SOURCE: “Introduction,” in The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 1–27.

[In the following essay, Brunette surveys Antonioni’s career and various critical responses to his work.]

Michelangelo Antonioni, who first gained prominence on the international cinema scene in the 1960s, has become the very symbol of that increasingly rare form, the art film, and of all that the cinema has ever sought to achieve beyond mere entertainment. Along with the films of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, the directors of the French New Wave, and a few others, Antonioni’s films were, during the 1960s, absolutely essential to the cultural life of the educated elite around the world. His work, especially, has carried both the cachet and the condemnation of being particularly “artistic”—that is, symbolic, indirect, metaphysical, and even downright confusing.¹

Antonioni’s early interpreters saw his films primarily as an expression of “existential angst” or “alienation.” (Pierre Leprohon, for example, speaks of “the anguish of existence.”)² In the mid-1960s this was undoubtedly the appropriate tack to take toward films that insisted, in what seemed to be an entirely new manner, on dealing overtly with a certain philosophically inflected Weltanschauung in a popular, commercial medium.

Now, however, we can see that this manner of regarding Antonioni’s films as transhistorical artifacts is itself not transhistorical but is typical of critical response to the art-film milieu of the period. In other words, his films came to be viewed in this way not only because of their own inherent features, but also because of the period’s interpretive frame—at least as posited by critics whose primary interest was aesthetic or formal, rather than political. This focus can also be explained historically by the fact that in the late 1950s European existentialist philosophy, as popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre and others after World War II, began to filter down to more popular artistic forms such as the movies.

I am not saying that these themes are absent in Antonioni’s films. Many of them are concerned with the essential loneliness of individual human beings and the difficulty of adapting to a relentlessly changing technology that at times seems utterly antihuman. Though these themes are far from irrelevant to the present age, the times now are different, and if the themes of alienation continue to be emphasized to the exclusion of all else, Antonioni’s films will quickly become museum pieces, historical artifacts documenting, at best, a certain moment of film and European cultural history. (My students, dumbfounded by this pervasively negative critical attitude, ask me why everybody was so depressed in those days. It is not a bad question.) Therefore the time has come to rethink these films. One way to do that is to examine more closely the errancies of their textual particulars and to pay less attention, at least for a while, to the “big picture.” These films continue to be vital precisely because their other themes have more immediate bearing on the present historical situation as the world moves toward the new millennium. Ironically, their relevance becomes clearer when one considers the historical particulars that the “alienation” thesis has tended to overlook.

This rethinking might take several paths. One approach might be to reconsider the rhetorical force of these films’ visual metaphors and the way they always exceed whatever rational meaning an audience may attach to them. Another might be to resituate the films in the economic, social, and cultural context in which they arose. We too often forget that directors by and large need to make financially successful films in order to continue their work; the long periods of enforced silence throughout Antonioni’s career provide eloquent testimony to this fact of life. Instead of glossing over this commercial and popular context, as is often done in dealing with “art films,” we need to explore the precise ways in which such films came to be made in the frame of the Italian film industry and what they “meant” to that industry as an alternative paradigm to more blatantly commercial product.

One might ask how such a challenging, formally demanding film as L’avventura (The Adventure), could be financed in 1959 and, even more surprisingly, how it managed to break even at the box office in Italy? (La notte [The Night], which followed in 1961, did even better, showing a substantial profit.) Unfortunately, such questions turn out to be much easier to ask than to answer. Before beginning my research on Antonioni, I knew, from prior experience, that the bulk of Italian film criticism—all of it deeply auteurist—was either formalist, philosophical, or political in nature. But I was taken aback to find that only one slim volume, a book by Vittorio Spinazzola called Cinema e pubblico: Lo spettacolo filmico in Italia 1945–1965 (Cinema and its audience: Film in Italy 1945–1965), published in 1974, even attempted to answer questions similar to those I had begun to pose. Spinazzola’s treatment of Antonioni is also rather skimpy; given the limited scope of the present book, I cannot claim to have gotten much further in providing the sociocultural fact-finding that I now believe is necessary to contextualize the formal and thematic analysis of any film.

In addition, the very necessity of resituating these films historically leads to a whole set of other problems that arise in the context of what has come to be called cultural studies. All too often, cultural critics have, in their desire to establish firm connections between political and social events and cultural products, unconsciously resorted to crude metaphors of “reflection,” as in “this film reflects the governmental crisis of 1960.” But what does it mean to say that a text “reflects” some historical event? What metaphors of seeing and vision are unconsciously at work here, and what is their effect on the analysis?

Even more important, in the rush to establish this relationship between the textual and the supposedly extratextual (that is, History or “the way things really are [or were]”), it is often forgotten that history and even “the real” are themselves texts that must be read, and that the meaning of past events or present reality is never given directly but is always constructed after the fact. This is common knowledge, of course, but sometimes it is more convenient—because more “productive”—to forget it. Above all, cultural critics sometimes tend to forget that the cinematic texts themselves must always be interpreted. Reading, in the fullest sense of the word, is a labor that cannot be dispensed with, and thus no matter what political claims, or clandestine truth-claims, are made for or about a text, they will always be situated within a host of limiting, interpretive frames.

I take it to be axiomatic that Antonioni’s films—like all films, like all texts, for that matter—are by definition impossible to dominate. Their recalcitrant particulars, the gritty, diverse, innumerable, even contradictory, facts of their being refuse to give in gracefully to overpowering master narratives that claim (usually only implicitly) to control or subjugate them. In fact, nothing ever really seems to add up in these films, nothing, that is, beyond a vague sense of uneasiness and alienation, and thus most critics have taken this to be what they are about. Such apparent unanimity, however, is only arrived at by means of a certain violent epistemological gesture of transcendence, a gesture that moves one quickly and painlessly from the supposedly “superficial” (and certainly confusing) level of the film’s particular, material details to a “higher,” more synoptic level where things can be made to cohere.

This hermeneutic operation is probably inevitable in all forms of sense-making, for all works of art, for all books, and, of course, for all films. What is especially interesting about Antonioni’s films, however, is that this process is itself often, or even always, foregrounded. In other words, these films seem self-consciously to present such a plethora of particular, unreconcilable textual details that critics are unable to escape a confrontation with the fact, the procedures, and the consequences of interpretation. The emphasis, visual or aural, on which viewers rely in most films to help them locate the “important” textual details is often missing or, what amounts to the same thing, present everywhere. Emblematic for me is the moment at the very beginning of L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) when Vittoria (Monica Vitti) sits at a table idly looking through some empty picture frames. By so doing, she and the director point to the constant necessity and inevitability of framing, that is, of reading within a context, whether the frame is visible, as here, or invisible, as it is in the rest of the film (though everything one sees is, of course, always “within” a frame, the film frame). The question then becomes, what is the proper, or better, most productive, context for reading these films?³

Antonioni’s films continually offer the promise of meaning, like the gaping garment of French theorist Roland Barthes, tantalizing the viewer and yet always withholding any unambiguous signification. The necessity of interpretation is already obvious when the critic confronts such complex films as L’avventura (1960), say, or Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964), or the other films of this period; later, however, in Blow-Up (1966) and The Passenger (1974), the interpretive operation is itself foregrounded as part of the plot and incident of the films. There, the hermeneutic work of the audience has been introjected into the characters themselves, as the photographer in Blow-Up and the journalist in The Passenger are actively forced to interpret the texts—and the world—that surround them. (Actually, even as early as L’avventura, in the search for the missing Anna, the films’ narratives replicate this epistemological problem of making or discovering meaning.)

The vast majority of Antonioni’s films thus can be seen as collections of signifiers that turn out to have ambiguous signifieds (which is not a bad description of the world, either), and this impetus, this need to interpret, to make sense of experience, occurs even on the level of the shot. Important narrative or even cognitive information is often withheld, and the constant visual mysteries that result also contribute to a certain “hermeneutic pressure” that is always present.

