometries, with simplified classical forms like blind arches and blank pediments, the town’s vacant abstraction looks like a facsimile from the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Yet, if the painter’s metaphysical dream was to re-establish an archetypal language of geometric forms, this town, constructed during the fascist era of Benito Mussolini, is an unrealizable fantasy of community and a relic of dangerous dreams. While Sandro wonders why such a well-built place was never occupied, Claudia remarks on a similar town in the distance—or is it, as Sandro interrupts, a cemetery?

The inability of modern-age designers to achieve idealized dreams of pure geometric cities is highlighted throughout L’eclisse. Much of the film is shot on the southern outskirts of Rome, in the EUR (Exposizione Universale di Roma) district, the same locale where Federico Fellini had shot a disturbing murder-suicide in La dolce vita (1960). Intended by Mussolini’s architects and postwar planners to be a utopian city that would replace the congestion and chaos of old Rome, the neighborhood where translator Vittoria lives appears much more like a cemetery for the living. The streets are silent, devoid of stores, people, cars. The inhabitants that do appear seem robotic, mechanized into routine, and out of touch with their physical surroundings. They walk in the middle of streets and alongside playfields where the only action is a rotating sprinkler. This city of white slab buildings, flat grassy fields, and empty roads is as much a failure as the ghost town depicted in L’avventura. The archetypes designed in the godless times of modernity are dreams for illumination that shed only darkness.

If archetypes cannot be created in the modern era, what about a return to history? Throughout the tetralogy, Antonioni sets the frosty architecture of the modern city against the earthtones of architecture’s past. Characters often project their most vital desires onto old buildings and public spaces, and onto memories of their youth associated with objects unspoiled by modernity’s infertile conventions. For example, it has been frequently observed that in a hospital scene in La notte, the view of the protagonist Lidia from her dying friend Tomasso’s bed opens out through a window onto an old, intricately designed building. Seen from elsewhere in the room, however, without Tomasso’s loving gaze at Lidia, the view takes in sleek gray modern buildings that hover menacingly over the polychrome grain of the old building. In L’avventura, Sandro and Anna’s only sensual moment occurs in an older building, their union consummated by the crisscrossing lines of a ceiling’s parabolic vault.

Similarly, the only bright moment of Il deserto rosso occurs when housewife Giuliana, worried over the loss of sensation in her son Valerio’s legs, tells him a story of a little girl who lives alone on a tropical island. In contrast to the drab surroundings of Ravenna’s industrial quarter where they live, the island’s beauty lays in the fact that modernity hasn’t yet reached it. As Seymour Chatman writes:

It is interesting to note the textural difference between the beach scenery in the story she tells to her son and the surfaces of her life in Ravenna. Everything near her home is smooth, hard, and cold to the touch, a medley of modern materials—steel, glass, and plastic—whereas the sand and sandstone of the fantasy beach are warm and soft-looking, resembling nothing so much as the limbs and breasts of lovers embracing in the sea.²

Is this connection to unspoiled nature and historic architecture anything more than a dream? Can we live in the past? Or do images of the past come clattering down on the present?

In a powerful scene in L’avventura, Sandro and Claudia view Noto’s cathedral square from the roofscape of a nearby church. What begins as a romantic ramble through a monument of architectural history ends up highlighting the dimness of Sandro’s past and future. At first, Sandro is inspired by the panorama before him, an enormous plaza enclosed on its principal side by a long facade articulated by pilasters, urns, towers, and a central pediment and dome. He comments stirringly on how the baroque was planned with extraordinary freedom as a stage set for its times. These bright thoughts lead him to reflect on how he’d like to be an architect again, a creator of ideas instead of profits. But despite Claudia’s encouragement, Sandro quickly demurs from his enthusiasm. Beautiful things don’t last long in a transitory age, he sadly reflects; whereas new buildings once persisted for centuries, now they have lifespans of only ten to twenty years.

Then, incredibly, after only a few seconds, Sandro impulsively asks Claudia to marry him. Trapped between ropes that pull the great church bells above their heads, Claudia is a caged animal. Sandro, who does not see the possibility of lasting architecture, clearly does not believe in the permanence of marriage. Architecture’s fragmentation presages social disintegration—neither cupolas nor couples will last long in his world.

