Post by MPPost by WordsmithPost by kelpzoidzlIf you haven't seen La Notte since EWS....it's a mind blower to pick
up on the connections.
dc
Never seen *La Notte*. Will soon. I saw *Zabriski Point*
recently. Great panoramic desert photography, although
the politics seemed secondary.
W : )
I saw Zabrinske Point when it came out. have it on order with
netflix need to see it again. At the time I found it too much a
case of "art for arts sake." I was disappointed in it after Blow
Up, but I need to give it another watch.
La Notte is the middle film of a trilogy. Have them in my netlfix que
also.
La Notte starts out a bit slow and seemingly mundane, the character
Lidia played by Jeanne Moreau reminded me too much of my ex-wife--
nuttier then a fruitcake---so it had a repelling effect---- but then
it just goes batty with subtleties and once the EWS connection
occured to me it became riveting. I can see why it was one of
Kubrick's favorite. It's pretty indescribable. Now I want to connect
the dots and see L'avventura and L'eclisse because I remember so
little about them. Want to see the next one "Red Desert" also. I saw
that when it came out also, but I might appreciate it more now, since
it is supposed to be related to the trilogy.
It's interesting reading about how the last long scene in The
Passenger was accomplished. I am going to have to find the 150
minute version on DVD. Apparently Antonioni was livid about the MGM
edit for the US. The version on Netflix is cut by 25 minutes.
http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs24/spo_koehler_passenger.htm
dc
"Zabrinske Point" is the only Antonioni film I outright hate. How
could somebody, who across his career displayed such restraint, make
something so awash with bad metaphors, silly ideas and heavy handed
storytelling? I've heard that there was no real script for that film.
Couple that with the amateur cast, pop-anarchy and a fairly
introverted director, and you have one awkward flick.
I think this was a problem that many post-war new wave European
directors (unlike their pre-war colleagues) faced when attempting an
'American film', when making a film in the US that tried to address
contemporary US concerns (Wenders' Hammett being another obvious
example, but there were numerous others, though Fassbinder's last
movies more successfully resolved these tensions). Today the issue no
longer even arises, media globalization/colonization being (almost)
complete.
Still, two features and affects of Antonioni's visual-filmic universe
which broadly correspond with those of Kubrick:
[1] Antonioni's films work as critiques of class relations, and of
gender relations, precisely because they
don't at all moralize (and also because they don't portray any
working
class alternatives to the lives of the bourgeoisie, in the manner of
the neorealist films that Antonioni was reacting against). Rather,
these films draw us into a paralysis, which we as viewers share with
the characters whom we are watching on screen. This paralysis is the
absurd consequence of what happens when class domination and gender
stratification are pushed to the extreme points that they are in a
certain sort of (medium-late) capitalist society. The characters'
neuroticism, their narcissism, their sterility, is the rigorous
'subjective' consequence of an 'objective' regime of accumulation for
its own sake.
[2] Antonioni shows us the world - sometimes the "natural" world, but
more often the human-built
world, including the human beings who are figures in that world - as
we scarcely ever see it: he shows us the world as image, the world
retreated into its image, the world "made image" (in precisely the
way
that the Word is "made flesh"). Which is why one gets the vertiginous
sense, watching Antonioni's films that what we are seeing is not the
least bit objective, since everything we see is inflected, affected,
by the characters' catastrophic subjectivity, by their narcissism,
their neuroticism, their (yes) ennui and anomie; and yet, at the very
same time , that what we are seeing is entirely separate from human
subjectivity, that in fact we are seeing inhumanly, from an entirely
alien sensibility, as if the camera were a being from another planet,
for whom human behavior is as distant and enigmatic as insect
behavior
is for us. It's the impossible combination of a subjectivity so
excessive as to be sick unto death, and an inhuman distance so great
as to defy explication, that makes Antonioni's films so compellingly
enigmatic, so alluring for their surfaces or their look.