So, too, whatever seemed to remain of the “natural,” the “real,” and the “direct” has been evacuated from the world, as Antonioni’s characters learn. All is necessarily offered up to an active interpretation that, both for character and for audience, is a never-ending activity; the films thus rehearse what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has described as the “infinite interpretability” of reality.⁴ As cinema historian Gian Piero Brunetta has pointed out, in Antonioni’s films, “things, in their totemic presence, become signs of signs.”⁵ Things thus take on the presence and mystery of the film’s characters, and the characters themselves take on the rigidity, but also the symbolic signifying potential, of things.

One of the consequences of the interpretive operation I have been describing is that the very ambiguity of these films causes them to become vast blackboards on which individual critics scrawl their own desires and obsessions, thinking all the while that they are describing the films, and only that.⁶ (I do not exclude myself from this self-deluding process.) The critic seems earnestly to believe that she or he is attending to the specific particulars of the text, scrupulously avoiding the merely impressionistic, but the exact nature of this negotiation between the critic’s position outside the text and the text’s inside—terms that are easily reversible—is seldom considered. As such, the details of a film come to resemble the elements of Morse code, or better (because that implies something too systematic), a bunch of apparently unrelated visual and aural signifiers that the critic rearranges and reformulates to send her or his own conscious or unconscious message.

This vast uncertainty or undecidability concerning the films’ meanings sometimes leads critics to postpone a close engagement with the particulars of any given film by attempting a comprehensive description of what might be called the world of these films. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this Antonionian world, even more obviously than the real world, is always a textual one and thus is subject to the same “incoherence” that is inevitably found in all texts. One localized version of this world-making comes in the insistent treatment of L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse as a trilogy—which Antonioni scholar Seymour Chatman and others expand to a tetralogy with the addition of Red Desert. Although it is true that these films have much in common, having been derived from the same cultural matrix by the same director, continually lumping them together also has the effect of erasing their considerable differences. In general, it seems productive to efface boundaries between films, or at least to recognize the inevitable permeability of such boundaries by trying to understand the films intertextually. (For example, the character that Monica Vitti plays in L’avventura clearly affects the reading of her character in La notte and the other films in which she appears.) In this way, the metaphysical tyranny of the rigid logocentric separation between outside and inside, and thus between discrete texts, can perhaps be rethought and rewritten; there is no logical reason for the individual film to be the sacrosanct, basic unit of interpretation.

But regarding these particular films as a trilogy (or a tetralogy) does not have the effect of rewriting the inside/outside opposition or questioning the notion of boundaries. Rather, such a gesture often merely reconstitutes these cinematic texts as a larger textual unit, which in turn leads the critic to attempt to produce a more inclusive, more synoptic reading of that text. In other words, the individual films do not become texts whose boundaries are permeable and whose meanings as individual texts are thus forever dispersed because they cannot ever be kept “inside,” but rather they become a kind of megatext that the critic may then proceed to interpret in essentialistic terms, in a more or less conventional manner.

Consider now the kind of misleading exclusions that have resulted from the overinsistence on the themes of alienation and anxiety described earlier. I am thinking here of the specific political content of these films (“political” in the largest sense of the word, that is, including social critique) that most film commentators, especially Anglo-American and French, have systematically repressed. It is all too often forgotten that Antonioni was, like every other artist, responding to specific social, cultural, and moral problems that had arisen as part of il boom. Italy’s amazing fifteen-year economic recovery from collapse at the end of World War II. Pierre Leprohon, who, ironically, was a chief architect of the “alienation” thesis, was almost alone among earlier critics of Antonioni in also insisting that both L’avventura and Fellini’s La dolce vita, which appeared the same year, were “first and foremost testimonies on their period.” He also stressed the “particular social circumstances” behind the “sexual crisis” in Antonioni’s film.⁷ It may be true, in other words, that Antonioni’s characters are alienated, but this alienation seems to be an effect of a specific social organization, rather than a generalized response to the difficulties of something called “modern life.”

Armando Borrelli, in his Neorealismo e marxismo (Neorealism and Marxism), published in 1966, provides a good example of the ambiguity with which earlier political critics greeted these films. Borrelli grants that Antonioni is interested in modern Italian reality but believes (along with many others) that he is finally more concerned with the ontological fate of man than with any specific political struggles. Thus Borelli castigates the director for the ambiguity of his social portraits because he allows spectators to draw from these films conclusions that are either critical and Marxist—in other words, that say it is not life in general that is meaningless, but this particular form of social life under these particular historical conditions—or religious, in their emphasis on the inevitability of human unhappiness.⁸ Borrelli’s ultimate judgment of Antonioni, though, is a positive one. Although contemporary alienation is not always expressed as concretely as one would like—as it is, say, in L’eclisse, Antonioni’s most explicit attack on capitalism—Borrelli believes the director has done his part by examining the crisis in this society with scientific precision, leaving it up to the spectator to take from these films a sense of the necessity of creating a different world in which “man makes the decisions that affect his life,” a world in which he is not inherently alienated from reality.⁹

In assessing the political aspect of Antonioni’s films, one should also remember that they often contain explicit, detailed depictions of class and class relations. For the most part, the director focuses on the middle class, and the absence of other groups can make viewers forget that they are, in fact, examining the foibles and failings of a particular class of people. The director himself is very conscious of this aspect of his films, once saying in an interview:

Inasmuch as I am the product of a middle-class society, and am preoccupied with making middle-class dramas, I am not equipped to [give solutions]. The middle class doesn’t give me the means with which to resolve any middle class problems. That’s why I confine myself to pointing out existing problems without proposing any solutions.¹⁰

Not surprisingly, the director has been attacked by many leftist Italian critics for focusing on the middle class, but film historian Lino Miccichè has rightly seen this as one more example of Antonioni’s political agenda. Having realized, perhaps unconsciously, that the bourgeoisie had “won” (for example, in the person of Piero, the flamboyant stockbroker of L’eclisse), Antonioni “became interested in the ‘winner’ because he wanted to x-ray the ‘disease’ that resulted from the apparent spread of the dominant ideology.”¹¹

The problem is that by investigating the bourgeoisie, the class that, as Barthes explained in Mythologies, refuses to name itself in order to appear more natural, it may seem that Antonioni is offering, once again, a “universal” portrayal of Man, when it is actually a particular portrayal of men and women bound to a specific class. Unfortunately, Antonioni’s interest in exploring class dynamics is perhaps most overt in earlier films, such as Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950), I Vinti (The Vanquished, a controversial, clearly self-conscious social document made in 1952), Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), films that are rarely seen nowadays, and most important, in Il grido (The Cry, 1957), whose protagonist is a worker. It is true that this character, Aldo (played by Steve Cochran), suffers from a kind of nebulous melancholy, a psychological depression whose metaphysical roots go beyond the emotional disappointment that motivates the plot, but Antonioni also explores his feelings in the context of a specific possibility of collective political action that he, for reasons that are never made clear, explicitly refuses.