At the all-night party that concludes La notte, Antonioni likewise expounds on the impossibility of permanence. The industrialist Gerardini wants writer Giovanni to come work for him, to pen a history of his company and then direct the firm’s public relations office. After telling Giovanni that his garden already contains more than one thousand roses and many valuable statues, Gerardini goes on to reflect that his commercial enterprises themselves are works of art. Only he, the grand capitalist, can create solid design, a lasting monument to the times. Although Giovanni wants to differ, he labors sentences whose words end in affirmation. Yes, he sadly reflects, the free artist or architect is today an anachronism; the times indeed are in the hands of industrialists.

Earlier in La notte, Lidia embarks on a great journey through modern Milan, from its center to its periphery, but fails to escape from its grasp. Her journey begins at a downtown party celebrating her husband, Giovanni’s, new book. Trapped between cocktail glasses and overflowing pretense, she flees the social game that the dying Tomasso had never learned to play. In a flowered dress, she begins her great walk through the anonymous streets of the modern city, a journey in search of renewed love for a wayward husband who now resides in the anteroom of fame. Along the way, Lidia encounters numerous people but is unable to connect with any of them. Instead, her encounters are with buildings and machines, dissonant sirens and jet planes, rows of uniform windows and balconies, a canvas of forms and sounds opaque to her heart. She is trapped once again, not by ruthless people but by the harshness of modern architecture, by the restless shadows and cutting shapes cast by smooth-skinned buildings.

Modern architecture not only cuts people off from each other, it also cuts them off from the past. At one point on her walk, Lidia looks in on a site where an old building is being demolished. There she discovers and comforts a solitary weeping child. As she leaves the gloomy confines, Lidia gently touches the remaining wall of the building. The cracked paint easily peels off. Mother “protector” has abandoned both child and architecture.

Seeking to rid herself of the repetitive, clamorous loneliness of the modern city, Lidia takes a taxi to a spot on the outskirts of the city where she and Giovanni had once enjoyed romance. But what must have once been a quaint town reached by railroad has been engulfed by the fringe of metropolitan development. The small pavilions and train station are abandoned. The hotel is run-down and the fields overgrown. The old magic is gone. Having found no deeper meanings or stability, the event that most captivates Lidia is a bottle-rocket launching, another feeble attempt at escape.

Not all of Antonioni’s characters seek to escape their lives. Several live comfortably within the pretenses of the present. In L’avventura, Antonioni juxtaposes the empty lives of the rich with the monumental weightiness of the palaces, churches, and ancient villages they frequent yet blithely ignore and even degrade. One palace is now a police station; another has become a hotel and the setting for interminable parties. Their apathy toward their heritage is clearly reflected when, during the search for Anna, one member of the group finds an ancient vase in a crevice. While at first they all marvel at its beauty, the vase is suddenly and carelessly dropped. After lamenting its loss for only a couple of seconds, the characters nonchalantly move away from the shattered pieces.

In L’eclisse, the past offers no comfort whatsoever. Much of the film alternates between the modern environment of EUR and the old city of Rome. Yet the contrast here is not one of modern alienation and traditional community. To the contrary, the scenes in Rome’s narrow streets and, especially, at its stock exchange reinforce the notion that the commodification and senselessness of modern life has penetrated every nook and cranny of the historic city. In a tradition that reaches back to the neorealist films of Vittorio de Sica and Roberto Rossellini, the old cities of Italy have become stages for depicting the struggle for survival.

If Italians labored just to find enough food following World War II, by the early 1960s their struggle transcended material survival. Now, the characters battle psychic breakdown. This is reflected in L’eclisse, at Rome’s stock exchange, when Vittoria tries to speak with her mother but is repeatedly rebuffed. The bedlam of commodity trading has taken over modern life; Vittoria’s mother is only interested in financial gain. The incongruous consequences of Italy’s newly won material prosperity are screams of stock prices and orders, rushing hands, constantly ringing telephones, and the loss of time for human conversation.

Setting the hell of capitalism within a giant columned space adds poignancy to Antonioni’s commentary. This hypostyle hall is no longer a sacred grove, the center for community it would have been in the past. Instead, the thick columns of the stock exchange stand as mute reminders of an ancient world covered by the sands of accumulation. In a frequently analyzed shot, the columns actually divide Vittoria from her potential new lover, Piero. Here as elsewhere in Antonioni’s films the life and solidity of historic buildings are bent and broken by the derangements of modern society.

