Tagged: Antonioni
La notte (The Night, Italy-France 1961)
Giovanni and Lidia
For many cinephiles, Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the directors most identified with the concept of ‘European art cinema’, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s. His career started early as a writer and then director in the 1940s when neo-realism was beginning to develop. In the 1970s he worked outside Italy for Hollywood (Zabriskie Point 1970) and for European producers, but with American and British players in The Passenger (1975). Antonioni had a 60 year filmmaking career but it is perhaps the three films he made between 1960 and 1962 which are most responsible for the art cinema designation. L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse are films which share the same director, writers and various crew members. They each star leading Italian and French actors and Monica Vitti appears in all three films. She also leads in Red Desert in 1964 – a film sometimes bracketed with the other three films, although it is in colour. The key terms to describe these narratives seem to be alienation, isolation and existentialism. Put crudely, in La notte critics see the decay and possible collapse of the marriage of two intelligent (and wealthy) people reflected in some way by their responses to both the kind of society they encounter (and are part of) and the buildings and technologies of the new world of affluence for the haute-bourgeoisie whose interest is aroused by a writer’s celebrity. I’m not saying this is a ‘wrong’ reading, but there seem to be several other ways of thinking about the film. On the Wikipedia page for the film, the following statement appears in the introduction:
The film continues Antonioni’s tradition of abandoning traditional storytelling in favour of visual composition.
This is a helpful observation but it also potentially misleads. Antonioni doesn’t abandon traditional storytelling, but he does place more emphasis on cinema’s unique capacity to tell stories through setting, camerawork, editing, music etc. as well as dialogue. He doesn’t deploy the conventions of Hollywood storytelling in terms of pacing or the linear ‘drive’ of the narrative. But he does utilises stars. The elements of a story are all there but they are presented in a way that some audiences will perhaps find off-putting and unsatisfactory – or the story itself will not be of enough interest. A film is an art object, preserved like amber, and must be seen in its context of production and reception. Many of us will read it differently today than audiences did in 1961. But others will attempt to read it as timeless because ‘great art’ doesn’t age. These differences are interesting for me.
In the clinic, Tomasso (Bernhard Wicki) has Giovanni’s new book, but it’s perhaps Lidia he is most keen to see.
Time and space
The setting of La notte is contemporary Milan. The narrative involves a married couple, Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) who first visit a dying friend in a swish modern private clinic – more like an up-market hotel or apartment block. They leave and drive through the streets, arriving at a party being given in Giovanni’s honour on the occasion of the publication of his latest novel. A greeting suggests it is still morning when they arrive. Giovanni is the centre of attention. Lidia becomes bored and wanders out to walk among the lunchtime crowds. It’s a warm summer’s day and she enjoys observing people. Eventually she hires a cab and ends up in the district where she lived with Giovanni when they first married. It is a more open area, perhaps on the edge of the city? Giovanni goes back to their apartment in the centre and falls asleep on his day bed. Later, Lidia rings him and he collects her. She wants to go out in the evening and they visit a night club and then move onto a party outside the city given by a very wealthy industrialist. Giovanni is again the centre of attention and Lidia feels marginalised. Later at the party, Giovanni spends time with the industrialist’s daughter Valentina (Monica Vitti) and Lidia leaves for a short time with a man from the party. At dawn Giovanni and Lidia are together again and they wander out onto the private golf course on the estate. They admit to each other that their marriage is facing a crisis. The camera moves away from them and the film ends.
Lidia at the reception with an image of Giovanni over her shoulder
It occurs to me that Antonioni’s choice of locations in his three films is very similar to De Sica’s choices for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Italy-France 1963). I suspect it was a popular headline around that time. De Sica told three stories featuring the same actors playing a couple in Naples (‘Yesterday’), Rome (‘Today’) and Milan (‘Tomorrow’). Marcello Mastroianni is the man and Sophia Loren is the woman. Antonioni chooses Sicily for L’avventura, Rome for L’eclisse and Milan for La notte. My impression is that at this time, the differences between Italian regions and especially between ‘South’ and ‘North’ were very great. They still are to some extent I think. One of the best indications of this is developed by Visconti in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), a film also set in Milan and a film which I thought about while watching La notte, especially when Lidia is on her own on the outskirts of the city. I also thought about Fellini’s La dolce vita (Italy 1960). OK that is set in Rome but it’s the helicopter that is the link. It appears a couple of times in La notte with that angry buzzing sound somehow proclaiming the modern city. It also suggests on the one hand surveillance of the population if you are working class or the freedom to take to the air if you have the money. Thinking about that helicopter now – i.e. as it flies over my house – I’m aware that, apart from its use for real emergencies, it also signifies a polluting object, something that would not occur to anyone in 1961.