American critic Richard Roud agreed, some thirty-five years ago, that it was important to stress this sociopolitical aspect of Antonioni’s films. In a survey of the director’s early career, written after the release of L’avventura, he said that “throughout all Antonioni’s work, one finds unsentimental illustrations of his belief that the emotions are often conditioned by social factors and tastes.” In this way, Roud sought to counter the prevailing view that any investigation of emotional life must inherently be a middle-class (and therefore apolitical) project; characteristically, he also felt compelled to add that “whenever Antonioni’s social preoccupations gain the upper hand, however, his work seems to suffer.”¹²

Another theme that is cast in a different light once one moves beyond the prevailing “existential angst” thesis is Antonioni’s resolute focus on women. In this he may have been inspired to some extent by his compatriot Roberto Rossellini’s obsessive concentration on his wife Ingrid Bergman in his films of the late 1940s and early 1950s; in any case, the emphasis is unmistakable. This particular interest is often regarded as a function of Antonioni’s view that women are “more sensitive” than men, and therefore that they are better exemplars of the alienation that contemporary society has foisted upon all human beings. In other words, whatever attention Antonioni pays to women is usually seen as part of a more general critique and not as a specific concern with women as women. He himself has said that “reality can be filtered better through women’s psychologies. They are more instinctive, more sincere.”¹³ Besides its essentializing of certain so-called feminine characteristics (and its covert, but familiar strategy of associating women with the body or the animal through the use of words such as “instinctive”), Antonioni’s statement also implies that this filtered reality is ultimately the same for everyone, irrespective of gender: its essence, he might say, is just better shown by filtering it through women.¹⁴

What this reductive view of the portrayal of women in Antonioni’s films misses—in other words, what Antonioni himself misses—is just how probing their examination of gender dynamics frequently can be. These films not only document the difficulties that attend any emotional relationship, as most critics have pointed out, but they also offer a specific analysis of the situation of women in contemporary Western society of the 1960s, an analysis that presents a sustained attack on the patriarchy (whether consciously or not is not ultimately relevant here), and this attack is surprisingly, for its time, sympathetic toward women as women.¹⁵

Antonioni is concerned in large part with the male way of being in the world. In L’avventura, for example, men voraciously watch women from beginning to end. The spectacle of thousands of aroused males following Gloria Perkins (a British prostitute who says she writes in a “trance” and wants to make films) and her torn, slit skirt—an incredibly overt, and thus purposely ridiculous, symbolic exteriorization of female genitalia—is only the most grotesque moment of this scenario. The male obsession with sex is hardly an uncommon theme in Italian cinema (Fellini made a whole career out of it), but here the obsession assumes truly monumental and ugly proportions. Similarly, when in the same film Claudia is momentarily left alone in the Sicilian town of Noto, she is entrapped by a large group of men, who surround her in an intensely threatening manner. It is more than just the supposedly playful “boys will be boys” theme promoted by too many Italian films; Claudia seems truly frightened for her personal safety, in a way familiar at least to American women in the 1990s, and to a degree that can make the “existential anxiety” she supposedly manifests seem remote and almost laughable by comparison. The world here is completely male controlled, in the most physically palpable way, and any slight autonomy that women might have wrested from men in the more sophisticated urban centers by 1960 has evaporated in this Sicilian town. In Il grido, the working-class protagonist Aldo beats up his common-law wife, Irma, in front of the entire village, and no one comes to her aid. Later in the film, he is accompanying another woman, Elvira, when she is physically attacked by a group of men. In both of these films, and elsewhere, the patriarchy shows itself in raw, ugly, physically threatening terms.¹⁶

If the films do seem to be about the complexities of the heterosexual relationship, this, too, must be seen in a historical perspective. Thus when Leprohon privileges the normative “unity of the couple” that is, according to him, at times assailed in the films and at other times fostered, in hindsight such a putative “unity” will almost always appear asymmetrical, given the power structures that exist in patriarchal society. And given the fact that feminist film theoreticians have elaborated a complex theory concerning the film’s positioning of the male spectator who gazes at the female on screen—a theory continually being rewritten over the past twenty years—Antonioni’s films are also enlightening in terms of what has been called his “feminine temperament.” What is the nature of the apparently contradictory relationship between such a temperament and the phallic, penetrating power of Antonioni’s camera, that technological stand-in for the male gaze?

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these films is that this often unnoticed social critique is held in tension with a rigorous formalism that was utterly new to mainstream cinema in 1960. That is, the films depicted interiority (e.g., interior emotional states) externally on the screen, in the form of gestures, expression, and—most important—abstract means such as line and color.¹⁷ Even more radically, in film after film, the audience is led to react to the characters as graphic expressions as well as humans with whom they identify emotionally. Psychological realism (“What would a character with such and such a personality say or do in a situation like this?”) is rarely Antonioni’s goal. Rather, his characters can be seen (and to some extent, must be seen, in order to make any sense at all) abstractly as textual elements, as much as fictional representations of “real people.”

In this regard, Antonioni’s formalist project is reminiscent of that under-taken by the American painter James MacNeil Whistler as long ago as the 1870s. In painting after painting, Whistler carefully portrayed specific, easily recognizable people in an unproblematically representational manner, yet he always insisted on giving these paintings abstract titles that foregrounded what was for him their true subject matter. The public (as well as the curators, to judge by the wall labels in museums that exhaustively detail the sitters’ biographies) seem to want to see paintings such as Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2: Thomas Carlyle, or Arrangement in Grey and Black (more familiarly known as Whistler’s Mother) principally as representations of specific people, whereas Whistler apparently wanted to see them at least as much, or more, as arrangements of line, color, and shape.¹⁸

The perception that Antonioni’s characters are not to be understood in traditional ways is abetted by the director’s stated view of the role of the actors in his films:

Inasmuch as I consider an actor as being only one element in a given scene, I regard him as a tree, a wall, or a cloud, that is, as just one element in the overall scene; the attitude or pose of the actor, as determined under my direction, cannot but help to effect the framing of that scene, and I, not the actor, am the one who can know whether that effect is appropriate or not.¹⁹

The point is that, despite appearances, Antonioni’s films are much more formal, graphic experiences, say—almost like animated paintings with characters and narrative—than they are typical film stories to which the viewer responds by identifying with the characters in all the conventionally “human” ways.²⁰ (It is also significant perhaps, that the period in which L’avventura and the other films were made was also the height of the U.S. art movement known as abstract expressionism,²¹ and that the male ethos critiqued in Antonioni’s films of this period was a salient, even celebrated, aspect of that movement.) In addition to line and shape, color comes into play, even in his early black-and-white films, for as French theorist Pascal Bonitzer has pointed out, all the colors in Antonioni’s palette, including the blacks and whites, are ideas rather than just ornamental, emotional, or psychological features. As with all abstract art, the problem comes when one tries to determine precisely what these ideas, or even emotions, are.²²

Clearly, the relation between the films’ social critique and their involvement in expressionist abstraction provides a tension that activates much of what is most powerful in them. Yet these poles must not be regarded as irreconcilable opposites, either. An argument can be made that it is precisely when Antonioni is at his apparently most formal that he is also at his most political. According to Lino Miccichè, Antonioni’s work is comparable (and preferable) to that of the more overtly political Italian filmmakers:

It is doubtless true that in the Italian cinema, often enough, the loud militancy acts as noisy cover and clamorous industrial subjection to an expressive acquiescence badly masked by striking ideological rigors, to an unlimited faith (mysteriously enough based, it’s true) in the possibility that progressive “ideological subject matter” can, without paying or losing anything, be born from regressive formal models. All the films of Antonioni … bear witness to the refusal of this handy alibi and to the positive choice of the primary political engagement that one should demand of a filmmaker: that of being “politically” responsible for his or her own expressive means.²³

Critics have, in addition, found it difficult to understand that Antonioni’s “political” vision extends far beyond the field normally covered by that term. For he is also trying to grapple with huge technological changes that are perhaps altering human beings at their very core, and his documentation and analysis of these changes transcend the easy binaries of left and right but are no less politically charged for all that. (This effort is perhaps best exemplified in Red Desert [1964], a film that Antonioni sees quite differently from his critics.) He believed that “a great anthropological transformation is occurring that will ultimately change our nature,” in the same way that increasing knowledge about the sun, for example, has made us regard it differently. After buying a telescope that enabled him to see the rings of Saturn, he remarked:

I get out of this a physical perception of the universe which is actually so upsetting that my relationship to the universe can no longer be the same as it was before. … [S]ome scientific notions have set in motion a transformational process that will end up changing us too—that will lead us to act in a certain way and not in another, and consequently will change our whole psychology, the mechanisms which regulate our lives.²⁴

These will not be merely political and economic changes, the director insists; rather, human beings will themselves be utterly altered. These transformations will also have important, if vague, formal consequences for his own work:

