[In the following essay, Chatman analyzes how Antonioni explores “the modern condition” in L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, and Il deserto rosso, using plots “liberated” from conventional narrative techniques.]

If the films of Antonioni’s apprenticeship show diverse and sometimes wayward strands of originality, the four mature films—L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, and Il deserto rosso—constitute a solid core of achievement. Even early on, critics felt that the first three films formed a trilogy. I would extend the group to include Il deserto rosso, which differs from the earlier films only in its use of color but not significantly in theme, plot structure, or character type. About the plight of still another middle-class Italian woman, in another difficult relationship, again at odds with her environment, it looks backward rather than forward to the quite different thematic concerns of the later films. I do not claim that Antonioni intended a cycle of four films, only that the themes, style, and worldview are best understood if the films are looked at as a loose unity.

In the tetralogy, the “Antonionian film,” as the world understands that expression, was born. The surface of the world was finally captured and then polished with consummate skill. Plots and themes (this chapter), characters (Chapter 4), and settings (Chapter 5) were integrated in a new and brilliant synthesis in a style (Chapter 6) that would be increasingly admired and copied by other filmmakers.

With L’avventura (The Adventure, 1959), Antonioni established himself as one of international cinema’s great artists. The story, which occurred to him on a cruise among the Aeolian Islands off Sicily, concerns the unexplained disappearance of a young woman, Anna (Lea Massari), from the uninhabited island Lisca Bianca (“White Fishbone”), to which she had sailed on a luxury yacht, and the impact of her disappearance on her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti). Anna’s feeling for Sandro is highly ambivalent—she both wants him and rejects him. Claudia seems to be the only one who is genuinely upset by Anna’s disappearance. With unseemly haste, Sandro is attracted to Claudia and turns his attention to her. At first shocked, she finally responds to his courting as they wander through Sicily looking for Anna. During the search, Sandro sees a prostitute, Gloria Perkins, cause a riot in Messina; he observes the poisoned marriage of a pharmacist and his wife in Troina; and, in a moment of frustrated spite, he spoils the drawings of an architecture student in Noto. Now lovers, Sandro and Claudia rejoin the group of friends with whom they sailed on the fateful cruise—Patrizia, owner of the yacht, her husband Ettore, for whom Sandro works as consultant, and another couple, Corrado and Giulia, whose only pleasure is to torment each other. Arriving at a palatial hotel in Taormina, with Anna seemingly forgotten, Claudia and Sandro are a confirmed couple. But during their very first night there, Sandro betrays Claudia with Gloria Perkins, whom he meets casually in the hotel lobby. In the final scene, Sandro sits weeping with remorse in a deserted piazza; Claudia comes up behind him and puts her hand lightly on his head.

La notte (The Night, 1960) takes up problems at the other end of the love spectrum, those of a long-term couple. It concerns the marital difficulties of a successful Milanese writer, Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni), and his wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau). As the film opens, the couple visit a friend, Tommaso, who is dying in a hospital. Overcome by tears, Lidia must leave the room. Giovanni soon follows, but on the way to the elevator he is lured into an embrace by a hospitalized nymphomaniac. Nurses burst into the room as they are about to make love. After a hectic drive through traffic, the Pontanos arrive at a cocktail party in honor of Giovanni’s new book. Lidia slips out for a long walk. In the Milan suburbs, she witnesses some toughs engaged in a brutal, almost ritualistic fight, and then she sees some more constructive youths launching toy rockets in a field. She finds herself in the neighborhood where she and Giovanni first lived together and telephones him to join her. He fails to share her enthusiasm for the place. That evening, they go to a nightclub and watch a striptease act, then to a sumptuous party at the house of a business tycoon. The party lasts all night. During its course, each wanders off, Giovanni to find Valentina, the tycoon’s daughter, and Lidia to be found by Roberto, a handsome man-about-town. Neither adventure comes to anything, and at dawn the couple walk away from the house across the tycoon’s golf course. Sitting in a sand-trap, Lidia tells Giovanni that Tommaso had been in love with her and had tried to help her develop her intellect when she was young, but she had been too foolish to appreciate him. She confesses that she no longer loves Giovanni; all she feels is pity. Refusing to accept the truth that their relationship is dead, Giovanni forcefully makes love to her in the sand-trap as the camera drifts away.

In L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) Antonioni continues his examination of the problem of emotional relationships. In one sense, his view about the very possibility of such relationships has grown bleaker than it was in the two preceding films, where, for better or for worse, the couples stayed together. This film begins with the breakup of one relationship and ends with the unexplained disappearance from the screen of both partners to a second. Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a Roman woman in her mid twenties, ends her two-year relationship with Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), a morose writer in his thirties. She cannot explain her reasons to him, though his distraction and apathy provide us with adequate reasons. Visiting her mother, who plays the stock market obsessively, Vittoria meets Piero (Alain Delon), an energetic young broker. He pursues her vigorously, and she finally accepts him as a lover, but she refuses to consider marriage or to treat the relationship as anything more than one of physical attraction. She cares for Piero, but she is put off by his materialistic approach to life. After making love one afternoon in Piero’s office, the couple part, their mood changing from playfulness to unexplained gravity. They embrace, promising to see each other that evening, and the day after, and the day after that. But when eight o’clock arrives and the camera awaits them at their usual rendezvous, they do not appear. Instead, we are shown seven minutes of the ordinary life of the EUR suburb of Rome, in a series of shots made strangely tense and even sinister by the absence of the characters. The film ends with a close-up on the blinding light of a streetlamp as the music swells to a harshly discordant climax.

Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964), Antonioni’s first color film, concerns the plight of Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the highly neurotic wife of a Ravenna engineer, Ugo (Carlo De Pra), and mother of a young son. Visiting Ugo at the factory one day, she meets Corrado (Richard Harris), another engineer who is trying to collect a group of technicians for a project in Patagonia. Corrado is attracted to Giuliana, visits her at an empty store that she plans in a vague way to turn into a boutique, and invites her to tour the countryside with him as he looks for workers. She tells him indirectly about her mental problems—her attempted suicide and hospitalization. The scene changes to a shack on the river, where Giuliana, Ugo, Corrado, a lecherous friend, Max, his wife, Linda, and Emilia, a woman Max is trying to seduce, have a kind of orgy manqué complete with aphrodisiac quails’ eggs. Giuliana is able to relax in the warmth of the place, but when no one will confirm the scream she hears from a passing quarantined ship, she bolts and nearly drives off the pier. One morning, her young son awakens, apparently paralyzed in the legs. She tries to comfort him, telling him the story of a young girl who, playing happily alone on a beach, sees a strange ship approach shore and then leave and then hears sweet music coming from erotic-looking rocks and the sea itself. Giuliana learns that her son has tricked her, presumably in order to stay home from school. Highly upset, she visits Corrado in his hotel room, where they make love. Though that calms her for a moment, she leaves Corrado, presumably for good; on her way home, she stops in front of a docked Turkish freighter and tries to explain her plight to an uncomprehending but sympathetic sailor. In the final sequence, we see her with her son again in front of the factory, as in the opening shot; when the boy asks her whether the birds die when they fly through the poisonous yellow smoke issuing from the smokestacks, she says that the birds have learned to avoid the smoke. The implication is that there is some hope for Giuliana: though not cured, perhaps she is beginning to learn how to avoid whatever it is that sets off her anxiety.

THEMES AND THEMATICS

Instead of themes, one is tempted to speak, stylishly, of the thematics of the middle stage of Antonioni’s career. On the model of the French original, I use thematic to mean not themes taken singly but something like a coherent network of themes. And the themes of Antonioni’s later films do tend to interconnect in complex patterns.

In another sense, the suffix -ic means “the study of,” as rhetoric is the study of the rhetor, phonetics is the study of the phone, and so on. Thematic suggests a clear separation of subject examined from technique of examination. It enables us to see components of texts not as natural objects but as conventions and thereby to avoid the conclusion that it is in the “nature” of narratives to contain themes. For there is such a thing as a themeless or pointless story, even at the level of the art narrative (for example, some texts by the Surrealists). It is important to be able to ask whether there are such things as “Antonionian” themes, not merely to presuppose them, especially since Antonioni has said that his films are about “nothing.” Certain critics, missing the irony, have agreed. Precisely what he means is a principal question for any account of his art.¹

Clearly, Antonioni’s films do mean more then they say, that is, they imply something more than “This is the surface of the world as I choose to exhibit it,” although they imply that, too. (Perhaps they imply that all other generalizations derive secondarily from this basic one.) We are made more comfortable about investigating Antonioni’s themes after reading interviews in which he articulates them himself. Unlike many visual artists, Antonioni is highly verbal, a brilliant speaker and writer fully capable of expressing his intentions. For instance, he has spoken of his desire to capture the “spiritual aridity … and moral coldness” (freddezza morale) of the upper classes of postwar Italian society. So it is not the films’ thematic meaninglessness but rather their unusual formal demands that make them difficult for the mass audience. Resenting the challenge, many viewers and reviewers prefer to believe that they are pointless records of modern life, that they are, indeed, about nothing.

