[In the following review, Chatman draws on Antonioni’s writing to describe how the filmmaker worked as a director.]

Antonioni was an active cinema critic in the 30s and 40s, but stopped writing about other directors’ work after making his own first film, Story of a Love Affair (1950). From then until his debilitating stroke in 1985, he wrote a number of short pieces and gave many interviews; two particularly, at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia; are of such importance and influence that the editors call them “oral writings” and include them among the essays of the first section of this book [The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema,], “My Cinema.” Section 2 contains writings by Antonioni on several of his own films (from Attempted Suicide [1953] to The Mystery of Oberwald [1980]). Section 3 reprints other interviews of a general nature, and 4, interviews on specific films, from Story of a Love Affair (1950) to Identification of a Woman (1982). Many of these pieces have already appeared in English, but they lie scattered among a variety of journals, and it is useful to have them assembled in one volume. Perhaps inevitably, such assemblage leads to some repetitiousness. But that is as much the interviewers’ problem as Antonioni’s, since they tended to ask similar questions, Antonioni, being consequent and clear about his art, tended to provide similar answers.

Antonioni vowed from the beginning to eschew standard filmmaking practices. His first feature film employed extremely long takes and temps mort holds on characters to glean the “true” reality in the actor’s face and body after she thought the shot was finished. Antonioni developed the long take on his own—it just seemed right for Cronaca (he says that he did not see The Magnificent Ambersons until much later). But he did not feel bound to the long take forever: “Later … I became aware that perhaps it was not the best method after all, that perhaps I was concentrating too much on the external aspects of the actors’ states of mind and not enough on the states of mind themselves.” In Red Desert, he used many short takes: “Perhaps it was the fact that I was using color that suggested this technique to me, this deep-seated need to deal with [colors] in large blotches, as if they were pulsations that penetrate chaotically inside the characters.” Similarly, he explains his use of the telephoto lens in Red Desert to “limit the depth of field … to put the characters in contact with things” (one remembers how Giuliana needs to cling to walls). It’s too bad that Antonioni cites only a few such concrete examples of how and why he chose specific techniques on the set. Mostly, he speaks in generalities about his need to trust intuition. In his desire to “fill the image with a greater suggestiveness,” Antonioni dispensed with some standard Hollywood shooting and editing conventions. For instance, he permitted himself certain “errors” in shot/countershot editing (presumably crossing the 180-degree line). His constant desire was to get rid of “unnecessary technical baggage.”

His direction of actors, too, was unorthodox and was criticized as such. In several of these writings he defends his practice against accusations of mistreating them. He explains how he had to give opaque directions to Massimo Girotti (the protagonist in Story of a Love Affair) to keep him from overacting, to slap Lucia Bose to get more expression into that lovely face, and to “deceive” Betsy Blair and Steve Cochrane to get compelling performances in Il grido. This deception obviously pained him—he is far too gentle for sadism—but he found it essential. Only the director, he argues, can decide how characters should look, move, and speak; an actor need not understand her role, she need only feel it. Explaining the character to her is not the way to achieve that result. Antonioni sees the actor as only one element in the ensemble of features that have to be organized. Like an orchestra conductor, only the director can blend the heterogeneous elements into a unified and meaningful whole. Not being an actor himself, Antonioni could not in any case show actors how to perform their roles. His resort to “deception” is clearly not a question of ego but of simply doing his art as he saw it. What Antonioni doesn’t say, however, is that his method really only works with great actors—Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moreau, Mastroianni, Delon, Hemmings, Redgrave, and Nicholson—actors able to respond intuitively to the signals that he did give. Unlike De Sica, he could not get accomplished performances from amateurs like Daria Halperin and Mark Frechette. Great actors have a sixth sense that thrives even under reticent direction.