If what I say is true, I must look at the world with different eyes, I must try to get to the heart of it by routes other than the usual ones. This changes everything—the narrative material I have at hand, the stories, their endings—and it cannot be otherwise if I want to bring out, to express, what I think is happening.²⁵

Furthermore, Antonioni’s decision to accentuate the productive ambiguity of his films can be seen as being, in the widest sense, political. As Roland Barthes has pointed out in his essay “Cher Antonioni,” the director’s subtlety of meaning is politically decisive because “as soon as meaning is fixed and imposed, as soon as it loses its subtlety, it becomes an instrument of power. To make meaning more subtle, then, is a political activity, as is any effort that aims to harass, to trouble, to defeat the fanaticism of meaning.”²⁶

Barthes also praises Antonioni’s ability to make the object “vibrate, to the detriment of dogma,” and this notion of a vibrating object—which obviously has its graphic features—also leads inevitably to a more overtly philosophical inquiry into the classic problem of the relation between the object and its perceiver, the subject. Here I follow the lead of the Italian critic Lorenzo Cuccu, who describes Antonioni’s complicated investigation of vision in such books as La visione come problema (Vision as problem, 1973) and Antonioni: Il discorso dello sguardo (Antonioni: The discourse of the gaze, 1990). Antonioni has often been accused of heavy-handed visual symbolism (a question that will be discussed in greater detail in the specific context of the films), but Cuccu provides an inkling that the source of this perception lies in the overwhelming pressure that the director can put on individual images, “the problematic and dynamic tension internal to an image that cannot be reduced to being a mere illustrative function of the story.”²⁷

From the beginning, according to Cuccu, Antonioni saw the camera not as “a passive and indifferent instrument, but as a concrete expressive function” (p. 20). In this, his approach departed from the prevailing aesthetic of neorealism, as seen in the work of such major figures as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio DeSica. For Antonioni, “the cinematic operation is creative not because it reproduces a creatively elaborated [prior] material but for what it adds, in meaning and artistic elaboration, to this material” (p. 21). Narrative and poetic functions thus coexist in Antonioni’s images, and these correspond to the metonymic and metaphoric functions of language that have been identified and catalogued by linguists and semioticians. From this perspective, Antonioni’s famous long takes can be seen as a product of the disruption, by the metaphoric level, of the metonymic or narrative level. Nevertheless, these poetic images are necessary to fill out the meaning of the narrative (p. 34).

Cuccu also describes Antonioni’s vision as “estranged,” “a form of vision whose structures or spatiotemporal articulations follow a function which might be called ‘self-representative,’ in the sense that they serve to render perceptible … the visual experience that the author is having regarding the visible world” (p. 137). Antonioni’s self-conscious philosophical exploration of the nature of his own vision becomes clearly political in The Passenger, in which he considers the possibility of approaching reality through the visual media, in the explicitly political context of revolutionary Africa.

In exploring the nature of vision, Antonioni also examines the nature of the perceiving self, or subject, which is usually thought of as fixed and in command, visually at least, of all that it surveys. Both the object (“vibrating” or not) and the subject come to be portrayed as ambiguous and insubstantial in the films under study; in this light, Antonioni can be regarded as the most postmodern of directors. And in describing this relation, Antonioni adds to its complexity by always questioning as well his own inevitably compromised subject position as filmmaker.

Antonioni was born in 1913 to a middle-class family, in Ferrara, a mediumsize town north of Bologna known principally for its Renaissance school of painters whose work tended toward the expressionistic. After graduating from the University of Bologna and dabbling for a while in painting and semiprofessional tennis, his first connection with the movies began in 1935 as a film critic for Corriere Padano, the Ferrara newspaper to which he also contributed short stories. Late in the 1930s, Antonioni tried to make a documentary on the inmates of a mental asylum and, to judge by his moving account of the experience some twenty years later, it troubled him profoundly. When the bright lights necessary for filming were turned on, Antonioni recounts,

for an instant, the inmates remained absolutely stationary as though they were petrified. I have never seen such expressions of total fear on the faces of any actors. The scene that followed is indescribable. The inmates started screaming, twisting, and rolling themselves over the floor. … In no time at all the room became an inferno. The inmates tried desperately to get away from the light as if they were being attacked by some kind of prehistoric monster. The same faces that had kept madness within human bounds in the preceding calm, were now crumpled and devastated. And this time we were the ones who stood petrified at the sight. The cameraman didn’t even have the strength to turn on the motor, nor I to give an order. It was the head of the asylum who yelled “Stop, lights off!” And as the room became silent and subdued, we saw a slow and feeble movement of bodies which seemed to be in their final stages of agony.²⁸

What later came to be recognized as one of the director’s most characteristic artistic traits, a certain tentativeness regarding the “investigative” or “penetrating” power of his camera, may have stemmed, at least in part, from this experience.

In 1938 Antonioni left the provinces for the greater opportunities of Rome and, for a while, worked on the Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR), the World’s Fair scheduled for 1942, which, owing to the outbreak of World War II, never took place. (The section of Rome that was to be the site of the fair, now associated with Mussolini’s grandiose dreams for a new Roman Empire, is the futuristic, alienating setting for L’eclisse.) Antonioni spent a few months writing for Cinema magazine—an important source of ideas and personnel for the neorealist movement—which was, curiously enough, presided over by the Duce’s son, Vittorio Mussolini. Then, in 1940, he enrolled for a few months in the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the prestigious film school that had been recently established by Mussolini père.

At the Centro, Antonioni made a short film about a prostitute who blackmails a well-to-do lady. Apparently the most interesting thing about the short, now lost, was that he used the same actress for both parts; Antonioni is said to have been very proud of the invisible cut that makes the lady’s approach to the prostitute seem to consist of a single, impossible shot. The future director next collaborated on Roberto Rossellini’s patriotic film, Un pilota ritorna (A pilot returns), in 1941, a film that so embarrassed Rossellini that he rarely spoke of it in later years.

In 1942 Antonioni was drafted and, like virtually everyone else connected with the Italian film industry at this difficult time of divided loyalties, he did everything he possibly could to avoid being sent to the front. Since Italy was fighting a losing battle on Germany’s side, this reluctance was more than understandable. During a period of leave, Antonioni signed a contract with Scalera, a well-known Italian production company, and went to Paris (then under Nazi occupation) to work as assistant to the great French director Marcel Carné on Les visiteurs du soir. His unstable army situation forced him to return to Italy, however, and thus he had to turn down additional film offers from other French masters such as Jean Cocteau and Jean Grémillon.

About the same time, he wrote favorably in Italia Libera of the most revolutionary new film of the era, Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, which so displeased Fascist censors with its gritty, startling portrayal of working-class life that it was banned within a week of its release. In the winter of 1943, with the help of the Istituto LUCE (which had been busy making propagandistic documentaries on the “successes” of the valiant Italian army), Antonioni shot his first documentary, the completely nonpolitical Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley), a strongly realistic yet intensely poetic ten-minute film based on a treatment he had published in Cinema in April 1939, about life on the river that ran through his hometown.

It is during this period that Antonioni’s special fascination with vision and the nature of the look seems to have ripened. (Significantly, his Cinema article, “Toward a Film on the River Po,” contained nine photographs, four of them half-page in size, even before the film was shot;²⁹ in the finished documentary itself, information is often conveyed in purely visual terms, rather than through the more conventional means of the voice-over.) Antonioni later told an interviewer that once he began looking at objects with the intention of making a film, everything changed:

The things themselves were claiming a different attention, acquiring a different significance. Looking at them in a new way, I was taking control of them. Beginning to understand the world through the image, I was understanding the image, its force, its mystery.

As soon as it was possible for me to do so I returned to those places with a camera. This is how People of the Po Valley was born. Everything that I did after that, good or bad as it was, started from there.³⁰

When the southern half of the country was liberated by the Allied forces in mid-1943, effectively dividing the country in two, Antonioni had to put the film aside. He was finally able to finish it in 1947, but only after 70 percent of the footage he had shot was accidentally destroyed during the developing process.