Antonioni made his wonderful remark after a visit to Mark Rothko’s studio. What he said exactly was, “Your paintings are like my films—they’re about nothing … with precision.”² The best gloss on “nothing” that I have seen is Richard Gilman’s:

Antonioni’s films are indeed about nothing, which is not the same thing as being about nothingness.

L’avventura and La notte are movies without a traditional subject (we can only think they are “about” the despair of the idle rich or our ill-fated quest for pleasure if we are intent on making old anecdotes out of new essences). They are about nothing we could have known without them, nothing to which we had already attached meanings or surveyed in other ways. They are, without being abstract, about nothing in particular, being instead, like most recent paintings, self-contained and absolute, an action and not the description of an action.

They 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: all the replicas we have made of ourselves, all the misleading because logical or only psychological narratives, the whole apparatus of reflected wisdom, the clichés, the inherited sensations, the received ideas.³

What may seem to the casual moviegoer an inconsequential string of happenings is obviously a reflection of what passes for life today. In La notte, for example, the heroine visits a dying friend, attends a tedious reception, takes a walk in the suburbs, attends a fashionable party, and ends up bleakly confronting her husband with her feeling that their marriage has reached a dead end. Nonoccurrences these may be, but they are very resonant ones. They reveal what her life and, to a great extent, our own lives are like—what they are “about.” Their very inconcluiveness seems to be a profound part of the truth of the representation.

The reduction to “nothing” constitutes a rejection of the comforts of traditional narrative.⁴ By L’avventura (even by Il grido), Antonioni no longer felt the need to account for behavior, to provide clues to its meanings and consequences. He has achieved extreme honesty in a medium in which that virtue often seems unobtainable. Central to his honesty is the acknowledgment that one cannot know what motivates people, that actions are indeed a mystery. This would seem virtually fatal to an art that relies on large sums of risk capital. How can a producer justify investing in a film that he knows will frustrate and baffle the mass audience’s need for reassurance? “What do you mean, you don’t know?” he hears the crowds roar. “You’ve got to know!”

But Antonioni’s texts, while lacking in comfort, provide glorious esthetic rewards for those who are able and willing to accept his naked vision:

The acceptance is made of what we are like: it is impossible not to accept it as this film [La notte] dies out on its couple shatteringly united in the dust, because everything we are not like, but which we have found no other means of shedding, has been stripped away. … This stripped, mercilessly bare quality of Antonioni’s films is what is so new and marvelous about them. The island criss-crossed a hundred times with nothing come upon; the conversations that fall into voids, Jeanne Moreau’s head and shoulders traveling microscopically along the angle of a building, unfilled distances, a bisected figure gazing from the corner of an immense window, the lawn of the rich man across which people eddy like leaves; Monica Vitti’s hand resting on Ferzetti’s head in the most delicate of all acceptances; ennui, extremity, anguish, abandoned searches, the event we are looking for never happening—as Godot never comes, Beckett and Antonioni being two who enforce our relinquishments of the answer, the arrival, two who disillusion us.⁵

EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY: LA MALATTIA DEI SENTIMENTI

The central thematic of the tetralogy is the perilous state of our emotional life. Narcissism, egoism, self-absorption, ennui, distraction, neurosis, existential anxiety: many terms have been proposed for the complex state of mind that was first defined clearly by Kierkegaard and that has seemed particularly afflicting since World War II. These terms struggle to characterize a life lacking in purpose, in passion, in zest, in a sense of community, in ordinary human responsiveness, in the ability to communicate, in short, a life of spiritual vacuity. Antonioni had been preoccupied with that state of mind since Cronaca di un amore but, for the reasons proposed in Chapter 1, he was not able to portray it convincingly until he made his sixth feature film, L’avventura. As long as he tried to account for it through the conventional rationalizing structures of dialogue, genre, “psychology” (especially “female psychology”), his vision seemed doomed to inauthenticity. Only when his art grew strong enough to reject traditional narrative paraphernalia and to evoke the surface of life with clarity could he genuinely capture the lineaments of the modern mood.

What also helped was his emergent understanding of what he came to call the “fragility” (fragilità) of the emotional life—its unstable, shifting, amorphous character, in which one feeling passes without rhyme or reason into another, so that people do not know themselves why or how it is that they behave as they do. Feelings, he claims, are not definitive but “fragile, seductive, reversible.” Everywhere there are “symptoms of … restlessness in our psychology … feelings and … morality.”⁶ A virtual “malady of the emotional life,” he calls it, una malattia dei sentimenti. If we focus on the analytic rather than the moral overtones of this phrase, it serves very well to name the thematic of the tetralogy.

Naturally, such problems find their most acute expression in love relations. So all four films turn on love: love is the emotion in which restlessness, spiritual aridity, and moral coldness are displayed most revealingly. Women are the main protagonists, not because feminine psychology says that love is their proper domain but because Western civilization, Antonioni thinks, has left to them alone a modicum of the capacity to acknowledge feelings, a capacity virtually lost by men, especially intellectual men. The obsession with the erotic side of life

is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy, that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy. The tragedy in L’avventura stems directly from an erotic impulse of this type—unhappy, miserable, futile.⁷

One cannot resist comparing Sandro’s behavior with that described in Freud’s famous essay, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life”: “When the original object of an instinctual desire becomes lost in consequence of repression, it is often replaced by an endless series of substitute-objects, none of which ever give full satisfaction. This may explain the lack of stability in object-choice, the ‘craving for stimulus,’ which is so often a feature of the love of adults.”⁸ Clearly, Gloria Perkins and, more sadly, Claudia (as he treats her) must fail to satisfy Sandro, since they are inappropriate substitutes, anodynes, for the creative and meaningful architectural work that he cannot do.

Work is the other half of Freud’s great dyad of life: Sandro, angry and guilty enough to ruin a young architect’s sketch “accidentally,” rushes back to the hotel and tries to force Claudia to make love (a particularly bad piece of timing; only minutes before, he was too preoccupied to respond to her light-hearted seduction, probably by obsessive architectural thoughts). Claudia senses that it is not herself that he lusts after but Woman, any woman, which is just his name for “distraction from meaningful work.” She says despairingly that at such moments she feels she does not know him. The remark is more profound than she realizes: in seeking Woman, he reduces himself to simple, instinctual Man, thereby losing whatever identity he has that is worth knowing.

The theme of sick Eros reverberates in the behavior of the minor characters, like the silly Raimondo, the would-be lover of Patrizia, owner of the yacht, a man bored with his useless life, following passively the dictates of a facile society; this year, the fashion is snorkeling. She indulges him, in a kind of ironic maternalism, out of her own moral indolence. Not virtue but boredom keeps her from succumbing. Her response caricatures Claudia’s indulgence of Sandro at the end of the film, while another aspect of love, that exemplified by Corrado and Giulia, the couple who have been together too long, caricatures the whole institution of marriage. No wonder Anna has grievous misgivings. And the masses? Sex in the head obsesses the entire male population of Messina. The adventuress and call girl Gloria Perkins splits her overly tight skirt, revealing a few centimeters of begartered skin for publicity purposes. An all-male crowd assembles and begins to howl. A reductio ad absurdum: so many howling for such small reward. It is sex twice removed: not even voyeurism, but the merest report of a voyeuristic possibility. What a superb image of mass anodyne sex as substitute for work: half a city not merely distracted but literally immobilized.

For Giovanni in La notte, sex is never far from consciousness. Two steps from the threshold of his dying friend’s hospital room, he cannot resist the temptation of a nymphomaniac’s “passion.” In nymphomania, of course, sexual preoccupation has become pathological. But what is significant is less the nymphomaniac’s fate than the test of Giovanni’s distractibility. He flunks ingloriously. When Giovanni asks Lidia (of all people) to sympathize, she refuses, remarking: “An experience like that is something you could turn into a nice story. Call it ‘The Living and the Dead.’” What does she mean? Superficially, Giovanni and the nymphomaniac, the would-be “lovers,” are the living, while poor Tommaso is the dead. But one can envision at least two deeper interpretations: the nymphomaniac is the living because of the psychotic vitality that arouses her to any man who passes by, while Giovanni is the dead because of the passive and predictable way in which he allows himself to be dragged into a meaningless embrace and to think that it was his charm that prompted it. Or, Giovanni is the living because he responds, even if weakly and absurdly, to the nymphomaniac’s compulsive and mechanical cravings, while she is dead because she can only imitate genuine love. The incident is a curious but efficient reflection, in the moral sphere, of Tommaso’s illness, which appears to be gastric cancer. Just as in cancer, where a hectic, abnormal life rages among the cells of the body, so in nymphomania a hectic, abnormal love rages among the cells of the spirit. It feeds on the normal, balanced structure of feelings, blocking the possibility of nonsexual sorts of human contact. (The themes of the cancerous body and the cancerous spirit find another parallel in the image of the cancerous city, which feeds on its inhabitants.) At the party, Giovanni thinks he has a chance for a “more meaningful relationship” with Valentina, the beautiful and intelligent daughter of his host. After a difficult night, however, during which nothing much happens between them, she ends up expressing more sympathy for Lidia than for him. She says wryly that the two have exhausted her. Finally, Giovanni’s sense of rejection is made complete by his wife’s sad, straight talk in the sand-trap. He cannot bear another refusal of his sexual favors and forces himself on his wife. People addicted to sex cannot afford diplomatic abstentions.