One of the carefully composed framings (which I have had to crop) of Lidia on the streets of Milan
Lidia finds the old Milan . . .
. . . and finds herself close to where she and Giovanni were first together
Time – story time, screen time, narrative time – is important in La notte and as part of Antonioni’s approach to his storytelling. The narrative time, the time covered by the events on screen, appears to be about twenty hours, from 10.00 am through to around 6.00 am the following morning. The actual screen time is just over two hours but the full story time is several years. How long have Giovanni and Lidia known Tommaso, the man dying in the clinic? Was he Giovanni’s friend first or Lidia’s? Given the books displayed at the publisher’s launch party, Giovanni has been writing for a long time. But the sequence in which Lidia returns to the area in which they first lived suggests that although she comes from a wealthy family, the young couple might have had a relatively ‘normal’ early married life during the 1950s when Milan was growing as an industrial centre. These ‘inferred’ events give a rather different perspective on the behaviour of Giovanni and Lidia at the industrialist’s party.
Composition: what do we think should fill the space to Lidia’s left?
In an essay on the Criterion website, Richard Brody discusses Antonioni’s focus on architecture and his “irrepressible delight in the oppressive and desolate forms of technological modernity”. It is certainly true that as I watched the film, I was most conscious of cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo’s framings and compositions Milan’s architecture. The credit sequence begins with a slow descent down the walls of a high-rise building and there are many later images when we see the couple framed in interesting ways, by internal and external features of the various buildings they visit. Brody also refers to the industrialist’s claim during his party that he always sees his businesses as works of art – and that is conformed for us not only by the modernity of Milan’s architecture but by the abstract patterns of the industrialist’s house and grounds. Brody argues that: “The city of the living future is utterly alien to nature”. His suggestion is that what is inferred isn’t only the past but the future as well. The relationship between Giovanni and Lidia seems trapped between what has been lost and what is to come.
At the party, Giovanni’s sees Valentina and joins her for the game she has invented to play on the chequerboard floor
How do we read this careful composition?
Stars
Both Mastroianni and Moreau were well-known actors in Europe in 1961. Were they ‘stars’? Moreau had certainly been in many films, some of them notable successes by this point, especially her films for Louis Malle, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud and Les amants, both in 1958, but she hadn’t yet achieved the string of notable performances throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. She does present a strong star persona in La notte. She doesn’t say much and she often appears quite solemn, but I feel like I could watch her walking through streets for a long time, marvelling at just how she moves, how she holds herself, even simply how she wears her costumes. She was only in her early 30s when she made this film but she seems older. The narrative depends to some extent on Monica Vitti’s youthfulness by comparison. But Vitti was actually less than four years younger than Moreau. I did notice that in the contest about who sported the thinnest spaghetti straps on her little black dress Vitti did win. I think what really interests me here is the extent to which our readings change over time. Do we now feel much more for Lidia and the way she seems to be pushed out by Giovanni’s celebrity? Looking back, Moreau and Mastroianni were of equal status but he is the agent of the narrative. Moreau as Lidia does get screen time on her own and she acts in ways that reveal things about herself as well as commenting on her relationship with Giovanni. She also introduces aspects of a critique of Italian bourgeois society in 1961. Mastroianni is a beautiful man but in many roles he appears weak and vulnerable. Although as Giovanni his actions structure the events of the day – the couple go to the book launch and the party where he is a significant figure – he seems to be being manipulated and played with, especially by Valentina and her father.
