MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI (1912)

Antonioni’s fame emerged somewhat later than Fellini’s, and his pessimistic, cerebral films stood out in sharp contrast to Fellini’s life-affirming extravagance. Nonetheless, throughout the 1960s, he helped define European cinema’s “high modernism.”

Antonioni served his apprenticeship in Italian Neorealism with several short films and five features running from Story ofa Love Affair (1950) to II Grido (“The Outcry,” 1959). His most famous film was L’Avventura (“The Adventure,” 1960); though booed at the Cannes Film Festival, it became an international success. L’Avventura was followed by La Notte (“The Night,” 1961), L’Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962), and Red Desert (1964), the entire tetralogy constituting an exploration of contemporary life. By the mid-1960s, as one of the half-dozen most prominent directors in the world, Antonioni accepted a contract

19.34 The modern city becomes a labyrinth that dominates human beings (L’Avventura).

19.35 A reminder of the fatal elevator looms over the couple in Story of a Love Affair.

19.36 The itinerant worker confronts his wife in I1 Grido.

With MGM to make three films in English. The first, Blow-Up (1966), amply justified Hollywood’s faith, earning praise and profits around the world. But Zabriskie Point (1969), Antonioni’s rendition of student activism, was a financial disaster. After The Passenger (1975), Antonioni returned to Italy, breaking several years of silence with The Mystery of Oberwald (1981), Identification ofa Woman (1982), and Beyond the Clouds (1995, codirected with Wim Wenders).

Antonioni’s historical significance rests principally on his early and middle-period films. During the first decade, he helped turn Italian Neorealism toward intimate psychological analysis and a severe, antimelodramatic style. The films depicted an anomie at the center of Europe’s booming economy, an indifference also portrayed in postwar Italian fiction. Antonioni’s early portrayals of the rich could be seen as extending the social criticism inherent in the idea of Neorealism. But Antonioni found numb, aimless people in the working class as well. The sluggish, inarticulate drifter of II Grido is far from the struggling hero of The Bicycle Thief, who at least has his wife and son to sustain him.

With the tetralogy of the early 1960s, what Andrew Sarris called “Antoniennui” deepens. L’Avventura undertakes a panoramic survey of the upper classes’ alienation from the world they have made (19.34). Vacations, parties, and artistic pursuits are vain efforts to conceal the characters’ lack of purpose and emotion. Sexuality is reduced to casual seduction, enterprise to the pursuit of wealth at any cost. Technology has taken on a life of its own; an electric fan or a toy robot has a more vivid presence than the people who use it. (“It is things, objects, and materials that have weight today. ”8) One cliche of Antonioni criticism—the “lack of communication”—takes on its significance within his broader critique of how all personal relations have shriveled in the contemporary world.

These thematic preoccupations are expressed in innovative narrative forms and stylistic patterns. After an increasingly episodic treatment of narrative in I Vinti

(1952) and II Grido, L’Avventura moved sharply toward pure modernist storytelling. Wealthy vacationers descend on a Mediterranean island, and Anna wanders off. Her friends cannot find her. Her lover, Sandro, and her friend, Claudia, return to the mainland to continue the search. Gradually, as they become attracted to one another, Anna is forgotten. What starts as a detective story becomes the tale of an ambivalent love affair haunted by guilt and uncertainty.

Other films in the tetralogy take different narrative paths. La Notte covers a twenty-four-hour period, tracing the ways in which a couple’s random encounters illuminate their disintegrating marriage. Red Desert presents an industrial landscape pervaded by ambiguity, in which the washed-out color schemes may be attributed either to the disturbed psyche of the heroine, Giuliana, or to Antonioni’s vision of the blighted modern world. All the films utilize a slow rhythm, with many temps morts (intervals of “dead time”) between events. Scenes begin a bit before the action starts and linger after the action has ended. And all four films conclude with “open endings”— perhaps most notably L’Eclisse’s series of empty urban spaces where the two lovers might yet meet.

From the start of his career, Antonioni demonstrated a mastery of deep focus (19.35) and the long take with camera movement. The early works also pioneered the possibility of concealing the characters’ reactions from the audience, often by means of setting (19.36; see also

16.4). L’Avventura systematically extends this strategy (19.37). The film’s last image is an extreme long shot of the couple dwarfed by a building, staring out at Mount Etna, their backs resolutely to the viewer (19.38). The viewer can hardly feel close to characters presented so dispassionately.

A similar detachment results from Antonioni’s increasingly abstract compositions. He reduces human beings to masses and textures, figures on a ground (19.39).

19.37 L’Avventura often presents characters turned from the camera, rendering emotional states uncertain.

19.38 L’Avventura: the ending.

19.39 L’Avventura: two strong diagonals divide the frame and isolate Claudia.

With Red Desert, Antonioni’s first color film, he pushed his abstraction further. He painted fruit gray (Color Plate 19.3); objects became blobs or slabs of color. In some scenes, space is flattened by long lenses; in others it becomes cubistic, as blocks and wedges of color fracture the shot (Color Plate 19.4).

In Blow-Up, the distancing effects of the previous films cooperate with a full-scale reflexivity. Thomas accidentally photographs a couple in the park; has he also filmed a murder? The more he enlarges his pictures, the more granular and abstract they become. Within a detective-story framework, the film probes the illusory basis of photography and suggests that its ability to tell the unvarnished truth is limited. Like S’/z and Persona, Blow-Up became a central example of modern cinema’s interrogation of its own medium.

Antonioni’s muted dramatization of shallow or paralyzed characters found a sympathetic response in an era that also welcomed existentialism. Perhaps more than any other director, he encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative. Juan Bar-dem, Miklos Jansco, and Theo Angelopoulos learned from his distinctive style. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma’s Blow-Out

(1981) derive directly from Blow-Up. An entire generation identified film artistry with the silences and vacancies of Antonioni’s world, and many viewers saw their own lives enacted there.