[In the following review, Harrison argues that this collection of Antonioni's writing illuminates the filmmaker's objectives and emphasizes the limitations of theory.]

It is difficult to overestimate the pleasures of having access, in one splendid volume, to Michelangelo Antonioni’s collected writings on film. So much remains unsaid in the work of Italy’s most intellectual director that the desire to be privy to his thoughts tends to be greater than with, say, Fellini, Pasolini, or Bertolucci. Antonioni has remained more silent in the print media than they. His films pose more problems of comprehension, often circling around unsolvable conundrums (e.g., what happened to Anna in L’avventura). His work, in his own words, records “abortions of observation” more frequently than full-fledged visions. The most abstract of Italian film-makers, Antonioni is also the most experimental, using techniques that share as much with poetry and painting as with filmic narration. To make matters even more puzzling, one senses a deep philosophical subcurrent to his dramas of human incomprehension, calling out for the clarifying texts of a Sartre or Camus, if not for treatises on perception and film theory itself.

With The Architecture of Vision, then, we are afforded the opportunity to look unto some of these issues inspired by the films themselves. The first in a multi-volume project covering Antonioni’s complete works, this one arrays fifty-one highly articulate pieces chronologically over four divisions. The first, called “My Cinema,” consists of essays, prefaces to screenplays, and formal discussions. The second, “My Films,” is made up of published writings on individual films. The third is devoted to “Interviews” with Antonioni on his art in general, the fourth to “Interviews on Films,” ranging from Story of a Love Affair (1950) to Identification of a Woman (1983). The great bulk of this material—in excellent translations by Allison Cooper, Dana Renga, and Andrew Taylor—is made available in English for the very first time.

Underlying the essays and interviews is a nagging question: to what extent do an artist’s reflections, reminiscences, and speculations unlock his hermetic procedures? “I don’t believe that what an author says about himself and about his own work would help make sense of his work,” Antonioni himself insists. As Giorgio Tinazzi notes in his introduction, however, even writings as incidental as a film-maker’s travel log will inevitably give “indications of his tendencies, of his interests, and of his poetics.” This rationale may be overly cautious. In her incisive preface to the English edition, Marga Cottino-Jones actually demonstrates how Antonioni’s theories illuminate some of the thornier issues in his art: his “coldness” toward his characters (aimed in one particular case, he notes, “at avoiding the possibility that the story could influence the public even in an involuntarily negative way”); his fondness for the long take (allowing him to ponder the after-effects of situation on character); his heavy manipulation of color (putting viewers in a frame of mind to follow unusual tenors of dialogue); his ambivalent uses of technology (“I adopted technology to eliminate technology”). By putting her finger on these types of connections, Cottino-Jones reveals that, although Antonioni’s readings of his own motives and accomplishments may not be “authoritative,” they open important directions for investigation that critics might not otherwise pursue.

In interview after interview, Antonioni appears as reticent to theorize his art as his characters to voice their emotions. In itself, this is surprising, for Antonioni is one of the most literate of directors’ famous for his references to Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Max Scheler; to Mallarme, Lucretius, and Dostoevsky. In this case, however, the reticence is particularly eloquent, revealing—even by means of this erudite help—a profound conviction. To Antonioni’s way of thinking, ideas, theories, and reflections never do justice to the complexity of intentions, moods, and aesthetic situations. Even when invoking the philosophers, Antonioni reaches with words towards regions that lie beyond them. And this clarifies his commitment to film. Precisely because Antonioni takes verbal language so seriously, searching its literary and philosophical articulations as thoroughly as he does, he discovers the necessity of film, the need for a means of communication that reading and writing do not attain. The Italian original of The Architecture of Vision takes its title from the statement, “fare un film per me e vivere” (to me, film-making is living). By providing these writings in English, Cottino-Jones supplies an extended gloss on the meaning of the phrase, Filmmaking, for Antonioni, is not only a particular species of writing. It is not only an alternative to the written or spoken word. It is a form of life, embodying the entire project of understanding. It is an expression of what his phenomenological philosophers call “preunderstanding,” “disposition,” the unspeakable complexity of “being-in-the-world.”

In an interview from the late seventies, Antonioni bemoans the fact that in this confused decade “people no longer want to ‘figure things out.’ There are too many people who sense that the reality around them is unfamiliar, and they hardly even want to come to know this reality because they feel that it would not solve anything” (205). While Antonioni is intending to be critical here, the situation he describes is not all that different from the one his films record from start to finish, where experience seems to have lost its clarity and characters cannot find their bearings. When he grows impatient with his interviewers’ ceaseless intellectual prying, is it not also for the same reason—namely, because they, too, are trying, impossibly, to figure things out?

To “figure things out” is to achieve discursive understanding of the reasons things are the way that they are, to have a clear sense of cause and effect. But, by Antonioni’s admission, this is the type of story that neither he nor his characters can tell. If anything, they are more interested in an opposite sort of narrative, and one more appropriate to the inarticulateness of the human emotions and understanding in the third quarter of the century. Antonioni’s narratives try only to seize “what I seem to see around me,” and that is a historical situation in which stories can exist “with neither a beginning nor an end necessarily, without key scenes, without a dramatic arc, without catharsis. They can be made up of tatters, of fragments, as unbalanced as the lives we lead” (142). More precisely still, Antionioni does not tell stories at all; “I try to ‘show’ stories” (209).

