Satyajit Das: On Cinema – Antonioni’s Mysteries

Yves here. Given the continuing harsh run of news, a break from our usual programming seemed to be in order. I hope you find Das’ treatment of Michelangelo Antonioni informative….and hopefully even motivating, in encouraging you to watch or re-watch some of his major works.

By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous technical works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011) and A Banquet of Consequence – Reloaded (2021). ). His latest book is on ecotourism – Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals (2024). Jointly published with the New Indian Express Online

In the aftermath of World War 2, Italy produced several important directors such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Lina Wertmuller. Arguably, the most important was Michelangelo Antonioni whose daring experiments in two series of films (the first in Italian and the second in English) had great influence on filmmaking.

Cold Modernism

Antonioni’s films ignore narrative and cinematic conventions. His best work is open-ended and vague where, Godot-like, little seems to happen. The films are slow, sometimes painfully so, but possess a hypnotic intensity.

The Italian series revolved around middle-class bored lovers living out lives of “quiet desperation”. One critic coined the phrase “Antonioni-ennui” to describe his work.

There is a sense of indifference. Every activity – holidays, social events – seems to lack any special quality. Characters are rarely likeable and seem lonely and isolated, perpetually searching for something that is always just out of reach. There is limited dialogue. Yet, befitting a former screenwriter, Antonioni understood the power of words. In L’avventura, there is a telling exchange: “Tell me you love me. I love you. Tell me you don’t. I don’t love you.” Its flat delivery reveals an absence of emotional depth where even intimate human relationships are merely something to occupy time.

The English films traverse the same themes although in different settings and draw on Alfred Hicthcock. The focus on individuality and self-awareness is more nuanced.

The technical details – long takes, frequent close shots, stark modern urban settings, beautiful cinematography, clever casting and fine performances – served his subject matter well. The early black-and-white films have aged better than some of his experiments with colour like Red Desert where technical tricks – blurred focus, desaturating colour filters, attempts at heightened colour contrast and telephoto shots – seem overly dramatic.

The films provided rich material for theorists. Fashionable critics, steeped in the liberal concerns of the sixties and eager for polemics, objected to the cool portrayals of alienated and narcissistic characters drifting through life. They found the director’s retreat into complacent despair defeatist and his decorous and often neurotic young female characters sexist.

These judgements are superficial. Antonioni’s films are an accurate rendition of a class trapped in themselves. The wealthy depicted can avoid work, responsibility and purpose. The parasitic main characters’ existences are hollow, lacking the concerns and the capacity for thought that makes life interesting. Instead, they need to be entertained and distracted. The merciless portraits are sardonic. There are subtle but telling critiques of racism, colonialism and consumerism. His genders politics are complex with his films featuring strong, smart and sexually aware women.

Italian Trilogy

Released in 1960, L’avventura is ostensibly about the disappearance of Anna (Lea Massari), a psychologically fragile young woman, during a boat day trip with wealthy friends to a small island in the Mediterranean near Sicily. She is never seen again. The film revolves around the fruitless search and the subsequent affair between her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti).

The film always seems on the verge of something significant. A boat is sent to get the authorities and help. We almost see or hear a mysterious boat on which Anna may have left. It is as if the landscape swallowed up Anna, a theme which would reappear in other Antonioni films. Aldo Scavarda’s cinematography places humans at the edges of shots. It is as if they may disappear at any stage. Gradually, Anna simply disappears from the plot just as she did on the island and is forgotten.

The ending is set at a party in a hotel where Sandro and Claudia are staying. She wakes thinking that Anna has returned. She runs down looking for her friend only to find her feckless lover with a prostitute. Claudia runs outside into the empty dawn. When asked for a souvenir or memory, Sandro throws a handful of money at the prostitute. The fragmented narrative and lack of resolution seem at odds with the title which loosely translates into ‘adventure’.

Antonioni followed L’avventura with La Notte (1961) and L’eclisse (1962), stylish dramas about middle-class metropolitan couples. Set during a single day and night in a Milan, La Notte is about with a disillusioned novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his embittered wife (Jeanne Moreau) visiting their dying friend, a leftwing critic (Bernhard Wicki). L’eclisse (The Eclipse) focuses on the relationship between Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and Piero (Alain Delon), a young stockbroker making money for Vittoria’s mother (Lilla Brignone) addicted to the thrill of financial speculation.

La Notte and L’eclisse cover the same ground as L’avventura but are stylistically distinct. Antonioni’s detached formula is expanded using ‘dead time’, distorted camera shots and angles and strange moments tangential to the main plot.

English Doubles

Antonioni was one of the few European directors to successfully transition to English language films. He cleverly used British and American stars and English language writers, often playwrights, to sharpen the dialogue.