Givanni and Lidia leave the party to walk across the private golf course
The ending of the film is quite shocking in some ways. I’ve outlined the events of the film but I won’t spoil the conclusion by describing it in detail. What intrigues me is that watching the film in 2022 I want the film to be about Lidia and I’m not so interested in Giovanni. I’m conscious about the way Giovanni’s talent is being possibly wasted but it is Lidia I want to see breaking free. Is this because so much emphasis is now placed on the agency of the female character? Is it because of Moreau’s performance or is it that this is always how the film has been read? I can’t remember what I thought when I first saw the film as a young man 40 or 50 years ago. I’ve seen several more films featuring Moreau or Mastroianni since then. Does that mean I read La notte differently now? Perhaps it is because Antonioni is less interested in the conventional modes of storytelling that he opens up the space to think about how these men and women behave? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions but I did enjoy watching the film and I’d like to visit Milan.
La notte is currently streaming on MUBI and BFI (subscribers only).
L’eclisse (Italy-France 1962)
Vittoria walks past the water tower in EUR – one of the extraordinary long shots in L’eclisse
I’ve assumed in the past that Antonioni’s films, like Bergman’s, typified the idea of a cerebral but sexy European art cinema in the 1960s. My feelings about Antonioni were much like my feelings about Bergman. I admired the performances of the actors, the mise en scène and cinematography, each of which I recognise as influenced by the directors but also by their collaborators. My problems tended to be with what they perceived as the purpose of their films. I found both directors more interesting when they steered closer to genre forms and less when they appeared enigmatic. Of course, they could be enigmatic and offer some form of social commentary or insight into human emotions and social/political discourse without focusing on genre, but I suppose I think there is some form of discipline that genre provokes. I’ve since seen Bergman’s early films and adjusted my position slightly. L’eclisse is the third film in what some critics see as a trilogy by Antonioni, following L’avventura (1960) and La notte (1961). I don’t think I’ve seen all of L’avventura and although I did see La notte in the early 1970s, I can remember little of it apart from the casting of Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, two of my favourite actors from the 1960s onwards. MUBI earlier offered me The Lady Without Camellias(La signora senza camelie, Italy 1953) which I wrote about at some length including an exploration of Antonioni’s early career. I rather liked that film so I decided to give L’eclisse a go. It’s on MUBI in UK for the next three weeks.
One of the deep-focus interiors with an arrangement of vertical ‘panels’ in this scene during the break-up of Vittoria and Riccardo
A fetishised shot of the slingbacks in another careful composition. Vittoria’s legs and the table and chair legs fill Riccardo’s gaze for a moment
I do find watching films on streaming difficult as I’m too easily distracted by what else is happening in our ‘locked down’ house. On this occasion, however, I found that watching the film in four parts actually paid off. There is little narrative ‘drive’ but a great deal happening with the performances, the mise en scène and the camerawork – and occasionally the music. It’s a long film (125 minutes) and watching it in roughly 30 minute bursts helped me focus. The setting is Rome, mainly two important specific Roman locations – a new housing development for the wealthy named EUR and the borsa or stock exchange. EUR has an informative page on Wikipedia which explains that it was the district to the South-West of Rome designed to be the site of Mussolini’s planned World’s Fair of 1942 that would have celebrated 20 years of Fascist culture. In the event, the area under state and local authority control was eventually completed in time for the Rome Olympics of 1960 and has subsequently become a business, sporting and government office district as well as an architectural attraction in which competing classical and modernist styles present a kind of dialogue. The central character Vittoria (Monica Vitti) is a young translator with an apartment in an EUR block and at the beginning of the narrative she is in the process of breaking up her relationship with Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) who also lives in the spacious EUR district. The break-up is a protracted scene in the early morning. Later Vittoria will visit the borsa to see her mother, an investor. Vittoria also meets Piero (Alain Delon), a young stockbroker (a ‘whizz kid’ as my friend the money dealer might describe him) who has her mother as a client. The rest of the narrative deals with the question of whether Vittoria and Piero can get together – and stay together – for any length of time.