In L’eclisse, too, eroticism plays an intense role. Piero divides his obsessiveness among women, the stock market, and sports cars. For him, eroticism is simply another outlet for the power drive. In contrast, Riccardo needs a woman for security, as a haven between long and neurotic voyages into himself. Only in Vittoria do we find anything like healthy sexuality.⁹ She recognizes and accepts in herself whatever it is that a man excites, even if, like Piero, he is unsuitable in every other way. But in her case, the acceptance argues a downplaying of sex. Because she does not agree with the old mythology that sex is a be-all and end-all, that it should take place only with the “right” person, that it can bind up and resolve, in a single swoon, all life’s needs, Vittoria sees the world with rare clarity. She can take pleasure in life’s simpler beauties: the sight of rustling trees, billowing clouds, a calm provincial airstrip, flagpoles swaying in the breeze, and even, to Piero’s chagrin, a man passing in the street.

In Il deserto rosso, sexuality is a palpable mechanism of neurotic relief. At her most desperate moment, not knowing where else to turn, Giuliana goes to Corrado’s hotel room. In an ecstasy of ambivalence, she both fights him off and embraces him. And she does experience some relief, however fleeting. The relief is communicated by a celebrated experiment with color. When she enters the hotel, everything is a frigid white—Antonioni even had the plants sprayed with white paint. Afterwards, the walls are blushing pink. The minor characters, as in L’avventura, are more exaggerated and obvious in their eroticism. The quasi orgy scene in Max’s river shack is perhaps Antonioni’s most pointed commentary on the sexual maunderings of the alta borghesia. In the heated atmosphere, which Corrado clearly finds distasteful, the participants discuss sexual practices around the world with great relish. The orgy is curiously unconsummated and for reasons that perhaps go beyond mere concern for the censor. The film suggests that sex in the head does not end in bed. The last word is given to Max’s employee’s ragazza, a matter-of-fact lass who says, a bit disdainfully, that she prefers doing “certain things” to talking about them.

Anodyne eroticism wards off the boredom and despair that accompany the unconscious refusal to make one’s life meaningful. It does not itself reflect deep passion: on the contrary, it is a rejection, even a flight from passion. And it is not a viable means of communication, only a superficial substitute for it. Only Antonioni’s women can honestly confess to the endemic inability to communicate. Anna’s frustrated attempts to explain how ambivalent she feels about Sandro are conveyed in two remarkably constructed scenes: one with Claudia in the piazza outside Sandro’s studio, and one with Sandro on the island just before she disappears. Equally brilliant is the opening sequence of L’eclisse, in which Antonioni uses silence and fragmented dialogue to convey not only the gulf between Vittoria and Riccardo but her painful inability to articulate her feelings. “But why?” he begs. “Surely there is a motive.” All she can say is that she does not know why. (Piero, too, comes to complain about her inarticulateness.) By the time of Il deserto rosso, not even small children can be counted on to communicate their feelings. Giuliana’s son tricks her into believing that he is ill, and he cannot or will not explain why. Giuliana articulates her problems to Corrado in virtually psychotic terms. Only in the language of fairy tale can she describe her true feelings to her son.

It is impossible for these characters to communicate with one another, because they cannot communicate with themselves—an inability that we read in their faces. They are not clear about their real wishes or life goals. They might even deny that one could have any. They are conscious or unconscious escapists, running away from rather than facing up to their problems. The theme of escape appears in some form in virtually every one of Antonioni’s films, even his first. In Gente del Po, a woman working in the fields watches a barge pass down the river, and the voice-over reads her mind: “She thinks perhaps of happiness. To leave, to travel, to change her life. The sea is there, at the end of the trip.”¹⁰ But the field hand’s desire is at least real and justifiable for the quality of her life. Later characters flee—in geographical actuality or into the wilderness of their own minds—for less comprehensible reasons. To ask only about the main characters: What or whom does Aldo hope to find after Irma leaves him? Why does Anna disappear just because she is conflicted about Sandro? Why does Sandro hurl himself into “love” affairs instead of facing up to his need to go back to architecture? Why is Giovanni so tempted by the life of luxury that he seems ready to hire himself out to a tycoon? What makes Piero run so fast, and what is he running from—or to? What is Corrado trying to prove by going to the wilds of Patagonia? (And in still later films, why is Thomas “off London” this weekend? Where does Mark intend to fly in his stolen airplane? What takes David off to deepest Chad and then even farther, into the mysterious depths of another identity? Why cannot Niccolò find the actress for his film?)

The films clothe the theme of escape in details of imagery and dialogue. L’avventura starts with a fast ride by sports car to the easy south and then escapes from land in a luxury yacht. Not satisfied with that, Anna jumps overboard to swim off on her own in a rehearsal of her final disappearance. In La notte, Lidia first escapes from the tedium of the publisher’s reception by wandering out into the suburbs and later from the tedium of propriety by jumping into the tycoon’s swimming pool with her clothes on. She even allows herself to escape for a while with a handsome stranger, but for her own reasons she decides not to go off with him. In L’eclisse, we see Vittoria escaping from the oppressive prison that Riccardo has made of her life. Later, she escapes in her imagination to Africa amid the artifacts of Marta’s apartment. She also escapes to the Verona airport, a provincial place made exotic by the flight there in a private airplane. A more poignantly definitive escape is made by the drunk who steals Piero’s Alfa Romeo and ends up in the artificial lake of EUR. As the car is pulled out by a crane, we see the drunk’s open hand extending over the door in a gesture of farewell. In Il deserto rosso, Giuliana escapes Ravenna for a few hours by traveling around the countryside with Corrado as he tries to recruit personnel for his own escape to “meaningful work” in Patagonia. There is no evidence that he shall find it. The couple wander around ships and then amid radio astronomy antenna towers; the towers hint at still other voyages, into the reaches of outer space. Clearly, the mysterious boat in the tale that Giuliana tells to her son represents a fantasy of escape. It roars in from nowhere and turns about, without deigning to land: it has “crossed the seas of the world and—who knows?—beyond the world.” And at the end of the film, she explains to her son that the birds learn to escape from the poisonous yellow smoke coming out of the factory chimneys by flying around it. The theme of escape continues into the later films, too. If anything, it becomes more insistent, as we shall see.¹¹

The theme of escape connects with the theme of distraction, a malaise common among Antonioni’s characters. One recalls Anna’s distracted smile as she looks at Sandro. Or Riccardo’s morose pensiveness: for all his concern about Vittoria’s departure, he keeps falling into a distracted reverie. Giuliana’s distraction amounts to a modus vivendi. Corrado cannot remain attentive to the workers’ questions about living arrangements on the project in Argentina; his eyes first wander up a meaningless line painted on a wall, then along some empty bottles as he leaves the building.

Distraction is attenuated escapism, a mental gesture of escape; one stays, though reluctantly, on the job.¹² And it is also a kind of inhibited fickleness: the distracted person would like to change the situation, to get out of it, but he or she does not quite dare. So the person “forgets”—even what he or she is looking for. The syndrome is familiar to the psychoanalyst; it is one of the psychopathologies of everyday life: “You go into a room to find something and realize you have forgotten what you were looking for. Then you remember, but perhaps feel some vague sense of dissatisfaction: ‘Was that really it?’ This sense of bafflement is likely to be keener when you plan a day, a month, a career. The goals and purposes of life, which in youth may have seemed self-evident, in adulthood seem impossible to define.”¹³ Search is the other side of the coin of escape, its positive name. People who run to are often also running from.¹⁴ That is certainly Sandro’s case. To make things worse, he not only defends but rationalizes his behavior, speaking with the deft and dramatic “honesty” of one who needs to persuade himself as much as the other:

Claudia: And when I think you must have said exactly the same things to Anna any number of times …

Sandro: Let’s say I did. But I was as sincere with her then as I am right now with you.