Throughout the tetralogy, Antonioni uses architecture to emphasize his themes of alienation and isolation. Walls, in particular, illustrate the ability (or inability) of his characters to relate to each other. For Antonioni, blank walls—whether concrete, brick, or stone—often symbolize mute feelings, an inability to express oneself or connect with others, metaphors for a distanced soul. Walls, of course, are also notoriously prey to multiple meanings. Are they a means of support or are they a fortification for defense? Does their traditional stone or brick impenetrability contribute to social isolation or a focused interior life? Does their modern transformation into transparent curtains by steel and reinforced concrete frames free people to engage with the outside world or expose people to their disadvantage?

In L’avventura, Patrizia and Claudia represent the walled and the unwalled, the one who accepts social conventions and the one who tries to stay true to her individual emotions. Patrizia, the wife of a real estate developer, is immersed and surrounded by the social pretenses of the well-to-do. While her yacht is anchored off gorgeous island caverns, she prefers to play puzzles and nuzzle her little dog in the boat’s lower cabin. Later, toward the film’s conclusion, Patrizia admits to Claudia that she feels comfortable at meaningless social gatherings; what she cannot stand are islands where she is surrounded by emptiness.

Claudia is the unwalled. She is still in touch with—yet troubled by—her visceral emotions. On the boat, it is she who intently watches a dolphin thread waves in a rhythmic dance. She is also the only one who really cares that Anna has disappeared. And, she is even willing to love Sandro, who already on the island had substituted Claudia (for the missing Anna) as the goal of his search. It is Claudia’s flickering spark of life that makes the final scene of the movie so difficult. After Sandro’s inevitable infidelity to her, she ends up forgiving him and, therefore, admitting that she too must join society and its hypocrisies. In the closing shot of the film, as Claudia comforts the scoundrel Sandro, the background of the frame is evenly split between a wall of the villa on the right and an open shot of Mt. Etna appearing as an island over the Gulf of Catania. Can individuals live unwalled like mountains or islands, distanced from conventions they abhor, yet separated from others? Or, shall individuals (as Claudia now seems to be doing) accept the confinements of walls, of claustrophobic and superficial modern society, but at least belong to something?

In Il deserto rosso, Giuliana, because of a mysterious industrial accident, takes the path that Claudia did not take, that of trying to find her true feelings outside of the walls of social convention. But she has taken this path because she is no longer sane. Corrado, the engineer Giuliana meets through her husband, is attracted to her madness much as he is to great engineering challenges. She is a project for him, an objective terrain to be researched and reconstructed. Corrado has made the opposite choice of Giuliana, accepting the compromises and dislocations inherent in modern society. Like the other principal male characters in the tetralogy, he is entangled in the circumstances of modernity. Whereas Giuliana wants to connect to everything around her, but cannot, Corrado pointedly remarks that he only travels with a couple of light suitcases because the world is his home. In a sense, both have become the social islands feared by Patrizia in L’avventura, but social islands of a different tenor. Throughout the film we witness Giuliana walking inches away from walls hoping for some imaginary support; Corrado, his soul at ease in the global world, walks in the middle of the street, unburdened.

Giuliana’s greatest hopes rest on an implausible plan to open a gallery on a deserted downtown street where there is obviously no potential clientele. The walls of her gallery are bare; unable to relate to the world, she is incapable of filling them with art. Similarly, throughout La notte blank walls reveal troubled spirits, as when Lidia rests alongside the hospital’s exterior wall after seeing Tomasso for the last time, or when the psychiatric patient who seduces Giovanni in her hospital room is pictured like a rabid animal against the expanse of a stark white wall.

The blank walls of modernist architecture were polemical statements, the realization of a functionalist aesthetic that sought to reveal the materiality of pure surface and banish the pretense of historical ornament. In Antonioni’s films, however, these all-too-honest walls are often contrasted to their disadvantage with premodern walls. Modernity’s sterile surfaces lack the textural depth of Noto’s baroque facades in L’avventura or the rhythmic monumentality of the ancient Hadrianic columns attached to Rome’s stock exchange building in L’eclisse. Modern walls, like islands, refuse social hypocrisy but at the risk of alienation and madness. Antonioni thus likens ornament to an acceptance of social pretense whereas modernist asceticism ends in isolation.