Piero (centre) is introduced in the borsa
Vittoria with her mother (Lilla Brignone) outside the stock exchange
L’eclisse is famous as an example of the difficulty of communication in ‘modern’ bourgeois society. That’s ‘modern’ for 1961 when the film was made. I was 13 when the film was first released and at that age not really aware of what ‘modernity’ meant. But I was aware of the world and what struck me most in the opening sequence in which Vittoria and Riccardo don’t communicate about their split is something I obviously dredged from memory. I was entranced by Monica Vitti and in particular her clothes. A shift dress with a boat neckline, bare legs and open-toed slingback shoes with a low slim heel – why do I know these terms? (I’m almost oblivious to fashion now.) I must be remembering the girls I knew a few years later in 1963-4 when such styles were percolating through to the north of England. But it’s not so much the dress but the way that Ms Vitti moves within it. That was the point of the shift rather than the ‘sheath’ dress, I think. It allowed a woman to walk elegantly and fluidly with her hips swaying within the dress. I don’t find Ms Vitti ‘beautiful’ but her face is attractive and interesting and she exudes erotic power in this film even though there is little physical in her relationships except when Delon later kisses her neck. Francisco Rabal is a powerful Spanish actor cast in a role which constrains him here and the filming captures that frustration.
A moment of sexual frisson when Piero kisses Vittoria’s neck
The contrast between the open spaces of EUR and the crowded stock exchange is perfectly captured by cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo. At this time he was working for Fellini and Rosi as well as Antonioni but he died in 1966 aged only 45 when Italian cinema lost a very talented filmmaker. There are so many scenes in the film that I could happily watch again and again partly for the mise en scène and what seems to be both a commentary on what’s happening between Vittoria and Piero and a more general commentary on a moment in Italian society, partly for the fluid camerawork and partly for the performances. Just one example – when Piero’s attempt to kiss Vittoria passionately ends with her dress ripping at the shoulder (the same shoulder her mother is touching in the shot above), Vittoria heads off into the other rooms in Piero’s parents’ home. She goes into what was presumably Piero’s room as a boy and finds his novelty striptease pen. She goes into his parents’ room and opens the window to look out as two small portraits of grandparents(?) seem to watch her. She looks down to the street below and sees two nuns, tiny figures coming down the street. The camera switches to exterior shots of buildings from different angles and then a reverse long shot to capture Vittoria looking out of the window. back inside the room, Vittoria looks out and down to see two men in an outdoor restaurant, a soldier on a street corner and then varuious people coming out of a building that might be a civic building – perhaps they have been registering a birth or a marriage or a death? Vittoria is an observer of ‘ordinary life’ in Rome.
Vittoria and Piero and Piero set up a meeting place on the corner of a building site
. . . and they come across various characters on the deserted streets of EUR in the heat
Will Vittoria and Piero ever consummate their affair? At one point she tells him she loves him not all or far too much. It sounds like a line from a song (and I haven’t really thought about the music in the film yet) but it might be perceptive on her part. Alain Delon is very beautiful, arguably more beautiful than Monica Vitti, but he is younger than her and in this film more adolescent. 1961-2 saw him at an early peak in his career at only 26. After his first major hit as the Tom Ripley character in René Clair’s Plein soleil (Purple Noon) in 1960 he’d worked for Visconti on Rocco and his Brothers (1961) and would do so again in 1963 as Tancredi in The Leopard. Although he had some Italian heritage and presumably spoke some Italian he seems to have been dubbed in this film (which I think was the norm for many actors in Italian cinema). Piero here seems to represent the materialistic young upper class man in Rome and in a way I think he is just a toy for Vittoria but perhaps that’s just me? There are so many aspects to this film. I haven’t even mentioned the racist woman who is a settler in Kenya and Vittoria’s use of blackface. Is she being satirical? The brief sequence featuring a plane trip to Verona seems to mark this period of Roman filmmaking, reminding me of Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). There are many commentaries on the film and it has received the full Criterion treatment including an essay by John Rosenbaum.
One of the long shots of deserted roads in the final sequence.