But the search need not be escapist; it can be a genuine voyage of self-discovery. In each of these films, the female protagonist is honestly searching for some truth about life more profound than what a mazy, superficial society can offer. In L’avventura, Claudia’s ostensible quarry is Anna, but she recognizes at a less than conscious level that she is searching for a viable way for herself to be. Despite the hazards of anodyne sex that she sees around her—the eerie voyeurism of the men in the streets of Noto or the blowsy lust of Giulia for young Goffredo (the narcissistic projection of a woman too often rejected by her husband)—and above all despite the promptings of traditional working-class virtues like caution and loyalty, Claudia lets love take its course. It is an honest gesture. And so is the touch she gives to the wretched Sandro at the end; she continues to search, even as she consoles.

Lidia’s escape from literary cocktail party chatter into the streets of Milan also turns into a search for meaning, first in the urban space, then in the space of memory, the old neighborhood. But she cannot find meaning among the high rises and side lots and traffic markers of the city, and she cannot induce Giovanni, though he comes to fetch her, to accompany her down memory lane. Only on the golf course, when it is too late, will he be able to really hear how unbreachable a gulf has widened between them over the years.

Vittoria’s search seems more successful, if we can find joy (as she does) in the merest sights of life: rustling trees, swaying flagpoles, sprinklers in the sunshine, and the like. Even Giuliana, despite her illness, attempts an honest search. But the fate of the certifiably obsessive is an inability to concentrate. She tries hard to understand what causes Corrado’s wanderlust and what it has to do with her own problem; but neurotic fibrillation blocks her, forces her mind onto still another tangent. Even when she stumbles on an uncomprehending but patient Turkish sailor, she cannot stop poring over her symptoms, especially her everlasting need to be helped.

But somehow even Giuliana’s vicious circles are better than Sandro’s elaborate rationalizations. Antonioni’s women are the only ones to understand that the search is essential, for lack of any other viable way to be: “what matters is not the result, which remains in any case uncertain, but the journey itself, the search and the way it is lived out.”¹⁵ The model for survival in a desperate age is Vittoria, who, by acknowledging the need to search, manages to remain honest and even cheerful despite the terrors around her.

L’eclisse, as we have seen, continues the thematic of the first two films. But it also extends it. The earlier films limit themselves to the personal impact of the malattia dei sentiment—the uncertainty of emotions, anodyne sex, the problem of communication, escapism. But L’eclisse raises the specter of a generalized, over-riding, nameless dread whose grounds are so real, whose possibilities are so genuinely terrifying that it cannot be written off as merely neurotic. It is a fear of the unknown—not only of the atomic bomb, since weapons only top the long list of means by which modern man can destroy himself. The fear is intensified by the fact that few people are willing to articulate it. Not a syllable concerning this brooding anxiety is spoken. Our only hints are commonplace sights: the headline—“Peace Is Weak”—in a newspaper that an anonymous pedestrian is reading, jet vapor trails in the sky, two men watching from a rooftop, a man whose face is taut and unsmiling, and so on. The montage of such shots, which state nothing explicitly, creates a sense of deep foreboding. No one speaks of fear: the ambience makes it hard to say exactly what one is afraid of. Such fear feeds on itself, hanging in the air like the failing light. In an atmosphere of unexpressed and even unconscious apprehension, a love relationship, indeed any relationship, seems impossible to sustain. Surely, it is the trace of fear (the only thing they truly share beyond sexual attraction for each other) that shows in the faces of Piero and Vittoria as they huddle like children together in the last scene in which we see them.

Of all the images in the concluding section of the film, that of the unfinished building veiled in straw matting is the most disquieting. What it seems to say is, “I represent the future, not only its architecture but all its shapeless menace.” It reminds us of Yeats’ nameless beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. There is no turning back to the comfortable, familiar shapes of the past. The only honest thing is to acknowledge our apprehension of the future, a future sparked, for better or for worse, by the incredible energies of science and technology.¹⁶

EMBODYING THE THEMATIC: THE REJECTION OF SYMBOLISM

So the films of the tetralogy are indeed “about” something: they are about the anxiety that the world has felt since the fifties. But in a way foreign to commercial movies of the sound era, this condition is shown primarily in images. It is not spelled out in dialogue or connoted by mood music. It is always depicted, never pronounced. It occurs in visual details of plot, behavior, and composition so veiled and subtle that Antonioni risks making the audience impatient and bored. The audience could well protest that there is no action. It would be more accurate to say that the film requires the audience to reconstruct the states of mind that prompted what action there is. Not every moviegoer can or wants to perform such labor, but the numbers are sufficient to persuade retrospective cinemas, art museums, college film clubs, and the like to keep on screening the films.

The particular kind of interpretation demanded by the tetralogy is that which uncovers significance in the minutiae of appearance. Antonioni’s art resembles that of a novelist like Virginia Woolf, except that her medium, in its easy access to the minds of characters, permits explicit psychological interpretations of the text. A Clarissa Dalloway or a Mrs. Ramsay or a Lily Briscoe or the narrator, for that matter, can verbalize the significance of someone’s faint grimace or slight hand movement. But those who view a film by Antonioni must do that for themselves: they must learn to read the meanings in appearances—Anna’s enigmatic smile, or Lidia’s close observation of Valentina as she reads her book at the foot of a long staircase, or the movements of the twig that floats in the cistern at the fatal EUR street corner, or the intense red of the docked freighter in the penultimate sequence of Il deserto rosso.

So much is thrown back on the viewer’s interpretative ability that it may seem unfair to accuse him or her of overinterpreting. But that is what many critics have done. So it is essential to establish outer as well as inner interpretational limits. The films are open texts, but that does not mean that they are open to any interpretation. The problem is particularly acute for viewers disposed to finding symbol or metaphor in the slightest textual uncertainty. For example, the toy rockets launched in a scene in La notte were all too quickly labeled phallic, and Antonioni was accused of “heavy-handedly” showing that “sexual restlessness” drove Lidia out into the streets. One critic even argued that the film should have communicated this feeling “directly,” that is, unsymbolically. The urge to see symbolism prevented more sensitive interpretations of Lidia’s state of mind. To argue that she is looking for sex, that she is “cruising,” is to misread her character by falling into the very trap of erotic obsession that, as we have seen, is one of Antonioni’s themes. Lidia clearly has other things than men on her mind. In the scenario, she says to Giovanni over the phone: “I’m in front of the Breda plant. In the same old field, there are children playing. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that. Imagine, they have rockets. They fly way up. It’s beautiful. Don’t worry, nothing’s happened to me. No, no! I told you nothing happened! Come pick me up, will you?”¹⁷ Then she returns to the field, waiting for him to arrive. The scene is described as follows:

The rockets are very well built. They shoot up quickly into the sky to a considerable altitude, to the children’s cries of delight. But the two rockets with which the boys are playing are apparently the last ones, as it is starting to get dark. The children pick up their equipment and leave. Lidia is alone, standing in the field. The sunlight is nearly gone, and the scene again turns squalid and desolate.¹⁸

Given the context, even the most determined Freudian should find little more than ordinary sublimation of sexuality in a harmless, even creative hobby, especially when rocket launching is compared to the sullen and ugly behavior of the young thugs in the previous scene, who were methodically beating out each other’s brains. The youngsters with the rockets have transformed their sexual drives into constructive, quasi-scientific activity. What is important is not the drive but the way it has been made socially useful, even exciting, by the brave new world of technology that Antonioni has celebrated in other contexts, for example, in the colors and shapes of industry in Il deserto rosso. Lidia’s part here, as elsewhere in her sojourn, is that of silent and objective witness to the sights of the city. To find sexuality so indiscriminately in her behavior is to violate a larger and more important contextual meaning, which is confirmed by the expressions on her face, the movements of her body, the angles and distances from which she is photographed.

Another mistake is to find too precise a tenor in images that bear only a vague or contingent significance. In L’eclisse, rustling trees are juxtaposed often enough with Vittoria to suggest an association, but it is, I believe, far too explicit to argue that they symbolize the “agitation of her own thoughts.”¹⁹ A symbol or metaphor functions as an independent sign, that is, a something that can stand for another thing when that thing is absent. But when a single rustling tree is seen in the coda portion of L’eclisse, the thought that comes to mind is not, “Oh, that stands for Vittoria’s agitated thoughts” but rather, “Where’s Vittoria?” The appropriate rhetorical figure is not metaphor or symbol but metonymy, the figure of association or contiguity, which, as Roman Jakobson has argued,²⁰ occupies the semantic pole opposite metaphor.

As we shall see in a later chapter, Antonioni works assiduously on his visual juxtapositions of people with things and of things with other things. Backgrounds are never fortuitous: they provide implicit comment on the characters’ actions or vice versa. At the beginning of L’avventura, Anna finds her father discussing with a worker the encroachment of the trashy housing development onto his beautiful estate. The restlessly modern Anna is identified with the transitory, noisy new buildings, while her father is matched with the magnificent dome in the distance.

Father: I thought you’d already sailed.

Anna: Not yet, Papa.

Father: Don’t they still wear sailors’ caps with the name of the yacht on them?

Anna: (frowning) No, Papa. Not anymore.