During the 1920s, Le Corbusier had announced that steel and reinforced concrete construction represented a revolution in the history of the window. Windows could be elongated to fill the space between the members of a structural frame. Transparent glass could replace opaque walls and bring light and air into a building. Enshrined as one of his “Five Points” of architecture, the strip window was expanded by other architects into a glass curtain-wall where interior and exterior became a unified visual realm. In the work of architects like Richard Neutra, the view through expansive plate glass onto nature was understood as one of modern architecture’s great contributions to the spiritual and aesthetic well-being of humanity.

For Antonioni, however, this great contribution yielded consequences unintended by its proponents. In L’eclisse, when Vittoria pulls open the curtains revealing the strip windows of her apartment, as if to relieve her soul in a view of nature, she is confronted instead by a water tower whose form resembles an alien spaceship or atomic mushroom cloud. Similarly, in Il deserto rosso, a strip window in Giuliana’s home reveals a dizzying view onto giant ships plowing through a harbor. If modern architects envisioned the strip window offering a healthful gaze onto nature, for Antonioni those windows exacerbate the anxiety of being held hostage in a world of entwining mechanical objects.

In all four films, Antonioni’s principal characters are well off. Survival is not an issue for them. As a result, their material possessions are something other than necessities governed by a logic of use. They are playthings, distractions, masks, even uninvited guests with minds of their own. Apartments, streets, and urban spaces teem with an ungodly dance of vacuous particulars, artificial lights, droning appliances, racing automobiles, and smoke-plumed factories. The sounds of objects and machines are a speech unto themselves, a technological yet archaic rumble that obscures human dialog. In this storm of engineered objects the rhythm of human relationships is terminally interrupted.

The numbing effect of materialism on the human condition is the principal theme of L’eclisse. A tundra of pointless material accumulation and real estate development shrouds everything. The film opens much the way it ends, through a slow-moving panorama of objects in disarray and human relations in decline. The only difference is that the object incantations of the opening scene have a counterpoint in the collapsing relationship between Vittoria and Riccardo. By the end, human relationships are beyond a state of collapse; consumerist materiality submerges anonymous people in its gray final music.

The first shot in L’eclisse is of a table lamp illuminating an apartment cluttered with objects. Through a scan of these objects, absent any dialog but filled with the disturbing drone of an electric fan, Antonioni establishes a mood of disarray in human relationships and a connection between that disarray and those objects. We quickly see that Riccardo’s arm had been part of the first shot, although it appeared an inanimate object. Predictably, Vittoria cannot connect with this lifeless lover, nor can her own lifeless consciousness offer any verbal cause for her disconnection. Yet the reasons surround them, the paintings, vases, trinkets, razors, and manuscripts that pull people apart from each other and from themselves.

If Vittoria is torn apart by the demands of objects, her attempts to connect with objects end obscenely. In a friend’s apartment, she is astonished by the collection of emblems and trophies from Kenya pasted onto walls and inserted into cabinets. In a trance, Vittoria assumes the character of these objects, becoming an African dancer, complete with darkened face cream, hoop earrings, and a spear.

Vittoria unwittingly relinquishes her soul to the exhibition of engineered objects and loses everything. Whereas men are more or less able to dissolve themselves in the modern spectacle’s material fantasies and fetishes, the principal women in Antonioni’s films are always ill at ease. Vittoria’s counterpoint is Piero, the floor man at the stock exchange who aspires to material possessions and financial gain. He is comfortable navigating the rocky shores of capitalistic opportunity. When someone steals his automobile and plunges it into a pond, the automobile is pulled by cranes from the waters. The material world replaces the materials that are lost.

The material world of L’eclisse ends in a set of images in which people are more dead than alive. Set in the haunts of EUR, the final scene is bereft of dialog. Instead, the camera scans a patchwork of unresolved built shapes and natural forms, mechanical objects and human figures, a city dissolving into silent noise, an abstract art. In the twilight approaching evening, humans are objectified and objects animated. We see the crooked lines on the face of an old man and the clean sharp lines on the balcony of a modern apartment building; water floating in a tank and then flowing toward a drain; a nondescript corner where a building’s scaffolding indicates a state of impending demolition more than renovation.