Immediately after the war, Antonioni worked for a while as a translator, film critic, and scriptwriter (he wrote two unproduced scripts for Visconti) and made a magnificently photographed nine-minute documentary called N. U.—Nettezza urbana. A study of the men who clean the streets and gather the garbage in Rome, the film poetically documents the magnificence of early morning in the city. It won an important critics’ prize in 1948.

Next followed several other shorts such as L’amorosa menzogna (Lies of Love, 1948–9), a film that humorously and ironically describes the gap between the glamorous lives of photoromance stars—all the rage at the time—and their real lives, and Superstizione (Superstition, 1949), which documents the superstitious customs still to be found among rural folk. About the same time, he wrote a treatment for Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), based on the same idea as L’amorosa menzogna, which was made into a film by Fellini in 1952. Three more made-to-order shorts came in 1949 and 1950, including a documentary on the production of rayon, another on the cable car that runs to Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites skiing area, and a third on the Villa dei Mostri, a Renaissance garden featuring grotesque figures carved in the rocks.

The urge to document everyday life that appears in all of these films is not surprising given the fact that Antonioni came into his cinematic maturity during the heyday of neorealism, the most famous movement in Italian cinema history. Visconti’s little-seen 1942 film Ossessione was a forebear of the movement, but although it wallowed in the grit and dirt of everyday life, a look that was to become a staple of neorealism, it lacked that sense of social concern for the downtrodden as a group that would also come to characterize neorealism. By general agreement, the first “real” neorealist film was Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, which came out in 1945 and was followed by such cinema classics as Vittorio DeSica’s Ladri di biciclette, (Bicycle Thief, 1948) and Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Shakes, 1948). The movement began to lose steam in the early 1950s, owing to an exhaustion of creativity and attacks by government ministries fed up with seeing Italy’s “dirty laundry” advertised around the world.

Even at the height of the movement, however, few of these films were successful with the Italian film-going public, who were, not surprisingly, tired of the misery of their everyday postwar lives and anxious to see comedy and fantasy on the screen. As a cliché of the time had it, right after the war “one made films either about the people or for the people.”³¹ According to Vittorio Spinazzola, the crucial weakness of neorealism was that it failed to alter in any significant way the relationship between the audience and the cinema, thus giving free play to the political powers aligned against the movement. Unsupported by the public and restricted to what Spinazzola calls “the radical wing of the bourgeois intelligentsia,” most neorealist directors suffered a crisis of confidence and severely altered their approach as the years went on.³²

Given his emphasis on poetic expressiveness, it now seems clear that Antonioni was never a neorealist. Yet, like all other postwar Italian directors, he cannot be understood except in reference to the movement, as an oppositional background, the way that neorealism itself cannot be understood without reference to its opposite, or what it posed as its opposite, conventional Hollywood narrative cinema. His early documentaries, so concerned with the feeling of place and the specificity of fact, obviously were conceived within the terms of a dominant neorealist aesthetic. But whereas neorealism was “obsessed with the visible,” as Italian film historian Guido Fink has put it, Antonioni has always been at least as interested in the not-seen as in what is realistically there, before the camera.³³

In 1958 Antonioni himself wondered aloud: “Am I a neorealist director. I really couldn’t say. And is neorealism over? Not exactly. It is more correct to say that neorealism is evolving.” He stressed the necessity of an interiorization of the neorealist project, taking DeSica’s masterpiece, The Bicycle Thief, as his example. He pointed out that now filmmakers needed to go beyond the stolen bicycle, which was almost the center of DeSica’s film, in order to enter the protagonist’s heart and mind.³⁴ It is unclear exactly how interior states might be shown, except through a simultaneous process of exteriorization; obviously, it is just this tension that so brilliantly animates Antonioni’s best films.

In more thematic terms, and in the context of the features that the director began making in the early 1950s, Gian Piero Brunetta has outlined Antonioni’s relation to neorealism in an admirably succinct fashion. Brunetta points out that although neorealism always regarded reality from a decidedly anthropocentric viewpoint—whatever meaning or coherence reality can be said to have stems from the central place of human beings in that reality—“the Antonionian man is no longer either center or measure of space and of reality. He moves and acts in a relationship of inadequacy in respect to others and to his surroundings.”³⁵ Even more than the neorealist films, which typically accentuate the heavy tragic destiny of common people (rather than their inherent political power, through group solidarity, to actually change things, which is what leftist critics understandably wanted filmmakers to emphasize), these early features, according to Brunetta, “insist on the chain of necessity with which the flux of existence pushes the individual from error to error, right up until the final collapse, without the resources of the individual subject ever being able to bring him out of himself to establish a relation with his kind.”³⁶ Although this is an accurate assessment of the way these early films outdo the negativity of most neorealist films, it leaves open the central political question: Is this sad state of affairs the result of something inherent in human fate or human nature, or is it the product of a particularly dysfunctional social formation?

This deterministic trajectory is especially evident in Antonioni’s first feature, Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950), starring Lucia Bosè and Massimo Girotti, the smouldering leading man who had first come to wide notice in Visconti’s Ossessione in 1942. It is a dark tale of illicit passion and fateful encounters that in fact strongly recalls the brooding atmosphere and iconography of the Visconti film. This film also shows early signs of certain Antonionian mannerisms, such as the use of extreme long shots of empty spaces to convey emotion, as well as expressive lighting and striking black-and-white compositions. The director’s focus on a female protagonist is also noteworthy here; it is a focus that will persist for more than fifteen years.

His next film, La signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias, 1953), once again features Lucia Bosè in the lead role. It is a bitter look at the complications of love and human relationships (note the ironic reversal of the title of Dumas’s novel and play, La dame aux camélias), filled with dark, expressive streets and duplicitous noirish men, with the world of the film industry as a backdrop. Significantly, the emphasis on the woman’s perspective is even stronger in this film, and the director is clearly sympathetic to her, for he emphasizes the way she is dominated and mistreated by the selfish and inconstant men who surround her. Neither she nor the director, however, at least in 1953, seems able to imagine a life for her without a man.

Though it was actually begun earlier than La signora senza camelie, Antonioni’s next film, I Vinti (The Vanquished), had its premiere six months later, in September 1953, at the Venice Film Festival. Originally titled Uno dei “nostri figli” (One of “our children”), the film, composed of three separate episodes shot in three countries (Italy, England, and France) and in three languages, was to prove one of the director’s most controversial projects. Based on true stories, it is an earnest European version of the “troubled youth” movies that were popular throughout the developed world in the 1950s. Both the British and the French episodes were banned in their respective countries because the portrayed families objected, and the censor’s permission to shoot the Italian episode was withdrawn at the last minute and another story substituted.

The French part of the film tells of some young people who kill a friend for his money; the Italian episode concerns a young man from a good family who smuggles cigarettes and dies from injuries suffered in a fall that occurs while he is running away from the police; the English section recounts the story of a young poet who kills a prostitute to get his name in the newspaper. The emphasis on documenting a particular historical moment betrays the neorealist context in which this film was conceived, but the long shots of empty streets also show the director’s desire to exteriorize internal emotions, and to move toward a stylization that, apart from Visconti’s La terra trema, was rather rare in neorealism. And although the entire film is filled with a bitter postwar world-weariness that questions the status of all heretofore “eternal” values, the very impulse to describe a particular social problem, precisely as a problem to be solved, seems to carry with it some sense of politics, and even a sense of hope.

A crucial document, both in terms of Antonioni’s work and of more theoretical questions in general, is “Tentato suicidio” (“Suicide Attempt”), Antonioni’s segment of L’amore in città (Love in the City), a compilation film released in November 1953. The director used some fifteen actual survivors of suicide attempts brought about by failed love affairs to tell their stories to the camera, in the semblance of a police inquest. Four of the stories are “re-created” by their protagonists, raising tantalizing questions about the relation between reality and its “fictional” representation.