Architecture and dialogue provide co-metonyms of the theme. They do not abstractly symbolize flimsy modernity: they are themselves concrete examples of it.

Similarly, in La notte, the graceful old building behind Lidia as she stands at the window of Tommaso’s sterile hospital room is metonymic of the waning of old values. It embodies them. Antonioni did not just think up that building, the way Robert Burns thought up the rose or Donne thought up the compasses. Metaphor depends on the sudden and unexpected perception of similarity. Metonymy does not, because it is purely associative, purely tied to the real. The idea of traditional values is reinforced by Lidia’s old-fashioned flowered dress, which strikes a quaint and even discrepant garden note in Milan’s barren streets. Neither building nor dress is an abstract symbol or concretion taken from another semantic sphere, as are the rose and the compasses. Metonymy is at once a figure for and a literal part of its referent. Hence, it reinforces the actuality of the world of the text. Antonioni’s very manner of working, his reliance on the inspiration of actual environments, ensures the supremacy of relational metonymy over substitutive figures like metaphor and symbol.

To argue that Antonioni’s images are not usually symbolic in the ordinary sense of the word is not to suggest that they are not motivated by thematic considerations. Motivation is always there, but it is subtle and unassertive (the shot of the exploding desert mansion at the end of Zabriskie Point is a rare exception). And it is always rooted firmly in the complex tissue of event and circumstance that constitutes the film. Consider the shot on the train in which Claudia refuses Sandro’s overtures and implores him to get off at the next station. The camera cuts to a view of the beach and the surf running alongside. It would be forcing a category to say that the running surf signifies—to Claudia or to us—the mutability of life (or of anything else). The sea, of course, is a traditional symbol of mutability. But this is a particular sea, into which Anna has disappeared and where she still may be. So its connection with Claudia’s thinking and situation is basically pragmatic rather than figurative, or it is only incidentally figurative. The film is not “stating” that life and the sea share the property of mutability and that Claudia sees her own fickleness or “fragility of emotion” in it. The association is lighter, more tangential, more allusive. And unlike a genuine symbol, it does not explain the inside by referring to the outside.

In short, Antonioni’s images always reverberate with the charge of the whole film, and it is a mistake for interpretation to reduce them to mere symbols. Valentina’s floor may resemble a checkerboard and hence suggest the hazard that Giovanni will incur by dallying with her, but it remains obdurately a floor. Whatever there is of phallus or atom bomb in the water tower that looms so visibly outside Riccardo’s window must not obscure its own solid weight as an object that is part of modern life. To reduce Antonioni’s richly envisioned objects to abstract signs in the interests of discovering what they are “about” would be as much an esthetic desecration as to project his films with a dim bulb.

The titles of the films, however, are verbal, not visual, indices, and they do work in a symbolic way. We see no literal desert in Il deserto rosso, no literal eclipse in L’eclisse, so efforts to ascertain the meanings of these expressions on symbolic grounds are clearly justified.²¹ The words The Adventure signify—in the superficial travel bureau sense of the word—an eventful trip on a yacht. At a less superficial level, there is the adventure of Anna’s disappearance. Then there is the “sexual adventure,” the trivial erotic escapade that Sandro unfairly accuses Claudia of desiring but in which he himself actually indulges with Gloria Perkins. At the deepest level, there is Claudia’s painful spiritual adventure of trying to get close to another person in all his psychological complexity.

The night of La notte is literally the long night of the party, which ends at dawn on a bleak prospect of marital misery. But it is also a vehicle for the obscurity in our emotional lives that makes marriage so difficult and that darkens our sense of direction in general.

The title The Eclipse is more problematic. What or who is overshadowed? How are they affected? What are the global consequences? The film ends, after the disappearance—or, better, the nonreappearance—of hero and heroine, with an illuminational phenomenon: “Sudden close-up of an illuminated street light with a glaringly bright halo encircling the lamp.” Is that the eclipse? We tend to think of an eclipse as the darkening of a heavenly body, not as a brightening: the sun is obscured by the moon or the moon by the earth’s shadow. But the reverse is at least theoretically possible: a darker body can be eclipsed by a brighter one. Does the bright streetlamp, as metonym for material progress or symbol for the atomic bomb, obliterate the lovers’ meeting? Antonioni recalls going to Florence to photograph an eclipse and speculating about the impact on bystanders’ emotions. There are two versions of what he said. The English version in the introduction to The Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni reads: “In that darkness … I speculated whether even sentiments [emotions] are arrested during an eclipse. It was an idea that was only vaguely connected with the picture I was making, which was why I didn’t retain it. But it could have been the nucleus of another film.”²² But in the 1964 Italian edition of Sei film, he writes: “During an eclipse emotions, too, are probably arrested. It was an idea that had vaguely to do with the film I was preparing, a sensation more than an idea, but that already defined the film when the film was still far from being defined. All the work that comes after, all the shooting, is always related to that idea or sensation or presentiment.”²³ The second version suggests a more interesting account of Antonioni’s feelings in the matter. The nonreappearance of the protagonists argues that love is extremely difficult if not impossible in the contemporary world. And since the pair cannot have a “meaningful relationship,” Antonioni decides not to show them at all. Their disappearance from the screen seems to be a synecdoche for the suspension of emotional life at a historical moment when civilization pauses to gasp incredulously. At the advent of … what? The millennium? Armageddon? The savior (looking perhaps like Albert Einstein)?

The title Red Desert is even more enigmatic. Neither industrial Ravenna nor industrial anywhere is written off as a wasteland. The desert seems, rather, to be what Giuliana makes of it. The film is inexorably tied to her point of view. The desert is in her own mind. And, from what Antonioni has said of the “color” of emotions and from what he does with colors in Il mistero di Oberwald, red is perhaps the sign of overheated neurosis, of hellish burnout. But paradoxically the heat does not make the colors and shapes of the world less beautiful—it makes them more intense, more saturated and lurid.

Antonioni’s themes are only part of his films—and by no means the most important. We should not allow problems of interpretation to obscure the glories of the other parts—the minimalist plot structure, the subtle characterization, and, above all, the unique beauty of the visual surface.

PLOT STRUCTURE: THE OPEN TEXT

It has been argued that the key to Antonioni’s mature art lies in a kind of “dedramatization” of plot. The term is suggestive, though its implications need careful examination. It is not that the films of the tetralogy are undramatic, for, clearly, they depict conflicts, interpersonal tensions, and the characters’ attempts to cope with them. They are dedramatized only in the sense that the conflicts are not shown in a direct and conventionally theatrical way. Drama there is, certainly, but it lies behind the characters’ impassive faces. It breaks out at odd moments, for reasons that are not always immediately obvious, as when Vittoria screams at seeing her reflected face trapped between the edge of the mirror and depressed Riccardo in the background.

In another sense, dedramatization can mean denarrativization. Here, the situation becomes more complex. Antonioni’s films are denarrativized in the way that much modern fiction is. Critics have exhaustively analyzed the difference between the twentieth century’s attitude toward plot and that held by previous centuries (and by unsophisticated audiences today). A common but mistaken view is that writers like Woolf, Joyce, and Proust simply give up plot—or, to use the common phrase, that “nothing happens” in their novels. Of course, those who use that phrase do not mean literally that nothing happens but, rather, that nothing “significant” happens. There are no “important” events by the ordinary standards of life—falling in love, marrying, succeeding or failing in business, dying, and so on. Further, modernist novels tend to avoid making events interpretable—lisible, readable, is the fashionable term—by clear chains of causality. As we have seen, the older, causative narrative logic prevails in Antonioni’s early films. For example, in the first sequence of Cronaca di un amore, the detective discusses the case with his boss; in the second, he questions several people in Ferrara about Paola’s early life. We conclude that his visit to Ferrara is the consequence of his boss’s instructions. Guido appears in Milan and meets with Paola: again, we infer, even before we hear the couple speak, that the meeting is the result of the detective’s investigation. Cronaca di un amore, like the vast majority of films, moves through a “readable” sequence of cause and effect, in which earlier actions clearly give rise to later ones.²⁴

In modernist twentieth-century fiction, the logic of narrative sequence changes. The connection between events becomes less conventionally consequential. It is not always possible to find causation in the plots of A la recherche du temps perdu, or To the Lighthouse, or Ulysses. Sequence, of course, necessarily remains, for narrative must preserve chronology, the march of events, if it is to remain narrative and not become another kind of text—exposition, argument, description, or something else. But in modernist narratives, later events are not self-evidently the consequences of earlier. We may sense a relationship, but it is attenuated, indirect, and it suggests less a particular development of events than a general state of affairs.

