[In the following essay in praise of L’eclisse, Peck selects several sequences which show Antonioni’s ability to convey the subtleties of alienation, uncertainty, and dread which characterize “The Atomic Age.”]

I was 15 when I first saw Antonioni’s L’eclisse. It was screened for only one afternoon at the Tooting Classic. I skipped school games to go and see it and as a result got slapped into a two hour detention. The impact the film had on me in 1963 was devastating. It was unlike anything else I had seen, and it seemed to describe the kind of world into which we were moving—it was almost science fiction.

L’eclisse was made some months before the Cuban missile crisis and my memories of it are strongly linked to that terrifying week of nuclear brinkmanship. I think that a premonition of a looming, unidentifiable catastrophe was what made the movie so disturbing. It is difficult to communicate just how frightening that October in 1962 was at the time. We all lived under the threat of obliteration, the end of everything, fini. Subsequent international crises no longer felt so remote, each one could take the world to the brink again, and this time some maniac might press the button.

Antonioni’s film was the first I saw that seemed to be made with acute awareness that the old myths, however comforting, were no longer adequate. It eschewed all certainties of characterisation, dramatic intent and narrative resolution. It was altogether a different sort of movie—it felt ‘modern’, its very fabric disturbed by an uncertainty that could now be said to underlie everything. This is not to reduce L’eclisse to being ‘about’ the nuclear threat (although a newspaper headline “The Atomic Age” appears as part of a montage during the film’s climax, and is especially unsettling). Trying to describe what the film—or any other work by Antonioni—is about, is not a simple task as it can’t be reduced to a plot synopsis, although it is definitely preoccupied with the narrative space between events, actions and intentional dialogue.

The opening scene is a long sequence set in an apartment showing two lovers, Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), at the end of a love affair. Worn out from talking all night and past the point of having anything further to say, they are unable to make the definitive break. Most films, I believe, would shoot the action prior to this—the night itself—but Antonioni is a director who focuses on what films leave out. Much of this scene is without dialogue. As it progresses, we increasingly become aware of an electric fan and, later, a razor. These objects, which in other movies would provide background noise, become under Antonioni’s direction extraordinarily highlighted. He is one of the most sensitive film-makers to the use of sound; aircraft propellers, car engines, ringing telephones, opening and closing of doors, footsteps on stone floors, all carry weight, not for any pointed narrative purpose, but as evidence of the technologies we communicate with, the machines we travel in, the cities we inhabit and adapt to.

There is a story in L’eclisse, but its emphases are similarly elsewhere than usual. Monica Vitti leaves the apartment and begins a walk that lasts, in a way, for the majority of the film. Her journey is without any particular destination, a series of detours, explorations and, most importantly, distractions. These distractions are the substance of the story and include a brief relationship with Alain Delon.

A characteristic Antonioni sequence is the flight in a small four-seater plane from Rome to Verona during which we listen in to a virtually inaudible conversation. Nothing happens in the conventional sense; the journey, which takes considerable film time, appears to have no dramatic aim or climax, sounds and images take over and become the dramatic content. As with Vitti’s character, the film has a wandering, searching quality. Antonioni has been described as “the poet of alienation,” and this is shown by Vittoria’s detachment from the world—which may be interpreted as either a sign of health or equally of neurosis.

There are two sequences, both set in the Borsa (the Rome stock exchange), which constitute the hub of the film. This is the world inhabited by Alain Delon’s character Piero, a young stockbroker. It is observed with an anthropological eye for detail. Only in the stock exchange are people shown to be full of passion, energy and action; it is an emphatically male world, preoccupied with money, profit and deals, and one in which Delon is comfortable. Duration is an important component of Antonioni’s style (the park in Blow-Up, the desert house in Zabriskie Point, the rocky island in L’avventura, the space outside the hotel at the end of The Passenger). He films the Borsa with relentless curiosity, as if to say, “look long enough and perhaps this place may reveal something of itself.”

If the narrative finds its organisation around the brief affair between Delon and Vitti, it is something of a shock when both characters simply slip out of the film altogether. The final time the couple are seen together, they make an arrangement to meet on a street corner. Neither one turns up, but the camera does. For a full seven minutes it records the world that carries on without them. Passers-by, seen in earlier scenes, take their regular walks; buses pull up, stop, drop passengers and drive on. Twice a person who might be Monica Vitti or Alain Delon turns out to be someone else. The streets empty and darken as day turns to dusk. This is an extraordinary sequence, acknowledging that it has lost both the original characters and the narrative. Other lives, which we know nothing about, cross the screen and disappear, leaving in the end just the city—functioning, automatically, part of a vast man-made machinery, within which individuals find temporary escape and pleasure in passing sensations of motion and contact. It is a chilling viewpoint.