But from the archive on Antonioni:
I've always felt that the people who describe Antonioni's movies as
being about ennui, anomie, and alienation are... not wrong, exactly,
but
largely missing the point. The point being that Antonioni's movies,
above all, are about seeing and feeling the world, about the look of
things - including when those things seem to look back, or when they
seem to look through us, to ignore us. There are so many scenes that
continue to haunt me, years after I last saw them: some shots of the
volcanic islands in L'Avventura, where the woman disappears; the
final
sequence of that same movie, in which Monica Vitti strokes the male
lead's hair, forgiving him (perhaps), despite the fact that he has
been unfaithful to her, and has proved himself to be a worthless cad.
There's the scene of panic at the stock exchange, in L'eclisse, and
of
course the (justly) famous final sequence of that film, the montage
of
an entirely deserted city, scenes of the rendezvous to which neither
of the troubled lovers managed, or was willing, to show up.
Of course, Antonioni is especially great at endings. There's also the
long travelling shot that ends The Passenger, moving out of Jack
Nicholson's hotel room onto and through a largely deserted square,
baking in the hot sun, then eventually back into the hotel room to
find Nicholson's corpse. And above all, perhaps, there's the ending
of
Zabriskie Point, with that hideous house in the desert exploding
again
and again, and all those commodities floating through the sky, slowly
floating, to the unworldly music of Pink Floyd, until Daria leaves,
and it blends into a pure colorism of the desert.
And so much more. There are scenes that I cannot even place - I will
have to watch all those films again: deserted squares with the sun
beating down (someplace in the trilogy, as well as in The Passenger).
Even in Blow Up, which is sometimes deprecated, because it is
Antonioni's most "pop" movie, as well as his most popular one at the
box office, there are astonishing visions, and not necessarily the
most obvious ones: like the scene where Jeff Beck is playing in a
club, and he wrecks his guitar and throws it into the crowd, and
David
Hemmings struggles against all the other fans in order to grab it;
and
finally, after he gets it, he exits the club and throws it down
(negligently? disgustedly? I can't quite remember) into the trash. Or
that other scene, near the end, where Hemmings is at a party, he
smokes a joint (I think?) with Verushka, in any case he is too
stoned,
too tired, too worn out to care any more... Not to mention the
exploitation scene, in the middle, with the nude cavorting models...
I may not be remembering these scenes quite accurately; it's too long
since I last watched any of them. But even if I have distorted them
in
my mind, the very fact that I am groping after them like this, that
they have the sort of insistence they do in my memory, and that my
remembrance of them, however inexact, stirs up all sorts of emotional
currents, is a testimony to how visionary a filmmaker Antonioni was -
meaning this word in the literal sense of 'having visions' as well as
in the sense of an obsession with the visual, with the visible (and
the invisible), with "the surface of the world" (to quote the
subtitle
of Seymour Chatman's 1985 book on Antonioni). Antonioni shows us the
world - sometimes the "natural" world, but more often the human-built
world, including the human beings who are figures in that world - as
we scarcely ever see it: he shows us the world as image, the world
retreated into its image, the world "made image" (in precisely the
way
that the Word is "made flesh"). Which is why one gets the vertiginous
sense, watching Antonioni's films that what we are seeing is not the
least bit objective, since everything we see is inflected, affected,
by the characters' catastrophic subjectivity, by their narcissism,
their neuroticism, their (yes) ennui and anomie; and yet, at the very
same time , that what we are seeing is entirely separate from human
subjectivity, that in fact we are seeing inhumanly, from an entirely
alien sensibility, as if the camera were a being from another planet,
for whom human behavior is as distant and enigmatic as insect
behavior
is for us. It's the impossible combination of a subjectivity so
excessive as to be sick unto death, and an inhuman distance so great
as to defy explication, that makes Antonioni's films so compellingly
enigmatic, so alluring for their surfaces or their look.