If the mood is serene, it is deeply disquieting, an elegy to our ability to discover meaning in things and hence in ourselves and each other. Ian Wiblin describes the strange beauty that emerges from Antonioni’s random arrangement of buildings and objects:

Finally, a bus comes and goes, its braking interrupting the quiet of the scene, adding an almost violent edge that jars with the emptiness, the lack of activity. The urban space has eventually won out over the characters and the narrative thread has finally been dissolved.³

The film ends amid the blinding light of a streetlamp. But unlike Alexander MacKendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), where blinding lights energize New York City and its people, Antonioni’s last frame is monochromatic white. Amid an energy created solely by machines, humanity is eclipsed.

It is logical, given the ending of l’eclisse, that the ominous shadows cast by industrial technology are the subject of the last film in the tetralogy, Il deserto rosso. Shot in the ancient city of Ravenna, Antonioni never allows a glimpse of the old city and its magnificent Byzantine architecture. The action, or inaction, is set on the industrial barrens alongside the Adriatic Sea, marshes that have become dumping grounds where giant ships move eerily through channels cut into the land. The modern world’s Stygia, it is a place of droning noises and sudden sounds, of earth that releases white vapors, a place by the sea where seafood must be bought from elsewhere because the waters now taste of petroleum.

Giuliana wanders through these infernal haunts over the course of the film, frequently accompanied by a dense fog that fades the human figure and spirit. Although the terrain has been constructed by men, people are forced to walk between tight passages, under hovering cranes, and alongside plumed releases of gas. Giuliana’s engineer husband seems hardly human; he differs little from the giant machines he controls at work and the gadgets and robots with which he fills his son’s room. At the beginning and end of the film, we see Giuliana and her son trying to negotiate a ground made barren by grime and filth, furtively eating sandwiches under skies whose yellow poisonous smoke, she tells her son, the birds have learned to avoid.

Nature and humanity assaulted and defeated, machines disclose a new order of dazzling forms and lascivious colors. The great ships move like dinosaurs in a prehistoric swamp, hulking-edged shapes in a murky bowl. Giant transmission towers point antennae out into space, the interests of machines having shifted already from our world. In the way this landscape is modeled, there are bits of new-found beauty. As Diane Borden writes:

One danger of the architectural wasteland is that is can be transformed into a “beautiful object.” The factories of Red Desert become works of abstract art when Antonioni paints pipes, walls, and machines orange, blue, and yellow; places the actors in sculpted positions within the mechanical constructs of the shot; and shoots fog, steam, and belching sulfur to create an atmosphere that is almost magical.⁴

The machine architecture of Il deserto rosso can be seen as boldly expressive where the human landscape has become mute, a composition of formed power and chromatic range where the slab architecture of human residence has become reductively regular and white. In Corrado’s hotel room, walls, furniture, and bed are all of an austere white. The power station is a hodgepodge of brilliant color. Both the formal complexity and fantastic colors of the machined environment have surpassed the reductive logic of modern architects.

Antonioni’s overriding interest in the tetralogy is the enervating numbness of modern life, the defeat of the human spirit amid material affluence and technological progress. This preoccupation with the extraordinary failure of modernity continues in Antonioni’s subsequent English-language films, although these films are more plot-driven and attentive to the popular and revolutionary culture of the sixties.

Architecture does not play a large role in Blow-Up (1966). Set in London, the film begins as a jeep of merry mimes drives around the austere plaza of Peter and Allison Smithson’s Economist Building and quickly cuts to a column of morose workers emerging from a brick factory. Beyond these scenes, however, Blow-Up is a film about the vagaries of perception. Through a story about a fashion photographer’s accidental shooting of a murder, the landscape becomes a terrain where the real and unreal, the seen and the unseen, are blurred.

In Zabriskie Point (1970), the architecture of America is subsumed by signs: signs on billboards, signs on trucks, signs on taxicabs, benches, and buildings. Anticipating Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the signscape of Antonioni’s Los Angeles takes on the sonority of a boombox blasting nonstop random messages. This visual bombardment reaches a crescendo at the film’s conclusion in the Arizona desert, where a sumptuous modern house explodes in slow motion over the course of six minutes—in a psychedelic sky show, clothes, books, furniture, and Wonder Bread wrappers dance the last dance of consumer culture. The Passenger (1975) begins in another desert, the Sahara of North Africa, before moving to scenes in Germany, London, and Spain. In Barcelona, Antonioni films the entrance and rooftop of Antonio Gaudi’s Casà Mila and Park Güell, contrasting their variegated and polychrome textures with the flat emotions of his characters. As in L’avventura, the protagonist, for no apparent reason other than acute modern ennui, decides to disappear. The difference is that he assumes the identity of another man, a gun runner for African revolutionaries, and later dies as a consequence of this game in a Moorish-style courtyard hotel, eerily evocative of the fascist ghost town in the earlier film. The relentless materialism that degrades buildings and cities has finally turned people into disturbed facsimiles of one another.