It seems useful to have a term for this attenuated narrative logic that avoids suggestions of causation and that still hints at some principle of connexity. In Story and Discourse, I proposed contingency: event B may be said to be contingent on event A if it succeeds it in the chronology of the plot and if both events can be understood to contribute to a more general state of affairs. (Some avant-garde plots depict events as completely random, but that is not Antonioni’s way.) In La notte, Lidia and Giovanni go from the hospital to a reception for his newly published book—not an obvious causal sequel. Traditional narrative logic would prompt us to look to a later event for an explanation of the connection to the earlier event. But what follows is Lidia’s walk in the suburbs, then the nightclub, then the party at the industrialist’s mansion, then Giovanni’s encounter with Valentina and Lidia’s encounter with the handsome bachelor, then the sad scene on the golf course. The causal connections among these events are not clear. For example, there is no particular reason why Giovanni and Lidia should not have gone to the cocktail party first and then to the hospital. The reasons exist only at the level of theme, character, and situation: seeing the dying Tommaso—we infer—makes Giovanni’s success seem all the more shallow to Lidia; the cocktail party, the scene of Giovanni’s present triumph, makes her anxious to get away by herself; walking alone in the city (an unusual event for a Milanese housewife in 1960) makes her more sensitive to it as a hostile environment; distaste for that environment makes her seek the nostalgia of the old neighborhood; and so on. The critical word here is infer: where the connections between events are tenuous, the demands on the audience to interpret, to provide connections, intensify.

Strange as it may seem today, many reviewers felt that La notte pushed narrative structure beyond recognizable limits. They said that the story had disappeared, or, if they were more favorably inclined, they described La notte as “pure lyric.” But it is clear that the film does tell a story, in the familiar sense of that word: it evokes a state of affairs and its consequences. That is, it describes the Pontanos’ desultory marriage and Giovanni’s discovery of his wife’s early attachment to Tommaso, of his own inability to satisfy her deepest emotional needs, and of the shallowness of his own emotional life. Of course, contingent plots can question the very need for events to fit into a pattern in which event B means event A because it is its result. The contingent plot indulges freely in “unnecessary” events, whose relation to an ongoing logical chain is marginal or even nonexistent. Consider two parallel situations, one in the causal plot of Cronaca di un amore, the other in the contingent plot of L’avventura. In both situations, one person interrogates another about the person whom he is looking for: the detective interrogates one of Paola’s old teachers in Ferrara, and Sandro interrogates the old man who is the only resident of the barren island. The teacher’s undisguised lechery, whatever independent value it has as a realistic portrayal of the type, remains causally relevant: he remembers Paola’s charms because it is important to know that she was extremely sexy even as a teenager. But the information provided by the old man of the island is completely gratuitous: the place belongs to Australians; he lived in Australia for thirty years; the people in the photograph are his family; he has just returned from Panarea. None of this information has anything to do with Anna’s disappearance or, indeed, with anything else in the movie. The effect is realistic precisely because the information is gratuitous; the old man is not there to advance the plot. He is simply there, as one more of Antonioni’s stubborn “found objects.” His Australian experience and the other details seem to be true because they have no reason not to be. While Cronaca di un amore selects details and events that function as signs of the plot, L’avventura and its successors undermine this convention by introducing events that are “useless,” “pointless” by traditional standards.²⁵ Not only that: they are played in real time, lasting exactly as long as they would in real life. This is the only justification for what would otherwise be an absurdly long depiction of the search for Anna on the barren island. Not only must Anna’s disappearance remain unexplained, but the search for her must be shown to be only a pretext for something else that is going on.

If we look closely at the published shooting script of L’avventura, we can see how the plot became more contingent than causal on the set (or in the editing booth), since Antonioni deleted many explanatory passages in the actual process of filming. In one scene, for instance, the idea was that Claudia should yield to Sandro’s sexual advances partly because the spectacle of the deserted town had made her feel so lonely and isolated that she needed to cling to him for warmth. The scenario is quite explicit:

Claudia is … silent, somewhat dismayed. Instinctively, she presses up close to Sandro who leads her to a shady spot where the ground is overgrown with weeds … Claudia offers no resistance; in fact, she entwines her fingers around his, almost with a sense of desperation. Sandro tries to kiss her. She makes a feeble attempt to resist, looks around, and sees the deserted town, the barren fields, the crumbling, sun-baked walls. She turns and looks at Sandro again, and now it is she who kisses him.²⁶

None of this business occurs in the film. There is no look of dismay, no eye-line matches with the deserted town or the like. We see only the following: a shot of Claudia saying “This isn’t a town, it’s a cemetery. My God, how dismal. Let’s get out of here”; a shot of an alley looking toward the open square, which is dominated by the modernistic church; a shot of Sandro’s car starting up and then driving away from the church; the church itself in an extended temps mort, as if the town, for the moment, were given the point of view just as it was being abandoned by Claudia and Sandro; and finally a shot of the pair on the hillside in the act of making love.

In transferring the shooting script to film, Antonioni deliberately avoids the easy causative, pregnantly meaningful glance or gesture in favor of depicting things simply as happening. Emotions are “fragile,” contingent, and so no more predictable than anything else in this world. Antonioni’s practice presupposes a certain audience, one that knows how it feels to offset an attack of loneliness with lovemaking. Audiences that are unwilling or unable to recognize the experience will find Claudia’s motivation obscure. But for the proper viewer, the ellipsis will seem just right, more “real” a representation of life than anything that conventional films can offer.

Of course, narratives based on contingent rather than causal logic run the risk of seeming obscure. But the challenge of open texts encourages audiences to participate actively in the interpretive process. The viewer may feel a healthy desire to see the films again. And since the films are very rich, the second viewing is amply rewarded. An event that on first viewing seemed meaningless or capricious or included purely for visual effect is seen on subsequent viewings to fit neatly into the plot. For example, Sandro and the young architect whose drawing he spoils are distracted from their quarrel by the spectacle of a long line of young seminarians dressed in black and shepherded by their teachers. Why that particular spectacle? At the surface level, it may seem to be just a photogenic excuse to get Sandro out of an awkward situation. But a second viewing may recall Sandro’s remark to Claudia as they stand on the roof of the church among the bell ropes. Trying to explain why he gave up architecture for cost estimating, he says, “Because … once I was asked to draw up an estimate—how much it would cost to build a school. The job took me a day and a half. I earned four million lire for it.” The shot of the seminarians going to school recalls that remark, made ironic by the fact that these pupils walk daily to solid architectural triumphs, not shoddy reinforced concrete boxes. That is not the only meaning of the shot, but it is certainly one of them.

It is obvious that the preference for contingency over causality suggests an epistemology. Since the end of a film never ties up all the threads of its plot, the end is only one more event and no less accidental than any other. So, instead of traditional essences and values, Antonioni’s tetralogy emphasizes sheer existence as such. The heroines in these films discover that ideal happiness cannot be found in this world and certainly not in a lover. The best that they can hope for is a modicum of hard-earned freedom. Vittoria, in L’eclisse, comes closest to finding it, but only in solitary moments—at a small airport in Verona, on a midnight walk looking for a dog, in a sudden view of wind-tossed trees, in a new friend’s apartment as she dances to African drums. The causelessness of these events argues the fortuitousness of life itself. Antonioni’s protagonists can achieve nothing more than a positive attitude toward fortuitousness. They can enjoy the exquisite moments when and as they come, even in solitude, without demanding them and without expecting an impossible, all-in-one consummation in love. In that sense, the theme of L’eclisse is not only unsentimental but antisentimental: it directly repudiates the ladies’ magazine view of life that haunted La signora senza camelie and Le amiche.

Ellipsis is an important formal property of modernist plots.²⁷ Ellipsis is not the omission of events but of their mentions; thus it is a matter of narrative discourse, not of narrative story, for the missing events remain necessarily implied. Like novels, commercial films have become more elliptical in recent years. Antonioni’s practice was ahead of its time. Still, his plot leaps are never so great as to be incoherent. The theme is always marked strongly enough to account for connections, and at this distance in time it is difficult to understand all the critical fuss that greeted the films.²⁸

In most films, especially action films and melodramas, the purpose of ellipsis is to quicken the pace and increase tension. In Antonioni’s tetralogy, ellipsis has a different function. It contributes to the sense that motives are unclear, perhaps even inexplicable. Nor does Antonioni use the time saved by ellipsis to add things, to make the plot more intricate; on the contrary, his films seem slow, contemplative, even dreamy. Time saved is more likely than not used (“wasted” in the eyes of conventional critics) for visual effects like temps morts, dead holds on the scenery after the actors have departed. This effect, about which I will have more to say, was early related by French critics to the “microrealism” of the nouveau roman. They found in it a devotion to what they called the “minute banality of things.” In Antonioni’s world, however, things are banal only at the superficial level of the traditional, causative plot; at a deeper level, as we shall see, they clamor for our attention. In Antonioni’s hands, their individuality and integrity makes them precious, precisely because we cannot explain them away by assigning to them easy background or symbolic meanings. We are forced to see them—truly to entertain them—with the fullest visual attention that we can muster. As Barthes put it, Antonioni has caught their very vibration.²⁹ Through ellipsis and other manipulations of narrative time, Antonioni insists the way painters do on the sheer wonder of the world’s appearance.