To “show” a story, in Antonioni’s fashion, is to reject the distended logic of plot, the construction of a dramatic line, the development of a coherent narrative progression—for all of them are correlatives of “theory,” of mental explanation, of experience subordinated to idea. To “show” a story is to privilege instead the mute evidence of singular, historical events, of life’s puzzling, unamalgamable episodes. Feeling as Antonioni does “an instinctive and sincere need to reduce everything to images” (62), he proceeds to wonder whether these images might not be made to cohere in a pictorial or figurative way, perhaps in the manner of that paratactic montage he explored in his documentary, People of the Po Valley (1943–47). At its most ambitious, the narrative disunity that makes a cinematic sequence appear to be just a string of separate and isolated shots is essentially an attempt to open cinema to “ways of expression that are absolutely free, as free as those of literature, as free as those of painting which has reached abstraction” (26).

Antonioni’s resistance to discursive meaning also shows up in his distance from the screenplay. “These are the limits of scripts,” he notes, “to give works to events that refuse words.” Writing a screenplay is just “describing images with provisional words, words which will no longer do” (67). If the dialogues of Visconti’s Obsession appear dated in the seventies, for example, it is “not because they are wrong, but because they no longer fit the images” (208). For Antonioni, the images are always what is prior, possessing an autonomous and ingrained power that the discursive embellishments do not share. And this helps explain why Antonioni’s own art tends toward minimalism, preferring “to say things with the least means possible” (43).

To reject the notion of cinema as an audiovisual “illustration” of a meaning, theory, or discursive intention is nevertheless not to divorce it from those living discoveries that words themselves serve. In fact, Antonioni himself suggests that his own films might best be seen as documentaries “of a thought in the making” (58). The greater part of this thought occurs in the process of production, not in the plans that precede it: in the scouting of locations, in choices about framing and camera angle, in the arrangement of characters in space, in expressive manipulations of color, in the extemporaneous gestures of actors (and finally in the adjustments to the script that all this thinking then comes to entail). The meaning of the film, if it has one, is to be found in these ways that its thinking takes shape. “Certain lines in the script might take on a different meaning once they’re spoken against a wall or against a street background. And a line spoken by an actor in profile doesn’t have the same meaning as one given full-face” (28). To understand the genesis or objective of a film, Antonioni suggests, one must heed Wittenstein’s advice to abandon explanation in favor of description. Instead of answering the question, “What did you want to say?” With a particular film, Antonioni “would prefer to respond along these lines: “In that period, certain events happened in the world, I saw certain people, I was reading certain books, I was looking at certain paintings, I loved X, I hated Y, I didn’t have any money, I wasn’t sleeping much” (57). Ideas, motivations, feelings, and believes cannot be abstracted from the situations that gave them birth. They are outcrops of existential experience—which is the very process that cinema transcribes.

Documentaries of a thought in the making can easily be built out of “flashes, ideas that come forth every other moment” (91). Something as simple as a sensation, says Antonioni, can define a film even when its story remains far from defined. (“One day I invented a film while looking at the sun: the meanness of the sun,” 61). If anything, the resulting work elaborates a type of “internal neorealism” (16). It portrays the “innermost thoughts” of a character (8), the subjective after-effects of a historical scene (25), the forces that motivate us to act in one way instead of another (26). This subjective type of art hits its mark when it occasions a similar response in the spectator: “A film does not need to be understood. It is enough if the viewer feels it” (168).

The question of course remains of just how one feeling (converted into an image) reproduces itself in the viewer. According to Antonioni, the process entails a mysterious conjunction of internal and external vision: “At a certain moment the two visions approach each other, and like two images that come into focus, they are superimposed upon one another” (58). While this coincidence of subject and object may be the motivating principle of Antonioni’s aesthetic, it is also, however, its bone of contention, for more often than not his films examine quite the opposite experience—namely, the noncorrespondence of inner and outer vision, of spiritual and material worlds, of desire and its dramatic surroundings. Antonioni’s documentaries of a “thought in the making” focus on the problematic experience of characters jolted or alienated for the events in which they participate. Instead of showing ideas reflected in actions, they dwell on the difficulties inherent to the reflection. Something more fundamental than coincidence then comes into view, namely, the situation on which is based, the naked experience of “mankind facing his environment and mankind facing mankind” (65). It was the sense that these feelings were not issuing into some “natural,” comfortable, dramatic behavior that led him to investigate those feelings to begin with.

A cinema that seeks form for non-rational feelings is thus spurred by the absence of that form. That, too, may explain why Antonioni is more interested in the perceptions of women, who “provide a much more subtle and uneasy filtering of reality than men do” (191). His film force the spectator to reflect on the relationship between experience and understanding, between subjects and objects, between “field” and “counterfield” (25). The problem of relationship eventually engulfs that spectator who relates to the film. “It is like studying a microcosm: while you observe a phenomenon, you change it, and the particle that you try to photograph changes its course” (202). The harder you try to penetrate the meaning of an objective image, Antonioni showed in Blow-Up, the less sure you are that such a meaning is actually objective. “Observing reality,” he concludes, “is only possible on a poetic level” (202). “You cannot penetrate events with reportage” (62). Film-maker and spectator alike help construct the grammar of all thoughts in process.

Antonioni’s film provides only the occasion for such construction. It has been distinguished from the neorealistic cinema among which he began his career in being less interested in the sociopolitical realities of the underprivileged than in the intellectual and emotional problems of the middle class. But here, too, the writings prove crucial: “The middle class,” Antonioni remarks, “doesn’t give me the means with which to resolve any middle class problems” (40). The deepest problem of this middle class, one suspects, may be its inarticulateness about the nature of its problems. Its stories, visions, and explanations are askew in some manner or other. Antonioni must therefore reconfigure those visions, rethink the very nature of its thinking. He must devise a new architecture of vision. Not even this architecture, however, can stand on its own. Antonioni, the middle class man, lacks the means to resolve middle class problems. And this identifies the great interest of these writings: they show that the vastest implications of his architecture of vision are intimately embroiled with the objectives and limitations of theory.