Antonioni’s next major film was Le amiche (The Girlfriends), which opened in 1955. Based loosely on a novella by Cesare Pavese called Tra donne sole (translated in 1959 as Among Women Only), it tells a group of interlinked stories of young, glamorous women and their loves and careers. It is surprisingly advanced in its examination of feminist issues such as conflicts between love and career or between “femininity” and sexual independence; class differences are also explored. Most important, perhaps, Le amiche resolutely, and unapologetically, focuses on women. Though it won the Silver Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival, it did poorly at the box office.

Il grido was the director’s next film, and the one that proved to be his entree onto the international scene. Shot during the winter of 1956–7 in and around the Po Valley, where Antonioni had grown up, the film is especially important because its protagonist, for once, is a worker. Women seem at first to be the locus of power in the film, as the worker, Aldo (played by the American actor Steve Cochran), is thrown into a deep depression after the woman he has been living with for seven years, Irma (Alida Valli), decides to leave him for reasons that are never explained. The balance of power is more than reestablished, however, by his harsh treatment of the other women in the film. In a kind of road movie that reprises characters, situations, and imagery from both DeSica’s Bicycle Thief and Visconti’s Ossessione (down to the sexual dynamics at a forlorn gas station in the Po Valley), Aldo wanders from place to place with Rosina, the daughter he has had with Irma, revisiting old women friends and trying to pull his life together. In the midst of labor unrest and an attempt by the government to throw the farmers off their land, Aldo can think only of Irma; the director explicitly shows him rejecting the group solidarity that motivates and gives hope to his fellow workers. Eventually, he gives in to despair and dies when he falls off (or jumps off) the tower on which we first saw him at the beginning of the film. Il grido is punctuated by the trademark Antonioni long shots, denuded landscapes, and fog-enshrouded scenes that lead naturally into the triumphant formalism of the great films to come.

At the box office, none of these early films was very successful (Cronaca di un amore earned 175 million lire, La signora senza camelie 140, and I Vinti 129, all ridiculously small sums). Even Le amiche, which grossed 260 million lire—because, according to Spinazzola, it had a story by the famed writer Cesare Pavese, a recognizable plot, and several well-known actresses in it—nevertheless finished only fortieth in box office receipts the year it was released. Il grido—the most formally challenging and most “depressing” of all the pretrilogy films—made the least of all: it ended up grossing only 100 million lire, of which only 25 million came during its initial release.³⁷

And then in 1959–60, which is often described as the annus mirabilis of postwar Italian cinema, everything changed, for Antonioni and for the entire Italian film industry. Films such as Fellini’s La dolce vita and Antonioni’s L’avventura leave the war and antifascism behind, finally, and begin to focus, for really the first time, on present-day middle-class mores. Strangely enough, both of these films are serious works of art of a high intellectual nature, quite “trying” according to conventional standards, yet both were deeply appreciated by the public as well as the critics, in the provinces as well as the major cities.

The entire Italian industry, in fact, experienced a powerful upswing at this moment. According to Gian Piero Brunetta, by 1959 Italy was number one in Europe and second only to the United States in the number of spectators and size of box office receipts; amazingly, there was one theater seat for every nine people in Italy. In the meantime, Italian film production jumped from a robust 140 films in 1958 to an amazing 246 in 1962.

Brunetta attributes this huge change to a number of factors:

The birth of a center-left government, new lifestyles, the rapid process of industrialization, the rise in mass consumption, the new distribution of leisure time, the maturation of a new social and political conscience, the change in sexual behavior and in social habits, the phenomenon of mass emigration from the south toward the large industrial centers of the north: all of this finds, in the cinema, a terrain that reacts immediately. Precisely in 1960 Italian cinema—like an extremely sensitive seismograph—notes and registers, with perfect timing, all of the processes of transformation in the economic, social, and political life of Italians. And, at the same time, it aims at a complete renewal of its own framework, offering very wide possibilities to a few directors who had come to the fore already in the 1950s, attempting to demonstrate how also the auteur film could translate into both a commercial and critical success.³⁸

In 1960, according to Brunetta, Italians began wanting to see a specific film, rather than just go “to the movies.” This situation was to last until private television came on the scene in the mid-1970s.³⁹

For Antonioni, the critical success of L’avventura (notwithstanding the hostility it aroused at the Cannes Film Festival) and of the other films that quickly followed—such as La notte, L’eclisse, and then, his first film in color, Il deserto rosso—was a personal vindication for the initiator of a brilliant new style of filmmaking. These films focus relentlessly, almost exclusively, on female protagonists and, in their apparent aimless indirection, explore human relationships and the meaning of human existence using narrative and formal techniques that the cinema had never before attempted. Since the bulk of this book is devoted to these four films, I will forgo further comment on them here.

Antonioni’s next effort was a twenty-five-minute segment of a compilation film entitled I tre volti (The Three Faces, 1965); Antonioni’s not very interesting section stars Princess Soraya as herself and is called “Prefazione: il provino” (“Preface: The Screen Test”). But it was Blow-Up (1966) that made Antonioni the internationally known figure that he remains today. Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), set in sexy, “swinging” London, and shot in English, the film, despite its enigmatic (and to some, laughably “arty”) exploration of the connection between reality and its photographic representation in the guise of a photographer who accidentally captures a murder on film, became a huge hit. It is discussed in depth later in the book.

Antonioni went on to make Zabriskie Point, the second film in a three-picture deal with MGM (produced by Carlo Ponti) and released in 1969. Set in the Berkeley of the student rebellion, the film is burdened with an implausible plot and inexperienced actors whose weak delivery greatly detracted from what could otherwise have been a very interesting film.⁴⁰ The problems go deeper than that, however, for Antonioni’s uncritical portrayal of the supposed innocence of his youthful protagonists (and the corresponding, one-note depiction of the policemen and capitalist land developers as completely evil) seemed naive even in 1969. Furthermore, in its celebration of a hippie orgy in the desert—no matter how magnificently composed, visually and aurally—the film also serves as a tacky and embarrassing record of the fifty-six-year-old director’s own presumed sexual liberation (or wish-fulfillment). In an interview with Look magazine at the time, Antonioni said:

America has changed me. I am now a much less private person, more open, prepared to say more. I have even changed my view of sexual love. In my other films, I looked upon sex as a disease of love. I learned here that sex is only a part of love; to be open and understanding of each other, as the girls and boys of today are, is the important part.⁴¹

Despite its failure, the film displays moments of brilliance, especially in its initial, documentary-like depiction of a political discussion concerning the possibility of revolutionary action undertaken by middle-class white students, and in the complicated abstract visual designs that reappear throughout.

Antonioni next undertook, at the invitation of the Chinese government and the RAI, the Italian television network, a documentary on contemporary life in China. Shown in 1972 on Italian, French, and American television, “Chung Kuo” seemed to most Westerners a rather straightforward depiction of the Chinese Communist attempt to build a “New Man,” but Chinese officials reacted violently against the film, citing its “distortions” and attacking Antonioni for “imperialistic cultural espionage.” The Chinese threatened to break diplomatic relations with any country that showed the film, but a shortened version was eventually shown again later in the United States, with additional commentary.

The Passenger, Antonioni’s third and final film in his three-picture contract with Ponti and MGM—and, in my view, one of the best he ever made—was based, for the first time in the director’s long career, on a script written by others. Starring the already well-known Jack Nicholson as a television journalist who exchanges identities with a man he barely knows who has died of natural causes in their hotel in the Sahara, the film returns to the themes of the trilogy but with a new depth and historical specificity (and a sharpened political edge) that made it feel thoroughly up to date when it was released; it, too, is treated in detail later in the book.

Next came Il mistero di Oberwald (The Mystery of Oberwald, 1980), a weird experiment in color for Italian television that was based on a play by Jean Cocteau and starred Monica Vitti. Set in an unspecified Mitteleuropa country in the nineteenth century, the film tells the melodramatic story of a reclusive widowed queen and a young assassin who becomes her lover and, finally, her murderer as well. Antonioni seems to have agreed to the emotional, somewhat silly project in large part because he had not made a film in five years and because it allowed him to play creatively with the television equipment, changing colors, improbably but expressively, for each character, through purely electronic means.