The bombastic and clumsy Zabriskie Point (1970) was a disappointing allegory. It was an ill-fated road movie whose exploration of the counterculture fails. In contrast, the cryptic psychodramas of Blow Up (1966) and The Passenger(1975) were impressive.

Blow-Up, set in bohemian swinging sixties London, centres on Thomas (David Hemmings), a photographer. Seeking relief from his hectic shoots, he visits flophouses photographing destitute marginal people, a sharp contrast to his life of Rolls-Royce convertibles and fashion. Thomas wanders into a park and photographs, at a distance, a man and a woman in ambiguous poses. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) tracks him to his studio and desperately wants the film back even offering to have sex with him. He sends her away with the wrong roll and blows up the real photos.

In a brilliantly edited sequence alternating closer shots and larger grainy blowups, light and shadow, dots and blurs, it appears that the woman is looking toward some bushes where a hand holding a gun is barely visible. In another photo, a man lies on the ground. Returning to the park, Thomas finds a dead body. But the body and the photographs disappear as does the Redgrave character. In a typical Antonioni touch, we see her standing outside a club and then she disappears. The material of a suspense thriller is assembled but there is characteristically no neat solution to the mystery.

Blow Up captures the period perfectly with its depiction of fashion photography, rock concerts (Jimmy Page and the Yardbirds are featured), casual sex, languid drug parties and groupies. The casting of swinging 60s stars, including Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Birkin and model Verushka, who plays herself in a group shoot involving grotesque mod fashions, was inspired. The film’s psychedelic colour and sound create a hallucinatory feel which underpins the story.

The Passenger is rightly regarded as Antonioni’s masterpiece. David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is a TV war reporter in an African village seeking to interview guerillas rumoured to be nearby. The hotel is basic. There is only a clerk and one other Western guest – Robertson (Charles Mulvehill). When Locke find Robertson dead of natural causes, he without any obvious reason swaps passports and clothes. He reports the dead body and the news of David Locke’s death. Looking through Roberston’s diary, he finds appointments which Locke decides to keep. The dead man turns out to have been an illicit arms dealer.

While impersonating Robertson, Locke meets an unnamed young woman (Maria Schneider), who seemingly without premeditation joins him. In a telling sequence, when asked what he is running from, Locke asks the girl to turn around to face the back of car to see the road receding behind her.

There are obscurities. Locke’s wife (Jenny Runacre) and associate (Ian Hendry) try to track down Roberston to find out about Locke’s final days. But Locke when almost recognized flees with the girl. Locke’s wife and associate work on a documentary about the journalist but the footage shows little of David Locke himself. It is a beguiling reference to the disappearing corpse in Blow Up. The film ends with Locke being killed by mysterious assailants, perhaps linked to Robertson’s gun running activities. When asked to identify the body, his wife states that the corpse is not her husband.

Beautifully shot by Luciano Tovoli, the film is flooded with a harsh penetrating light. The sets and locations have a feeling of emptiness. Even in cities like Barcelona the characters seem alone.

Like L’avventura and Blowup, The Passenger seems on its surface a conventional thriller but Antonioni converts it into a study of identity, role-playing, meaning, emotional estrangement and the unpredictable path of events. Locke like many of Antonioni’s characters is perpetually in motion but without a destination. The journalist reveals his need for something that may invest his life with purpose: “But Robertson made these appointments. He believed in something.”

Nicholson considered the film one of his greatest achievements and held on to the prints after the film failed commercially determined to preserve it.

Extraordinary Sequences

There are some extraordinary scenes in Antonioni’s films.

In L’aventurra, while searching for Anna, Sandro finds an ancient urn which one of group wants to keep as another jokes it will be for her begonias. When Sandro accidentally drops and destroys it, the loss of an archaeological artifact evokes little reaction as it has no meaningful value to any of them. In L’eclisse, there is the unearthly image of a crashed car being pulled out of a river or lake with the hand of its dead driver clearly visible.

In Blow Up’s famous final sequence, Thomas encounters university students, who were in the film’s first scene, playing tennis with an imaginary ball. The photographer pretends he can see the ball and the sounds of tennis can be heard on the soundtrack. It ends with Thomas wandering away, disappearing like the corpse in the park.

The Passenger’s extended final shot is mesmerising. The camera moves very slowly toward a window with iron bars, and then into the piazza outside. A little white car belonging to a driving school criss-crosses the square. People looking for Locke get out of another car which appears suddenly. The girl can be seen in the square at a distance, observing the action. Is she a bystander or someone who was specifically sent by Roberston’s enemies to track him down? The shot continues unbroken and re-enters the room where Locke lies dead.

Antonioni’s mysteries are unique. Like all great art, each film can be seen repeatedly growing richer and more nuanced with each viewing.

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