Antonioni says relatively little about his use of the sound track. He prefers recording on the set to postproduction dubbing because what is “picked up by microphones [has] a power of suggestion that can’t be obtained with dubbing.” As for commentative music, in the late 50s he began to cultivate a “dry manner” (climaxing in stark electronic sounds in Red Desert). His decision was simply that music provided unwanted “outside commentary”; it was “old-fashioned and rancid” and tended simply to “duplicate” the action. Music, he felt, belonged on phonograph disks, where it could have its own autonomy. Up to 1966 he increasingly insisted on “let[ting] silence have its place.” (Later, however, he was to reincorporate music, especially of a pop sort. This often worked better if the source was diegetic—on-screen or within earshot; the technique obviously sounded less artificial to him than nondiegetic off-screen music.)

Antonioni dwells more on his creative state of mind than on how he cultivated his style. He repeatedly describes his need to arrive alone on the set “in a virginal state,” to absorb and choose visual nuances from what lies before his gaze. His need for freedom was so great that he preferred to work in sunless locations, since “in the sun, the camera’s angles are fixed.” This intense quest for spontaneous inspiration from visual cues—“an idea almost always comes to me through images”—lies at the opposite pole from a storyboard director like Hitchcock. It also reveals the profound degree to which Antonioni trusts his visual instinct. Visuals are also at the core of his narrative invention, the very way he discovers stories (his most recent film, Beyond the Clouds (1995) is about a director who wanders about, picking up stories from what he sees around him). This was his method from the very beginning: chancing on a drowned man on the beach on his way to Paris for his first feature-film job with Marcel Carne, he saw a black bathing-attendant in a white singlet; a girl in a flesh-colored bathing suit; a ten-year-old boy pointing the body out to an eight-year-old girl and asking if she was scared; the police clearing the beach; the bath-attendant leaving to give a lady with violet hair “her usual lesson of gymnastics.” End of story. But, remarks Antonioni, his movie version of this experience, if he had made one, would “remove the actual event from the scene, and leave only the image”—the white sky, the deserted sea front, the sea cold and empty, the hotels white and half-shuttered. For “the event here adds nothing: it is superfluous. … The dead man acted as a distraction to a state of tension. But the true emptiness, the malaise, the anxiety, the nausea, the atrophy of all normal feelings and desires, the fear, the anger—all these I felt when, coming out of the Negresco, I found myself in that whiteness, in that nothingness, which took shape around a black point.” Many of the sketches of Antonioni’s book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber (ea. and trans. William Arrowsmith [New York: Oxford, 1986]) have exactly this sketchy, allusive, and highly visual character. And so do the four short films that constitute Beyond the Clouds. Antonioni explicitly defends the right of the director—like that of the postmodern novelist—to present stories “with neither a beginning nor an end … without lacy scenes, without a dramatic arc, without catharsis. They can be made up of tatters, of fragments, as unbalanced as the lives we lead.”

Antonioni has always freely discussed the thematics of his films. He learned at the 1959 Cannes Festival, when L’avventura met with initial hostility, that he would have to educate the public about his films’ intentions. He has done so in a clear and articulate way, as the eminent European intellectual that he is. (His erudition is astonishing: these pieces contain a wide range of casual but informative allusion to writers from Adorno to Virginia Woolf, Wittgenstein to Joan Didion.) He refused to simplify his message, disagreeing, for instance, that the final shot of L’avventura is either pessimistic or optimistic and arguing for a more complex interpretation.

When asked what his work brought him, he deprecated the question: “It gives me everything. It gives me the chance to express myself, to communicate with others. Being inept at speaking, I would have the sensation of not existing at all—without the cinema.” His later career, especially his astonishing production of Beyond the Clouds at the age of 83, testifies to the depth of that need and his stamina in satisfying it. It is touching to learn the price he paid for staying true to his own vision. After the success of Blow-Up, an American producer called him into his office, where, seated between Mia Farrow and an artistic director, he offered to write Antonioni a check for ＄1,300,000 to direct Peter Pan. He asks his interviewer wryly, “Can you see me doing Peter Pan?”

But Antonioni protests too much about the “ineptness” of his speech. This book illustrates that, until his stroke, he spoke and wrote copiously and well. Indeed, few of his peers can match his verbal articulateness. Nor, as Beyond the Clouds and recent paintings and drawings show, can he be imagined to cease expressing himself—one way or another—as long as he lives.