Michelangelo Antonioni

When Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni both died on July 30th of this year, it was sort of the cinematic equivalent of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on the same day. There is no record of Antonioni's last words being "Bergman lives," though. Having gone through a trek through the films of Bergman on DVD, I now turn to the other giant who died on that day, Antonioni. Only five of his films are available on DVD: L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, Blowup, and The Passenger.

The story goes that Antonioni admired the work of the abstract expressionist painters, and told one of them, Mark Rothko, "My films are like your paintings--they are about nothing, with precision." Antonioni's work was like nothing that came before it. He said that cinema didn't have to be entertainment, and he routinely broke the rules of film grammar. From watching the five-film representation, I can understand why he was greatly admired, but at the same time his work didn't move me. Perhaps it's because there isn't a shred of sentimentality to them at all.

Antonioni's films weren't really about nothing--if anything, they were about alienation, a struggle to find meaning in life, and a profound ennui. L'Avventura, the film that put him on the map, was booed at the Cannes Film Festival, but also won the Jury Prize. It is about a group of people from the Italian upper class who go on a yacht voyage around the Aeolian Islands off of Sicily. The group disembarks on one of the islands, and the main character up to then, Anna, disappears. Her friends look for her, but she is never found, nor do we as viewers ever find out what happened to her. The film still goes on, though, for another two hours, as her boyfriend, Gabrielle Ferzetti, and her best friend, Monica Vitti, fall in love with each other. Anna not only disappears physically from the film, but she also vanishes from the lives of the characters.

This film is a striking example of composition and the use of deep focus. Antonioni is like a still photographer in grouping his actors, along with the architecture that surrounds them. To me, though, this tends to make the characters more like dolls than people. On the commentary, a critic named Gene Youngblood gushed how the thought this one of the most romantic films ever made, but I just didn't see it.

La Notte and L'Eclisse complete what is generally considered a trilogy (some include Red Desert to make a tetralogy, but alas that film is not available on DVD). La Notte is very much like a Fellini film of the period, but without Fellini's zest. Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau are a married couple who are close the end of their love. They visit a dying friend in the hospital, then the last half of the film is them attending a party. They flirt with other people, and then in the morning realize their marriage is over. L'Eclisse (Eclipse) is an interesting yet confounding film. It recalls what Jean-Luc Godard said when asked if films need a beginning, middle, and end. "Of course," he said, "but not in that order." L'Eclisse begins with an ending, as Monica Vitti and her boyfriend are breaking up. It's as if we are seeing the last few moments of a different movie. But we follow Vitti as she visits her mother, who trades on the stock exchange, as if it were a casino. Then we end up following her broker, played by Alain Delon. There is a sense, and it's kind of thrilling, that any moment a random character could walk by and suddenly the camera would follow him, and he would now be the main character.

The most famous part of L'Eclisse is the ending, or should I say the beginning. For six to seven minutes, after Vitti and Delon have left the stage, Antonioni focuses on what seem to be random places. A bucket full of water, a building, a street where a buggy goes by, then a nurse pushing a pram. We realize that we have seen all these things before. In a conventional film we might see them as establishing shots, but now we see them absent any of our characters. Then streetlights come on, and the last shot is a closeup of a bulb, burning brightly.

Blowup was Antonioni's first film in English, and is set in London's swinging sixties. The main character is a fashion photographer, David Hemmings, who is the male animal run amok. At the beginning of the film he has spent the night in a homeless shelter, taking pictures of the poor, but then comes out and hops into his Rolls-Royce convertible, returns to his studio, and takes pictures of supermodel Veruschka while she writhes on the floor, scantily clad.

The spine of the film concerns candid photos Hemmings takes of two people in a park. One of them is Vanessa Redgrave, who desperately wants the pictures back. When Hemmings develops them he realizes he has photographed a murder. A conventional film would have Hemmings contacting the police, or being threatened by the criminals, but this is not a conventional film. Instead it is a philosophical one, dealing with the role of the artist in reality. Antonioni resists convention at every turn. A very common element of films in the sixties was the inclusion of a rock number to draw in the youth crowd. This film has a performance by The Yardbirds, but is not typical. As they perform, the crowd watches impassively, as if they were zombies. Only when a guitar is smashed does the crowd awaken, feverishly attempting to snatch a piece of the guitar. Hemmings grabs it, but when the leaves the club he realizes the guitar piece is worthless, because it has been removed from its context. The film ends with Hemmings watching two mimes play a game of tennis without rackets or ball. When one of the mimes indicates that the ball has gone out of the court, and indicates that Hemmings should retrieve it, he pauses a moment, and then goes to grab the imaginary ball, thus entering into their world.

The Passenger stars Jack Nicholson as a journalist in North Africa investigating a guerilla war. He is staying at a remote hotel. When an Englishman who looks very much like him dies of a heart attack, Nicholson makes a snap decision to assume his identity. But the dead man turns out to be a gunrunner. Again, this is the kind of plot that a Hollywood film would do all sorts of things with, but Antonioni has different fish to fry. The film is not so much concerned with narrative as it with mood and tone. Frankly I found it a bit of a snooze.

I do like that Antonioni doesn't spoon-feed the audience. His films are mysteries, but in the usual sense. Most of us are accustomed to mystery films involving a puzzle and a solution, but his films don't have solutions. They are very intellectually rigorous, but I guess I've been too conditioned to the Hollywood method and need some kind of emotional involvement. A true cinema buff should take a look at these films, though.