The film famously ends with a seven minute sequence in which Vittoria and Piero don’t feature. Baffled distributors in the US are said to have cut this sequence because they couldn’t see what it adds. It’s almost like a self-contained poetic documentary. It shows scenes of EUR and how ‘ordinary people’ interact with the environment, ending with the street lighting that illuminates the corner where Vittoria and Piero meet. Many of the shots feature characters we have seen before or objects that have featured like the nurse and her charge and the sprinkler. The ‘new’ element is a distinct sense of disturbance and foreboding (especially during this coronavirus lockdown). The disturbance is achieved partly by the camera slowly tracking, partly by the soundtrack of musical notes, chords and ‘runs’ and sound effects and partly by the reminder (via a newspaper held by a bus passenger) that this is the time of ‘The Arms Race’ and Khrushchev engaged in a ‘game’ with the Pentagon. The Cuban Missile Crisis was 6 months away when the film premièred in Milan . In addition there are still frames, large close-ups of trees, and pavements and ‘natural’ sounds (wind, water). There is a possible joke – is that Vittoria, oh, no it’s not. I find this sequence fascinating and it is almost like an avant-garde short – but meticulously shot and edited with the resources avant-garde filmmakers can only dream about. It’s a fitting end to a film I began with some trepidation but found in the end that I enjoyed it a great deal.
The Lady Without Camellias (La signora senza camelie, Italy 1953)
Clara (Lucia Bosè) as she appears in her first film.
What is the status of Michelangelo Antonioni today? In the 1960s he was in some ways the archetypal figure of the European art director. His three English language films, Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point (1975) and The Passenger (1975) then transformed him into a new kind of celebrity artist. For older cinéphiles his great works might be the trilogy of ‘alienation’ films from the early 1960s, L’avventura (1960), La notta (1961) and L’éclisse (1962). But what about the 1950s? Antonioni was born in 1912, making him roughly a contemporary of Bergman (b. 1918) and Kurosawa (b. 1910), but unlike those two prolific filmmakers who were active in their film industries by the early 1940s, Antonioni’s progress is more hesitant. He co-writes A Pilot Returns with Rossellini in 1942 and directs eight documentary shorts between 1947 and 1950 before making his first feature, Cronaca di un amore (A Chronicle of Love) in 1950. Penelope Houston, editor of Sight and Sound from 1956, made the observation that unlike the Cahiers du Cinema writers who became filmmakers in La nouvelle vague or the Free Cinema directors in the UK who formed part of the British New Wave, Antonioni had no clear beginning, no celebrated first film and no clear ‘film movement’ identity. She quotes an interview in 1959 for Positif in which Antonioni explains that in 1943 he was directing a documentary about fishermen on the Po River – the same location used by Visconti for Ossessione, often quoted as the first neo-realist film in 1942. “Today, perhaps I would be cited in a discussion about the birth of neo-realism”, Antonioni suggests. (In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary Vol 1: Aldrich to King, Richard Roud (ed) 1980, Martin, Secker and Warburg.)
A typical neo-realist long shot of a street scene
What then of La signora senza camelie?, one of three films that Antonioni directed or part-directed in 1953. Neo-realism was still a recognisable influence in Italy in the early 1950s and it certainly informs some of Enzo Serafin’s cinematography in the film. (Serafin worked continuously from 1942 and in 1954 shot Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia.) The narrative is familiar. Clara (Lucia Bosè) is a shop girl from Milan, an outstanding beauty who has been snapped up by a pair of film producers. They have put her into a mundane exploitation film and when the narrative of La signora senza camelie begins she is waiting in the street outside a cinema where her debut is being previewed in a public screening. These opening shots seem to promise distinctive location shooting. What follows certainly has neo-realist moments, especially because of the cinematography, but it is primarily a melodrama and in generic terms, a film about the film ‘business’ rather than about filmmaking per se – though there are some direct comments about performance. There are ‘pre-echoes’ of certain well-known films. It’s difficult not to think of Godard’s 1963 Le mépris (1963) in which an American producer wants to put Brigitte Bardot into a ‘classical drama’. In La signora senza camelie, Clara marries one of her producers, Gianni (Andrea Checchi) who installs her in a beautifully furnished by soul-less apartment and then casts her in a version of Joan of Arc. She goes to the Venice Film Festival and is humiliated when the film fails. In the meantime she has linked up with another hopeless lover, a diplomat who is not prepared to risk being seen with her publicly. She would be better off with the experienced actor Lodi played by Frenchman Alain Cuny, who in one scene teaches her how to make love for the camera. The film’s title presumably refers to The Lady of the Camellias or simply ‘Camille‘, a novel and play by Alexandre Dumas, an opera, La traviata, by Verdi and then a film made famous by Greta Garbo. Poor Clara has none of the mystique of Camille (though possibly all of the beauty).