In all the films, but especially those of the tetralogy, Antonioni makes use of the laconic aspects of modern architecture to accentuate the muteness of the modern individual. Ideas are conveyed not as much by revealing conversation or facial expression, both of which are typically lacking, but by situations in which the threadbare emotions of people are conveyed on the razor-edged corners of balconies or the implacable expanses of smooth walls. The films are a sequence of collages that confront the disturbing affinities between the modern urbanized landscape and the modern mind. As Antonioni himself writes: “The best results are obtained by the ‘collision’ that takes place between the environment in which the scene is to be shot and my own particular state of mind at that specific moment.”⁵

Like later directors, such as Terrence Malick in Badlands (1973), Antonioni filmed landscape as an echo of the alienation inherent in the modern age. Apartment buildings, power stations, and new towns billow as barren mental breezes, accumulating the blankness of material accumulation, twisting with the false seductions of technology, or whispering dangerous dreams of nostalgia. Asphalt avenues and curtain windows reflect the estrangements of modern subjectivity, and are bathed alternatively in monochrome flatness, blinding contrasts of sunlight and shadow, the white cream of moonlight, or the sudden flashes of a thunderstorm. Not just columns and walls, but also screens, balconies, and windows separate people as they attempt to see or speak to one another. A figure on a balcony overlooking an interminable forest, cut in half by an angular shadow, and seen furtively by another person through a doorway, such are the frames by which Antonioni animates modern architecture and landscape into a corollary of the disintegrating modern mind.

Antonioni’s viewpoint should not be reduced, as some critics have tried, to a blanket rejection of the modern world in favor of the past. Granted, his camera consistently and deliberately falters on the threatening hiss of power stations, on the apathetic acquisitions of individuals, and on the neurotic shadows of tall buildings. Yet, over the course of the films, such images pile atop and around one another, and compress the human characters into slow-motion trances that are themselves intensely captivating. The plotless stories, the desultory rhythms, and the lugubrious visual contents wage offensives on two fronts. For Antonioni, modern architecture is menacing but exact; it is monotonous but exquisite. Modern architecture is Antonioni’s grand metaphor for the turbulence, tedium, and sublimity that make up the age.

Indeed, Antonioni seems to have a romantic belief in the insights to be gained from juxtaposing the longings of the modern mind with the disharmonies of the modern landscape. As Mira Liehm states: “He used the immediate significance (presence) of things to reach beyond their mere objectivity and create out of their phenomenal existence a Proustian metaphor of oblivion.”⁶ Perhaps that is why so many of his films end at dawn or dusk, that time of luminary transition when the sharp glare and clear lines of the marketplace world are diffused and the anxiety of human emotions softened.

At the conclusion of La notte, Giovanni and Lidia walk onto a great lawn that opens onto a distant view of the horizon. As they wander in the misty morning air, absorbed in their individual thoughts, the two figures are set against single trees, fragments of the larger woods that define what is actually the fairway of a golf course. At this hour, the space is not a playing field with rules and routes any more than Giovanni and Lidia are individuals with purpose. Instead, the vista evokes the romantic sublime, a panorama onto an infinite space where their troubled souls may roam freely together. Lying together in a sand trap, Lidia reads aloud an intensely passionate letter Giovanni had written her years earlier. He is moved by the letter, so much so that he asks who wrote it. His mind has become obscured by the dense fog that envelops the trees and fairway, the irresolute atmosphere of the modern condition that swallows illusions of individuality and community in great gulps.

Notes

1. Frank Tomasulo, “The Architectonics of Alienation: Antonioni’s Edifice Complex,” Wide Angle 15 (July 1993): 4.

2. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni: Or, the Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 113.

3. Ian Wiblin, “The Space Between: Photography, Architecture and the Presence of Absence” in Cinema & Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, ed. François Penz & Maureen Thomas (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 106.

4. Diane Borden, “Antonioni and Architecture,” Mise-en-Scène 2 (1980): 25.

5. Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi (New York: Marsilio, 1996), 27.

6. Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California), 178.