His next theatrical film was called Identificazione di una donna, which was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1982 under the title Identification of a Woman, but which never received U.S. distribution. The film has its partisans, but the subtle connection that reigns in films such as Blow-Up and The Passenger between the director and his alter ego, the protagonist, is here made completely obvious and thus infinitely less interesting. The main character is now a film director, no less, involved in an obsessive search for two women. Many of Antonioni’s typical themes reappear, as well as his trademark formal techniques, bundled together with passionate and revealing sex scenes that seem to overwhelm the rest of the film. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, a longtime partisan of the director, called it “an excruciatingly empty work,”⁴² but the best analysis was provided by Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice:

Antonioni has always been up there on the screen, but we tended to mistake his reflection for a portrait of Modern Man with all his wires disconnected. Yet now that the director stands at last nakedly before us, the absence of a plausibly compelling narrative drains his confessional film of the necessary tension to sustain our interest.⁴³

Improbably, this connection between character and creator was to become even more blatant in the eighty-four-year-old director’s most recent film, Beyond the Clouds, made with German filmmaker Wim Wenders, whose presence was necessary for the film production company to obtain completion insurance. (Antonioni suffered a serious stroke in the late 1980s and is no longer able to speak.) In this film, which was shown at the 1996 New York Film Festival and elsewhere and opened commercially in London in early 1997, the film director character, played by John Malkovich, mouths inane dialogue that includes some of Antonioni’s bons mots from various interviews he has given. An uncompelling vanity production populated by the crème de la crème of contemporary European cinema (Fanny Ardant, Jean Reno, Sophie Marceau, Jeanne Moreau, and the late Marcello Mastroianni), the film tells several stories of lost love and misunderstanding that seem nearly to parody the director’s greatest works in that vein. More charitably, Anthony Lane, writing of Beyond the Clouds in the New Yorker recently, had this to say:

I don’t happen to believe that Antonioni’s work is profound, but the illusion of profundity is so spooky, and so exquisitely managed, that it will do just as well. … The world of Michelangelo Antonioni throngs with sick souls, and we may be slightly sick of them by now, but I wouldn’t want them to get better.⁴⁴

As of this writing, according to the trade journals, the apparently indefatigable, still speechless Antonioni is soon to begin shooting another film, entitled Just to Be Together, this time with that most Antonionian Canadian director, Atom Egoyan (The Adjuster, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter), as guarantor-sidekick.⁴⁵

Whatever else it may accomplish, this study does not aim to provide a master narrative of Michelangelo Antonioni that purports to “explain” him and his films once and for all. Besides the obvious complexity and ambiguity of the films themselves, the sheer volume of criticism in French, Italian, and English (to name only the most obvious sources of commentary) is itself impossible to master or to give any adequate accounting of.

What I hope to achieve in the following pages is a more modest goal, an “exploration” of what I judge to be Antonioni’s “central” films. (Even choosing which films to concentrate on, of course, is already an act of interpretation.) I have decided to focus on L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, the films of the so-called trilogy; Red Desert, the director’s first film in color; Blow-Up, his first “international” film; and, finally, The Passenger, the most artistically successful film of his maturity. For considerations of space, I have had to skip over all of the director’s earlier films; I especially regret having to omit Il grido, since it is the entry film for the themes of the trilogy and beyond. However, the other omitted films are, to my mind at least, clearly secondary efforts.

Some will question the very viability of an “auteur” study focused on an individual director, and whether anything of value can be achieved using such an “old-fashioned” method. Film history of the 1970s and 1980s taught us to look suspiciously upon the auteurist claims that had naturally arisen in the 1960s, when film was struggling in the academy for the acceptance that other art forms already enjoyed. The argument then was—and in large part still holds true—that, perhaps more than any other art form, film is marked by its collaborative nature. Nevertheless, it is also true that Antonioni’s films, like those of his countrymen and European filmmakers in general, were created in the context of an auteurist aesthetic that has always valued personal expression—even in such an obviously commercial, “compromised” form as film—above all else.

The auteurist approach was also dealt a serious blow by the writing of French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, who loudly, and convincingly, proclaimed “the death of the author” in favor of a new emphasis on the interpretive work of the reader in making sense of texts. Jacques Derrida has also raised doubts concerning the possibility that the artist can ever express him or herself in a noncontradictory fashion, given the fact that consciousness, like everything else, is inherently divided. Then there is the question of ideology. In many ways, of course, it is true that the unconscious ideology of any society is always speaking, using the author as its often unwitting mouthpiece, in every text. Yet as Robin Wood has pointed out in a seminal essay on Hitchcock, (now twenty years old but still valuable), “It is only through the medium of the individual [artist] that ideological tensions come to particular focus.”⁴⁶

It is also the case that if one’s own critical writing about film or anything else is to be coherent—and no publisher I know has become sufficiently “postmodern” to forgo those demands—it must have some principle of design. If that is so, then any form of organization—by period, theme, country, whatever, as well as by author—will implicitly depend upon an essentializing process that, by definition, will “deform” its object of study.

Ultimately, since there is before us the hard existential fact that these particular films would never have come into being without this particular author, maybe then it is just as valid to consider these films in terms of their author as any other way. In this regard, I am encouraged by Antonioni’s simple but incontrovertible response to an interviewer who innocently asked whether the director’s assistants chose the locations: “The location is the very substance of which the shot is made. Those colors, that light, those trees, those objects, those faces. How could I leave the choice of all this to my assistants? Their choices would be entirely different from mine. Who knows the film I am making better than me?”⁴⁷

Notes

1. To many critics in the 1960s, these films seemed especially, and perhaps illegitimately, “novelistic.” French critic Pierre Leprohon worried about this, particularly in regard to La notte (1961):

   Does it not present a real danger, that of once again drawing the cinema out of its proper domain? Is it not possible that this new approach, making use of all the techniques of the novel [whatever that might mean, since, after all, these are films], may create a literary cinema which will soon prove as vain as the theatrical cinema it is meant to replace?

   (Pierre Leprohon, Michelangelo Antonioni: An Introduction, trans. Scott Sullivan [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963], p. 76)

2. Leprohon, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 59.

3. For a fuller discussion of the question of the frame, in all the senses of the word, see Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 4.

4. See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

5. Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 2, (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982), p. 739.

6. One example among hundreds: a male critic describes the colors of the love scene in Corrado’s hotel room in Red Desert as well as those of the scene of Thomas’s frolicking with the young girls in Blow-Up as “alive and playful,” thus implicitly regarding these scenes themselves in the same light. From a feminist perspective, they can just as legitimately be seen as obnoxious.

7. Pierre Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, trans. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 168. Interestingly, though, and somewhat bafflingly, Leprohon asserts elsewhere that it is not “useful to enter into a discussion of Antonioni’s atheism or his interest in Marxism. While it can be argued that they explain his moral position, they certainly do not determine it” (Leprohon, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 68). It should also be noted in passing that during the 1950s Antonioni was a frequent contributor to the communist film journal Cinema nuovo (which, unfortunately for the director, did not keep that journal from attacking his “bourgeois” films later on).

8. Armando Borrelli, Neorealismo e marxismo (Avellino: Edizioni di Cinemasud, 1966), p. 148.

9. Borrelli, Neorealismo e marxismo, p. 171.

10. “A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on His Work,” in Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, American ed. Marga Cottino-Jones (New York: Marsilio, 1996), p. 40. (Originally published in Film Culture, no. 24 [Spring, 1962], this interview was translated from “La malattia dei sentimenti: Colloquio con Michelangelo Antonioni,” in Bianco e nero, vol. 22, nos. 2–3 [February—March 1961].)