Clara watches herself as Joan of Arc in the disastrous Venice screening of her ‘art’ film. Her would be lover, Nardo (Ivan Desny) is in the row behind, third from the right
La signora senza camelie is very much a film about mise en scène – the apartments, the beautiful clothes – and the cinematography. I’m sure there is music too – Clara sings in her début, but I didn’t really notice the music. Cinecitta, the great studio complex in Rome plays a role in the closing stages of the narrative, as do the paparazzi of Rome, ever-present in the studio canteen. Earlier, the two producers (the other one is much more pragmatic) first find a beautiful house belonging to the aristocracy and then fail to make use of its possibilities. Overall, I found the film beautiful to watch (and that includes the luscious Lucia Bosè, who I realise was in the Spanish film The Death of a Cyclist a couple of years later – she married a Spanish bullfighter). The narrative is in one sense quite cynical and in another an exposé of the celebrity culture of Italian cinema and what eventually came to be known as ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’. Fellini’s films make much more sense when you’ve seen this film and perhaps Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) the more ‘neo-realist’ film that traces the story of a mother’s attempt to get her child into the film world. I feel I appreciate Antonioni’s skill more than I did before, but he still feels a bit like a ‘cold fish’.
Clara with the producer who will become her husband on the night of her screen début
Like all Italian films of the period the dialogue is dubbed. I was surprised that this is very badly done at one point.
Clara in the bar at Cinecitta with the paparazzi
I watched the film on MUBI. It is currently available on a Masters of Cinema dual format DVD/Blu-ray. In the clip below (no English subs) we see Clara and Lodi playing the love scene in her second film. The director is the man in charge, though both the producers are also on set. What are those extras, seen through the window, doing outside?
A picture beyond the photographer’s intention: a semiotic analysis of Blow-Up
This paper was submitted by Giuseppe Raudino (see contact details below)
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (UK 1966) is a deep reflection about reality and meaning. What is real? Why is that real? And what does it mean? These are the questions that the viewer is obliged to ask himself/herself throughout the film.
The opening scene establishes the interpretative challenge the audience is repeatedly asked to accept: a group of mime artistes – masked merrymakers – are acting strangely in London, riding an overcrowded Land Rover and suddenly spreading themselves in the city streets, among the traffic, with no apparent reason or goal. What are they actually doing? What are their visionary gestures trying to accomplish? They seem so unreal within such a familiar context . . .
The film tells the story of Thomas (David Hemmings), a photographer who encounters a series of people, most of the time in quite odd circumstances. As a photographer he is meticulous, especially when he has to arrange the set and give orders to his models. Nothing he wants to depict in his photographs is left to chance, there is no space for the random in his shots: the photographer’s will requires accurate composition of the images even if that entails grabbing and stretching a model’s leg or engaging in an ‘intimate’ photo session with Veruschka von Lehndorff, with whom Thomas is even ready to mock-up a sexual encounter to make her reveal her sensuality to the utmost.
This concept of a full control over the product (and the related message conveyed by it) comes to a crisis when Thomas, after having blown up a picture of a couple in a park, accidentally discovers that there is a man hidden in the background, beyond a hedge. Further enlargements will show that the man is holding a gun. This third person could have never been spotted in a normal-sized photo, where his presence would have remained just a meaningless stain, but now he is there, unexpected, vigorously included in the photograph despite the photographer’s intention.
The new presence in the picture suddenly changes the original meaning of the picture itself. This implies that an (unnoticed) element may affect the reality and the context it refers to. In Thomas’ case, the armed man adds a dark connotation to the entire scene, bringing the idea of mystery, murder and drama to what was simply a romantic rendezvous in a park.