That many of the ellipses in L’avventura were the idea of Antonioni rather than of his screenwriters emerges clearly from a comparison of the scenario with the finished film. The scenario amply documents the characters’ feelings and thoughts. Antonioni could have (and practically every other filmmaker would have) externalized his intentions through conventional means—dialogue, facial expressions, music. Instead, he conveys a few feelings through the scenery, which he uses as a sort of objective correlative, and others he makes no direct effort to express at all, leaving it to viewers to infer them from context as best they can. For example, at the critical moment when Claudia, doubtless feeling rather ambivalent, finds Sandro at the pharmacy in Troina, virtually nothing is said, yet it is not difficult to infer the emotional storm that is raging or the importance of their decision to go off together.

Antonioni often intensifies ellipses by showing them through the straight cut, the shortest instant of film perception. A good example is the ellipsis between the shot of the couple’s departure from the deserted village and the shot of the couple making love on the hillside as the train goes by. The straight cut can be made to present information that virtually defies analysis because of the speed at which the viewer’s mind must work. Antonioni uses the ellipsis to make it doubly difficult to grasp motives: what is important is not only that the couple have fallen in love, or that they are panic-stricken at the spectacle of the deserted village, or that a woman has been seduced, but that we see an attenuated combination of these events and more: “the whole truth is more complicated and ultimately escapes analysis.”³⁰ The ellipsis is the device par excellence for rendering both the fragility of the emotions and the impossibility of accounting for them in any definitive way.

Discarding traditional narrative’s obsession with past and future, the films of the tetralogy engage the present event, liberating it from the dictates of conventional story. Antonioni raises to prominence the tangible present by playing against expectations. Audiences must expect Vittoria and Piero to meet again if their not doing so is to have any shock. What happens instead is that story time—the time of the chain of events—stops: the film is denarrativized, and another kind of time, descriptive or expository, takes over. An open-ended ellipsis occurs—the fictional story ends, although the movie continues for another seven minutes.

An ellipsis at the very end of a narrative from which the protagonists have disappeared is so unusual that many critics had difficulty interpreting it. Some talked, for example, about Antonioni’s excursion into “abstract art.” However, he denied that intention point-blank: “The seven minutes have been called abstract, but this is not really so. All of the objects that I show have significance. These are seven minutes where only the objects remain of the adventure; the town, material life, has devoured the living beings.”³¹

The final sequence can be considered an establishing shot in reverse, a kind of disestablishing shot. In Hollywood jargon, an establishing shot is a shot at the beginning of a movie whose purpose is to fix the site of the action. There are some good examples at the beginning of Stagecoach, Psycho, and Manhattan. The logic is this: “If you grant the existence of such and such a place—Monument Valley, downtown Phoenix, the New York City skyline—and how can you deny that it exists when you have it there staring you right in the face?—then it will be easy for you to accept the events that follow as plausible.” The convention further argues that all the establishing shots belong to an indefinite time preceding the action itself. Establishing shots function more like travelogues than like documentaries; what they show resembles stage sets more than actual locations of the action. They go little beyond the anticipational, working mostly like a concert overture: “We are beginning,” the movie says, “and here are some ‘views’ to validate the action and put you in a receptive frame of mind.” Unlike documentaries, which invoke places to make statements about them, fiction films show places so that the action can get under way.

In L’eclisse, however, the shots of the nondescript Roman suburb come at the end, frustrating the viewer’s expectations of a well-formed narrative conclusion. Ordinary movie logic insists that if protagonists are supposed to meet, we either shall see them meet or learn why they do not. The coda of L’eclisse, however, accumulates shot after shot of what has until then been only background. Gradually it dawns on us that this is all there is. We are not going to see Vittoria and Piero. But, if all that Antonioni wanted to do was to evoke their parting, he could have ended the film with the shot of Vittoria saying goodbye to Piero or with the high-angle shot of the empty street corner. Why does he embark on a kind of minidocumentary of EUR, showing bus wheels, light towers, skyscrapers jutting into the sky with tiny figures on top? (See photo on p. 65.) And above all, why did he people the landscape with real inhabitants of EUR—total strangers to the fiction? The sequence is a classic example of open text, and any single interpretation, even Antonioni’s own, can prove only partial.

As already noted, it has been suggested that the passage leaves the domain of narrative for that of lyric.³² But what makes the passage lyric (if indeed it is) is not its “poetry” (whatever that word means for cinema). It is rather that narrative time stops and that another textual order takes over. The focus on event becomes a focus on place and on the people and objects that occupy it.³³ Not temporal succession but spatial coexistence becomes the guiding principle. Even the gathering of dusk does not alter the descriptive function. The coda is a portrait of the suburb, not the story of how night falls on it. The substitution of this new, non-narrative text seems to universalize the motif of the going out of the light. The failing light suffuses the street corner where the fictional characters are supposed to meet just at the moment when the street corner ceases to be fictional and resumes its place in the real world. The area of relevance moves beyond the fictional situation of the characters alone: it is a whole society, ultimately a whole civilization, that cannot meet. The end, we cannot help but feel, may be more than just the end of this love affair and this film: hence the power of the final image, the blazing streetlamp (see Frame 44, p. 72).

Though the final sequence is atemporal, it possesses an ordered, descriptive logic, the order of disestablishment, since it moves away from the known particular to the unknown general. The first shots in the sequence show details recalled from Piero’s and Vittoria’s meetings there—the sprinkling system, the nurse pushing the baby carriage, the pile of bricks outside the building under construction, the barrel standing at the corner of the wooden fence. These peripheral synecdoches invite us to look for the central components, the two characters. Instead, we get a distanced view of the corner from a high angle looking down on the zebra stripes—more of the whole itself, but the critical human parts are still missing. Instead, a stranger (that is, a “real” resident of the “real” EUR) crosses the pedestrian stripes that until then have “belonged” to the fictional protagonists. The stranger suddenly introduces the randomness of real life. Disestablishment has begun. Freezing out whatever measure of warmth we have gathered from our identification with the fictional Piero and Vittoria, the image of a nonfictional pedestrian suffuses the complexion of the street corner with the cold pallor of reality. From now on, we see only indifference in the buildings and vehicles and streets. Or vague anxiety in the faces of bystanders—an anxiety universalized precisely by the fact that we shall never know their stories.

I do not mean to say that the buildings and streets of the EUR suburb are made more important than the characters. It would be too simplistic to insist on a single reading, say, “Things will predominate”—the moral counterpart perhaps of the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves buildings intact. That would be simply to reinvoke the old convention. No, characters and settings are of equal importance (or nonimportance), since every thing, like every event, is merely contingent. The film asserts nothing; it merely acknowledges the chance coexistence of things and people unrelated, even irrelevant, to one another.

Except in their predilection for ellipsis, the plot structures of the four films do not go beyond the normal ways of handling time. The emphasis on the here-and-now precludes any tampering with time sequence, for example, in flashback or in the summarizing or eliding of long periods of time: the films range from the single day of La notte to the indefinite couple of weeks of L’eclisse and Il deserto rosso. Their tendency to adhere to the classic theatrical unity of time is one more reason for rejecting easy uses of terms like dedramatization.

Notes

1. Another misapprehension is that the films are needlessly depressing. But, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith puts it:

   Except for La notte … none of Antonioni’s work is ever so arid, or so alienating, as a conventional analysis of his ideas might suggest. In each of his films there is a positive pole and a negative, and a tension between them. The abstraction, the ‘ideology,’ lies mostly at the negative pole. The concrete and actual evidence, the life of the film, is more often positive—and more often neglected by criticism (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Shape Around a Black Point,” Sight and Sound 33 [Winter 1963/64]: 17).

2. I heard the story from my friend Peter Selz, then curator of the Museum of Modern Art, who took Antonioni, at Antonioni’s request, to Rothko’s studio. Richard Gilman uses the remark as the title of one of the most perceptive early discussions of Antonioni to appear in America (“About Nothing—with Precision,” Theater Arts 46, no. 7 [July 1962]: 10–12). Antonioni confirmed the story in conversation, adding that he later became friends with Rothko and even bought a painting from him, paying in advance. Unfortunately, Rothko died before he was able to meet his commitment.

3. Gilman, p. 11.

4. See Roland Barthes’s S/Z (New York, 1970) for an account of the many ways in which traditional or lisible narrative reassures the reader.

5. Gilman, p. 11.

6. “A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on His Work,” Film Culture, no. 24 (Spring 1962), p. 46.

7. “A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni,” p. 51.