Antonioni's movies are also about time, about how time passes, about
the feeling of duration. As Bergson said, you have to wait for the
sugar to dissolve in your tea; it doesn't happen instantaneously.
Antonioni's films are about waiting; the wait can be for something as
trivial as sugar dissolving, or for something as momentous as death.
But in any case, Antonioni captures this waiting, the way that (as
Kant, Bergson, Proust, and Husserl all say) time passing is the very
essence of our interiority (or of what we are perhaps too ready and
eager to claim as an "inner life"): Antonioni captures this, in its
misery and splendor, more accurately and more fully than any other
film director (except possibly Chantal Akerman) has ever done. I
think
that his ability to plumb the depths of time - which like vision, is
both deeply subjective and deeply inhuman, in his treatment of it -
is
why Antonioni has so often been taken to be either boring (which he
never is for me) or about boredom and ennui (which I think he is only
in a very limited and derivative sense).
Antonioni is also - paradoxical as this may sound - a great poet of
the body. As Deleuze says, Antonioni is very largely about "the
immense tiredness of the body", as well as other "attitudes or
postures of the body." In these attitudes or postures, Antonioni
portrays "no longer experience, but 'what remains of past
experiences', 'what comes afterwards, when everything has been
said'." (Cinema 2, page 189). Antonioni gives us the vision of what
is
stirring when nothing has yet appeared, and of what remains when
everything is gone: and this vision is embedded in the flesh, or at
least in a certain sort of flesh, in attitudes and postures which are
devoid of consciousness, and perhaps entirely inaccessible to
thought.
That is to say, Antonioni is a poet of the body, because he shows us
what cannot be said, captures on screen what the body feels but does
not know. It's there mostly despairingly, in some of the scenes that
I
have already mentioned - like the ending of L'Avventura, or the pot-
smoking party in Blow-Up; but also - if rarely - ecstatically, like
the moment in Zabriskie Point when the protagonists are making love
in
the desert, and then, in a long shot, they are multiplied, a whole
army (?!) of lovers stretching as far as the eye (or the camera) can
see.
In all these ways, Antonioni gives us his own, highly original and
unusual, inflection of modernism. The combination of ravishing (if
severe) visual beauty and an underlying despair is, of course, very
much a familiar modernist stance or trope. But Antonioni gives it a
particular inflection, through the ways his characters are absorbed
into a landscape (usually not a "natural" one) that changes them even
as it reflects them: both expresses them and absorbs and digests
them.
The relation between human figures, and the spaces they inhabit (or
feel uncomfortable in, and in that sense fail to fully inhabit) is a
unique one in Antonioni's films, and I am not sure I have adequate
words for it.
But it's here that I can best raise the question of the politics of
Antonioni's films. The Italian trilogy (or tetralogy, if you include
Red Desert - and one might also group with them their later echo in
Identification of a Woman) does indeed focus on rich, or at least
haut-
bourgeois, characters who haven't a care in the world financially
(despite that stock market panic in L'eclisse), but who suffer from
loneliness, from an inability to connect with other people except on
the most superficial level, and from - not frustration so much as
anhedonia, an inability to take pleasure, and also (more deeply) an
inability even to have the desires whose unfulfillment might lead to
frustration. Often these characters are women; Antonioni treats them
with considerable sympathy, even if he objectifies them sexually at
the same time.
One common criticism of Antonioni is that any leftist critique of the
privileged classes that he might have is subverted by the way he
glamorizes these protagonists and their money-fueled lifestyles. But
I
think this objection is misguided. Antonioni's films work as
critiques
of class relations, and of gender relations, precisely because they
don't at all moralize (and also because they don't portray any
working
class alternatives to the lives of the bourgeoisie, in the manner of
the neorealist films that Antonioni was reacting against). Rather,
these films draw us into a paralysis, which we as viewers share with
the characters whom we are watching on screen. This paralysis is the
absurd consequence of what happens when class domination and gender
stratification are pushed to the extreme points that they are in a
certain sort of (medium-late) capitalist society. The characters'
neuroticism, their narcissism, their sterility, is the rigorous
'subjective' consequence of an 'objective' regime of accumulation for
its own sake.