Thomas (David Hemmings) and Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) in the park
Thomas is puzzled by what he found out and feels the need to investigate more. He is overwhelmed: probably, for the first time, the reality in his pictures is different from the reality he had in mind, that reality he wanted to construct.
The film is actually disseminated with elements in strong opposition to their contexts, and this clearly is a narrative means by which Antonioni invites the viewer to rethink the significance of something in relation of its environment and vice versa. Let’s consider, for instance, the episode of the propeller.
Thomas goes to an antiquarian shop, which is full of statues, boxes, paintings and a lot of rare objects. What does Thomas finally choose? A wooden propeller, which is a piece of something else (i.e. an element of an aeroplane). The propeller will be later placed in Thomas’ studio, totally out of its original context, far away from aerodromes, hangars and so on, but it will certainly bring a new meaning to its new environment.
The Yardbirds at the Ricky Tick gig
Another example of out-of-the-context elements occurs in the scene at the Ricky Tick, the famous club in which the Yardbirds are playing live. After having experienced some problems with the amplifier, the guitarist lets his inner aggressiveness come out and smashes his instrument, throwing some pieces to the public. As Thomas picks up the guitar neck, he realises that the crowd is ready to fight in order to obtain that precious relic. Then he runs away, chased by the Yardbirds’ fans, but when he gets rid of them and finds himself outside the club, he throws away the guitar neck. Some pedestrians have a glance at this strange object laying on the sidewalk but eventually do not show any interest for it. All at once, the so much contended memento of a great rock band loses its value as soon as it is placed out of its original context.
Something similar happens when Thomas pays a visit to his neighbour Bill, an abstract painter. The latter shows a canvas onto which there are painted some rectangular and trapezoidal objects. Out of that (apparent) confusion, Bill points out an area, saying that it is a leg. Considered in absolute terms, that shape is just a rectangle, but within the painting it clearly becomes a leg, and it would be as such even without the interpretative endorsement of the author, because the context and the opposition with the other elements would make it a leg anyway. The parallel between Bill’s painting and Thomas’ photograph is more than evident: a shape and a stain are meaningless until a closer look (or an enlargement) unveils a new truth, urging further interpretations.
Finally – yet the examples might be more numerous – there is another scene in which the interpretation of what is supposed to be real and true is questioned. At a certain point, Thomas again meets Veruschka. There is a party going on and Thomas is surprised to see her, since she had told him that by that time she should have been in Paris. Once asked, Veruschka claims under the effect of some drugs that she is in Paris. Is the model’s imagination less real than her factual location? The psychedelic dimension and culture presented in the film seems to suggest a clear alternative way for reading the signs that surround every character and build up each situation. Towards the end of the film, Thomas is somehow aware of this. What is commonly called “reality” isn’t something objective; on the contrary, it’s something subject to vary due to any little element, even an overlooked element. Perhaps it is with these thoughts that Thomas abandons himself on a bed after having smoked marijuana.
The final scene is strongly connected to the opening and shows the brand new attitude of Thomas about reality, meaning and interpretation. The mime artistes encountered in the initial frames of the film are now playing (or pretending to play?) a tennis match, but with no rackets and no balls.
Thomas is an improvised spectator who observes the match outside the court. Unexpectedly, the players throw the invisible ball beyond the fence and then stare interrogative at Thomas. Great suspense. Thomas makes some steps, stoops, picks up the ball and with an ample movement returns it to the visionary players. Then he resumes following the match, turning his head right and left, like everybody in the audience of a “normal” tennis match would do.
Thomas has learned a lesson. Fetching the ball means that he is now conscious about the fact that the reality goes beyond any straightforward appearance and a supposedly meaningless situation may become meaningful thanks to some elements, even overlooked, even imagined or dreamed. And the mime artistes don’t dream of anything but a better world.
The final section of the film on YouTube (but you’ll have to watch it there):
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Giuseppe Raudino is lecturer at the Hanze University Groningen (the Netherlands) where he teaches Media Theory and Media Skills. He graduated in Communication Sciences from the University of Siena with a dissertation in Semiotics about Umberto Eco. His homepage is http://raudino.webs.com/
The Case for Global Film 