11. Lino Miccichè, Il cinema italiano degli anni ’60 (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1975), p. 27.

12. Richard Roud, “Five Films,” Sight & Sound, no. 30 (Winter 1960–1), p. 9.

13. Yvonne Baby, Le Monde, September 16, 1960, and in several other interviews.

14. In talking about Il grido, Antonioni said: “The workers go to the heart of the questions, to the source of the feelings. Everything is more true (with them)” (quoted in Vittorio Spinazzola, Cinema e pubblico: Lo spettacolo filmico in Italia 1945–1965 [Milan: Bompiani, 1974], p. 152). What is interesting here is the uncanny resemblance between the woman’s and the worker’s supposed greater access to truth: they are both seen as marginal cases that can lead us to the reality that the (normative) middle-class male misses.

15. Even before the advent of feminist theory in the early-1960s a critic such as Pierre Leprohon was intelligently pointing out that in Antonioni’s films “the woman has become an autonomous character; she is no longer designed to serve as a complement to one or more partners: that is to say, deformed by the domination of a masculine figure” (Leprohon, Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 30). Leprohon does not at this early moment have the critical concepts with which to probe this dynamic further, but his suggestion that Antonioni’s early films were not financially successful precisely because they were dominated by women is a trenchant one.

16. Interestingly, what we hear the men murmuring on the sound track (not translated in the subtitles) is: “Is she a foreigner? Do you think she’s French? She must be French.”

17. One example of this is Antonioni’s decision in Red Desert to paint parts of the landscape, literally, in order, as he said, to more clearly portray the interior feelings of his characters.

18. Further information on Antonioni’s own career as a painter and the complex relation between painting and his films can be found in “Identification of a Filmmaker,” an interview with Sophie Lannes and Philippe Meyer originally published in L’Express (August 9–15, 1985), and reprinted in Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, pp. 245–56.

19. “A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on His Work,” p. 36.

20. Antonioni also said in the Film Culture interview: “I think it is important at this time for cinema to turn towards this internal form of filmmaking, towards ways of expression that are absolutely free, as free as those of literature, as free as those of painting which has reached abstraction” (“A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on His Work,” p. 26). Later in this same interview, the director testified to the great importance of painting in his life: “I have a great love for painting. … painting is something that moves me passionately” (p. 44).

    It should be added that in his 1961 article, Richard Roud, in discussing several apparently gratuitous camera movements in one of Antonioni’s early films, La signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias), was thinking along the same lines that I am trying to develop when he congratulated the director for giving us a “non-representational element for our pleasure … an experience in pure form” (Roud, “Five Films,” p. 11).

    Antonioni’s films not only borrow a formalist visual aesthetic from modern painting but also quite consciously resemble the modern novel in ways that are too complex to go into here. See William Pechter’s statement: “The best new novel I have encountered in the past few years is L’avventura. And it is a film” (Pechter, “On L’avventura” in L’avventura, ed. George Amberg and Robert Hughes [New York: Grove Press, 1969], p. 287).

21. Relevant here is a remark that Antonioni is said to have made during a visit to the studio of famed abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko in New York: “Your paintings are like my films—they’re about nothing … with precision” (quoted in Seymour Chatman, Antonioni: Or, the Surface of the World [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], p. 54). Chatman goes on to quote an article by Richard Gilman, published contemporaneously with the encounter between the two artists, that elaborates on the quotation from Antonioni: “[Antonioni’s films] are part of that next step in our feelings which art is continually eliciting and recording. We have been taking that step for a long time, most clearly in painting, but also in music, in certain areas of fiction, in anti-theatre. It might be described as accession through reduction, the coming into truer forms through the cutting away of created encumbrances” (Richard Gilman, “About Nothing—With Precision,” Theater Arts, vol. 46, no. 7 [July 1962], p. 11; quoted in Chatman, Antonioni, p. 54).

22. For Antonioni, this notion of abstraction has always been obscurely tied up with the larger question of realism. He realized that, in principle at least, more details of a filmed reality were latent on the film stock than could be made visible through current photographic technology. Thus, in a sense, the cinematic image is always an abstraction.

23. Miccichè, Il cinema italiano, p. 27.

24. “An In-Depth Search,” interview with Alberto Ongaro, reprinted in Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, p. 345. (This interview originally appeared in Italian in L’Europeo, December 18, 1975.)

25. “An In-Depth Search,” interview with Ongaro.

26. Reprinted in Cher Antonioni: 1988–89 (Rome: Ente Autonomo Gestione Cinema, 1988), p. 20.

27. Lorenzo Cuccu, Antonioni: Il discorso dello sguardo: Da “Blow-Up” a “Identificazione di una donna” (Pisa: ETS Editrice, 1990), p. 11.

28. “Making a Film Is My Way of Life,” reprinted in Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, pp. 14–15. (Originally published in Cinema nuovo in 1959.)

29. Carlo di Carlo, “Voir d’un oeil nouveau,” in Cher Antonioni, p. 37.

30. “Preface to Six Films,” in Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, p. 66.

31. Spinazzola, Cinema e pubblico, p. 7.

32. Spinazzola, Cinema e pubblico, p. 12.

33. Guido Fink, unpublished lecture given at the University of California at Berkeley, April 1993.

34. “My Experience,” in Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, pp. 7–8. (Originally published in Bianco e nero in 1958.)

35. Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 2, p. 740.

36. Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 2, p. 147.

37. Spinazzola, Cinema e pubblico, p. 146.

38. Gian Piero Brunetta, “Il giardino delle delizie e il deserto: trasformazioni della visione e dei modelli narrativi nel cinema italiano del dopoguerra,” in Schermi e ombre: Gli italiani e il cinema nel dopoguerra, ed. Marino Livolsi (Scandicci: La Nuova Italia, 1988), p. 65.

39. Provocatively, Brunetta insists on seeing Italian film of the 1960s—“whose importance is not less in the history of Italian cinema than neorealism”—as a movement. As such, it has its own formal differences from preceding cinema (in the use of montage and the long take); commercial differences (the director, as auteur, is removed as much as possible from the demands of the industry); and differences in subject matter (with the new treatment of taboo subjects such as Fascism, factory work, and the Republic of Salò) (Brunetta, “Il giardino delle delizie e il deserto,” pp. 66–7).

40. In a recent, otherwise excellent book about Antonioni, critic Sam Rohdie uses the following “thoughtful” adjectives in characterizing the American critical reaction to Zabriskie Point: “vicious,” “stupid,” “uncomprehending,” “insulting,” “vulgar” (Rohdie, Antonioni [London: BFI, 1990], p. 137). Rohdie attacks Seymour Chatman for his “stodgy book” and, especially, for choosing not to like this failure of Antonioni’s: “He [Chatman] dislikes Zabriskie Point because it is merely, pointlessly beautiful; narratively it is badly acted, unrealistic, inaccurate (no ‘real,’ ‘true’ American could accept it), unlikely, over-contrived” (pp. 137–8).

    Pace Rohdie’s intemperate remarks, few Italian critics thought more of the film than did we Americans. Goffredo Fofi, for example, attacked the director for his “megalomania” and said that Antonioni always failed when he attempted the “grand historical-philosophical-sociological vision” (Fofi, Cinema italiano: Servi e padroni [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971], p. 100). He called the film “a wagonload of commonplaces from the American ‘analytic’ cinema, youthful rebellion, and off-Broadway and off-Hollywood theater and film that provoke a horrible feeling of the already-seen and already-noted, with the difference that this operation of supposed synthesis is extremely more presumptuous and therefore more irritating than all the things that he is recording or manipulating” (p. 101).

41. Look, November 18, 1969, p. 40.

42. New York Times, September 30, 1982.

43. Village Voice, October 19, 1982.

44. New Yorker, September 30, 1996, p. 90.

45. Variety, December 8–14, 1997, p. 22.

46. Robin Woods, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 292.

47. “Antonioni Discusses The Passenger,” in Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, p. 334. (Interview originally appeared in Filmmakers Newsletter in 1975.)