But this paralysis, is also, and as it were in spite of itself, a
precondition for aesthetic rapture. Paralysis is Kantian
"disinterest"; it is also what Deleuze - describing the neorealism
that Antonioni is both the heir to and the rebel against - calls
"pure
optical and sound situations," in which the sensori-motor linkages of
"ordinary" perception are ruptured (see Cinema 2, pages 3-6).
Antonioni's characters don't experience aesthetic bliss; but their
paralysis is the precondition for the bliss that Antonioni, and his
films' spectators, are able to feel. As Deleuze also says, "the old
curse which undermines the cinema" is that "time is money," and that
"there is not, and there never will be, equivalence in the mutual
camera-money exchange." (Cinema 2, page 77-78). Unequal exchange, the
extraction of a surplus even when there is formal equivalence of the
items exchanged: this capitalist logic is at the heart both of the
neuroses of Antonioni's characters, and of the delirious aestheticism
that serves as an always-unequal counterpart, or counter-payment for
those neuroses.
The situation is a bit different in Antonioni's English-language
films, where the paralyzed voyeur-characters are photographers (Blow-
Up) or journalists (The Passenger), or even would-be radicals
(Zabriskie Point who try (unsuccessfully) to escape the logic of
equivalence/surplus/paralysis that is inscribed into the logic of
capitalist society. I'm aware that a lot more needs to be said about
Antonioni's ambiguous treatment, in these films, of what Deleuze and
Guattari call "lines of flight" or (when they are not successful, as
is generally the case in Antonioni's films) "lines of abolition."
More
needs to be said, as well, about how gender relations (in addition to
class relations) factor in here. But I think my general point stands
-
about how Antonioni's aestheticism is both consciously inscribed
within, and also mobilized against, the unacceptable social relations
that remain Antonioni's starting point.
I still haven't said anything about my favorite Antonioni film - or
at
least the one that I have seen most often, and with which I am most
familiar: Red Desert (1964). This was Antonioni's first film in
color,
and its scenes of belching factory smoke, and overall muted,
depressive palette, are unforgettable. These hideous colors are only
accented by their contrast with the one fantasy sequence, the story
Monica Vitti tells her son about a paradisaical beach: here the
lighting and the colors are excessively bright and clear, too much
so,
with the airbrushed perfection of the most expensive advertising.
This
is the bourgeois vision of beauty as compensation and escape, as
unrealizable ideal: Antonioni shows it to be only the flip side of
the
industrial pollution that dominates the rest of the film. Antonioni's
own aestheticism resides, rather, in the waste and pollution itself.
I
think of his use of the color red, as in the scene in the cabin,
where
Vitti tries (unsuccessfully) to transform herself into orgy mode; and
also the scene in the hotel room, her tryst with the engineer, where
the wall subtly changes color behind them as they writhe on the bed.
Related to that, in turn, though with a different palette, is the
scene in the ship yard, at night, where Vitti wandering alone is
briefly propositioned by a foreign sailor: not speaking Italian, he
tells her, in English, "I'll love you, I'll love you," as she passes
by. It's a scene that could be an epigraph for all of Antonioni's
movies, with their pain and blocked eroticism, and with the force of
the disinterest by means of which Antonioni transfigures them.
I will stop here, though I feel I could ramble on indefinitely. But I
need to watch these movies again, before I write more about them. I
will only add that, for all that Antonioni's critical reputation
declined over the past thirty years, he only became more and more
influential among the younger generations of art filmmakers. As David
Hudson notes, "now as we head into the late 00's, the almost
standardized "festival film" bears the mark of no other director more
than Antonioni's." Indeed - where would Tsai Ming-liang, Bela Tarr,
early Edward Yang, and Theo Angelopoulos be without Antonioni?