8. And the psychoanalyst who thus quotes Freud goes on to say:

   The movie makes a sweeping, it could almost be said an encompassing, statement about the erotic life of modern man. It is doomed from the start, the movie asseverates: doomed because the quest for the beloved is hopeless and because its hopelessness breeds disenchantment, cynicism, and self-hatred; doomed because sexual fulfillment is so often unsatisfactory and guilt-ridden; doomed because sex is used, wrongly, as solace for frustrations and defeats, as an anodyne for the soul-sickness which afflicts us because of our own compromises, weaknesses, and corruption, and as an outlet for angry, destructive feelings which besmirch it; doomed, finally, because despite all this the quest goes on and must go on, though joyless, sterile, and, after a time, devoid of any prospect of success. Eternal restlessness and frustration are the inescapable conditions of our erotic life (Simon O. Lesser, “L’avventura: A Closer Look,” Yale Review 54 [1964]: 45).

9. In his interview with Antonioni, Godard remarked, “There seem already to be traces of the neuroses which appear in Il deserto rosso in the character of Monica Vitti in L’eclisse.” But Antonioni disagreed vigorously. “Oh no. The character of Vittoria in L’eclisse is the complete antithesis of that of Giuliana. In L’eclisse, Vittoria is a calm well-balanced girl who knows why she acts as she does” (“Jean-Luc Godard Interviews Michelangelo Antonioni,” Movie, no. 12 [1965], p. 32).

10. Il primo Antonioni, ed. Carlo Di Carlo, p. 27.

11. The theme of escape is illuminated by Carlo Salinari, Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano (Milan, 1960). Salinari sees in escapism a central topos of the decadent movement in Italian literature.

12. Alberto Moravia observes somewhere that, though ennui—noia—seems to be the opposite of “fun,” it is really quite similar from the psychological point of view. The latter, too, diverts or even distracts. Like other distractions, “fun” is really a kind of insufficiency or inadequateness or scarcity of reality.

13. Lesser, p. 44.

14. The best article I have seen on the psychiatric meaning of distraction in Antonioni’s films is Piero Amerio’s “Appunti per una psicologia dell’irrelevante,” in Carlo Di Carlo, Michelangelo Antonioni, pp. 45–51. Amerio attributes the theme of distraction to “the irrelevant drive.” Much of Sandro’s behavior, he contends, is explainable as a “flight intended to block a less bearable state.” Sandro busies himself with finding Anna so that he can get his mind off other problems, including Claudia. She in turn becomes the object of the irrelevant drive distracting him from the problem of his work. The state of mind is a kind of psychological “vagabondage.”

15. Nowell-Smith, “Shape,” p. 17.

16. Antonioni was interested as early as 1939 in making a film about the destruction of civilization. In an article called “Terra verde,” he proposed a Technicolor production based on notes toward a novel published by Guido Piovene in the Corrière della sera in November 1937. Piovene envisioned a lost civilization on the east coast of Greenland, which flourished until the Gulf Stream deviated to the east, leaving the once flourishing land to the mercy of encroaching glaciers. Antonioni was particularly inspired by a passage in which a farmer, putting his horse out to graze one day, sees the grass change suddenly from green to silver and then back to green. This is not only the first sign of the coming of the glacier but the first sign of Antonioni’s desire to control the color of natural objects, a desire that led him to have streets, woods, and hotel lobbies sprayed with paint for Il deserto rosso and to shoot Il mistero di Oberwald from a television console so that he could mix colors on the spot.

17. The Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni (New York, 1963), p. 230.

18. The Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 231.

19. Strick, Antonioni, p. 12. Dwight MacDonald was one of the reviewers who let a penchant for symbolism spoil his reading of L’eclisse. For instance, he found “pretentious” and “obvious” the shot of the two nuns walking below Piero’s house as he tries to seduce Vittoria. But it is precisely because their presence is so common a sight in Rome’s streets that they do not work as symbols of asceticism or sexual purity. In their silent and odd, antiquated shapes, they seem, rather, to be one more embodiment of that mystery of the quotidian that forms so much a part of the film. MacDonald is no less off base in arguing that the stockbrokers “stand for” Civilized Man and the African natives in Marta’s photographs for Natural Man. Such readings reduce the film to mere allegory (Dwight MacDonald, Dwight MacDonald on Movies [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969], p. 338).

    Nowell-Smith was among the few who sensed the predominantly nonsymbolic or metonymic character of Antonioni’s art:

    Contrary to what is often thought, Antonioni has a horror of obvious symbolic correspondences. It did not take him long to realise that his starting point for L’eclisse, the actual solar eclipse, would provide in the finished film only a tedious and unnecessary metaphor—“the eclipse of the sentiments”—for what he really had to say. So he cut it out, and it survives only as an allusion in the title. Speculating here, I should also say that if it had been pointed out to him that the shots of the emptying water butt and the water running to drain in the final sequence of the same film would be taken conceptually as a straightforward symbol of Vittoria and Piero’s affair running out, then he would probably have cut them out or altered them so as to minimise, if not eliminate, the association. The meaning of this final sequence, even in the cut version shown in London, is extraordinarily rich and complex, and is diminished rather than enhanced by this sort of interpretation. It depends, like much of the best lyric poetry, on a subtle interplay of subjective and objective, of fact and feeling; but it derives most of its imagery from the narrative structure of the earlier part of the film.” (“Shape,” p. 19)

    The same point is made by Gavriel Moses in an excellent study of the opening sequence, Eclipse: Opening Sequence (New York, 1975). Moses sees Antonioni in the context of modernism and recognizes Antonioni’s minimalist action, his relation to the nouveau roman, his use of the witness—which he calls flaneur—and the importance of figure-ground relationships in his films.

20. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956).

21. On several occasions, Antonioni was asked what the title Red Desert means. To Michèle Manceaux he answered: “It isn’t meant to be symbolic. Titles of this sort have a kind of umbilical cord linking them to the work [a very good description of metonymy]. I don’t really know why. It’s more of an open title, and anyone can read into it whatever he likes” (“In the Red Desert,” Sight and Sound 33 [Summer 1964]: 119). Antonioni has made similar remarks about his films on other public occasions to questioners who pressed him for an interpretation. It is clear that he does not privilege his own interpretations, neither of titles nor of the films themselves, and that he intends the films to work as texts open to the viewer’s own interpretation.

22. The Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni, p. x.

23. Michelangelo Antonioni, Sei film (Turin, 1964), p. xi. Antonioni also said (in an interview published in Positif, March 1962, as translated by Strick, Antonioni, p. 52):

    The loneliness which separates us from others and brings on the eclipse of all feelings is what Vittoria in the film feels above all else, but it is not a dramatic crisis or a moral one, it’s a choice. Under her layer of anxiety she is serene enough. She knows, so does Piero, that they will not be able to love as they would want to, that they will not know how to live with this love. So he plunges back into his search for money, and she accepts it. She is resigned, but eventually she is smiling: love isn’t everything. And up to now eclipses haven’t been final.

24. See my Story and Discourse (Ithaca, 1978), p. 54, for a descriptive diagram and, more generally, for the theory of narrative presupposed by the discussion here.

25. See Bernard Pingaud’s important essay “Antonioni et le cinéma réel,” Preuves, no. 117 (November 1960), pp. 63–66, reprinted in Carlo Di Carlo, Michelangelo Antonioni, pp. 214–20: “In Antonioni, the truly significant shots, instead of constituting hints in the chain of the action, insidiously bend them, deter them from their course, furnishing spectators with other motives of interest.” (Antonioni confesses in interviews that he is often distracted as he writes a story by the next story or an alternative one.) Events “—like question marks in the margins—[show] that the past is not as clear as it seems, that it can be read differently.” This causes a peculiar kind of articulation, a kind of intentional “misfiring”: the plot moves along in short jerks, through small total fractures instead of the smooth “continuity” of traditional filmmaking. “The hinges of the story do not coincide with the beginnings and endings of the scenes.”

    For the theory of verisimilar irrelevance, see the classic essay by Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel,” Communications, no. 11 (1968); English translation, “The Realistic Effect,” by Gerald Mead, Film Reader 3 (February 1978).

26. The Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni, p. 183.

27. Chatman, Story and Discourse, pp. 70–72.

28. Bosley Crowther said about one film that several reels must have gotten lost, and Dwight MacDonald complained that there were not enough reasons or causes provided and that “nothing happens.”

29. Barthes, “Caro Antonioni,” p. 4.

30. Nowell-Smith, “Shape,” p. 16.

31. As quoted in Strick, Antonioni, p. 17.

32. Nowell-Smith, “Shape,” pp. 19–20: “His camera here is the voice of a lyric poet who draws on real material but fuses it together in a purely imaginative way in order to envisage subjectively a purely imaginative possibility—that the light should have gone out on the love between Piero and Vittoria.”

33. For the dialectic shifts between time and space, see Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleaumier, “L’espace et le temps dans l’univers d’Antonioni,” Etudes cinématographiques, nos. 36–37 (1964), pp. 17–33.