Michelangelo Antonioni

[bunuelian]

Such a shocking week of deaths. Antonioni is among the directors I am still in a struggle with, but I am grateful to at least have been driven into the struggle, and have never counted the hours of battle as anything less than a pleasure. For Bergman, I want to plant a tree. For Antonioni, I want to make a film.

[Barmy]

I kind of disagree with relegating Antonioni to a prior age. There have been two big recent Antonioni retrospectives in NYC (early 90s, which he graciously attended, and last year). In each case, difficult films like "The Eclipse" actually sold out huge theaters--not museums, but places where you have to pay. And the audience was not blue-haired snobs. His so called quadrology is absolutely ageless--no clunky hairstyles, dated music, big cellphones, whatever.

[ellipsis7]

....I am assuming Barmy, that you aren't writing off Antonioni's pre-trilogy work. Even in these - pre-widescreen and pre-Vitti - he is proposing a total break with the Italian post war cinema, just as Rossellini does, in very different ways with his Bergman (Ingrid!) pictures. I still find Cronaca di un amore and Il Grido incredibly moving - perhaps an odd thing to say about Antonioni while he was alive, but not any more. I also still find Zabriskie Point very formally powerful and surely, if viewed at least as an exercise in compositional abstraction, like Red Desert, it remains unchallenged by anything comparable in American cinema....

...Antonioni on the other hand gave me the gift of a formal vision which was like a form of abstract expressionism, and time travel with silences and stillness in place of narrative motion for sheer aesthetic pleasure. While both directors could also have been squarely seen to be examiners of the human condition, it was always Antonioni's insistence on filming man and his relationship to his environment through delineation, the panorama of the widescreen, improvisation and kinetic composition that gave me far the greater cinematic pleasure.

Totally agree and beautifully put, David!....

The desperate and the beautiful

From a vacuous Italy to swinging London, Antonioni's studies of modern alienation gave cinema some of its greatest moments. David Thomson mourns a master

David Thomson
Wednesday August 1, 2007

Guardian

On the radio yesterday in the US, someone asked me, "So who is left? Is there anyone else like Ingmar Bergman?" Of course, there is never anyone like anyone else, not in that way, so I knew how stupid I was being in saying, "Antonioni is still alive ... older, in fact, than Ingmar Bergman." They were alike only in being contemporaries and in doing what they did with the utmost seriousness. And I suspect that if you had reproached them both with, "Not too many jokes, Ingo? Mikey?" they would have sighed and agreed and said, "Not yet. But suppose we exit at the same moment. The obituarists may hear us laughing."
Antonioni came of age as a would-be film-maker in the time of Italian neorealism, except that Antonioni regarded those films (from Open City to Bicycle Thieves) as unduly simple, if not simple-minded. He was of a mind that said a poor worker whose bicycle has been stolen may still be entranced by the silences in Mahler.

Antonioni was literary, in that he began to investigate love stories in terms of how their failure represented the political nullity of the lovers and their society and their perplexity when confronted by the great spaces of the world. That may sound pretentious and arty - and Antonioni was never too far from either - but no one better than him could put the post-1945 disquiet on film simply by showing the gaps between people. Being with someone but not looking at them was nearly invented by Antonioni, and on film it is like a mortal sin. He advanced in the 1950s in a series of films (Il Cronaca di un Amore, La Signora Senza Camelie, Le Amiche, Il Grido) increasingly despairing, ever more beautiful. By 1959, he was a small master.

And then something happened: he found Monica Vitti (never a great actress, but a spiritual presence on screen), he turned ironic and yielded to time and space - if they were his subjects, so be it, he wasn't going to evade it. In the years 1960-62, he delivered a trilogy - L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse - that may be the enduring masterpieces of even those crowded years. In L'Avventura, a party of bored, rich people go to an island for the day. One of them vanishes. The film was booed at Cannes because the idiots thought one couldn't do that on film: just take a character away. Of course, Hitchcock did a similar thing in the same year with Janet Leigh in Psycho, and Antonioni wanted to see how other characters filled the gap.

In L'Eclisse (The Eclipse), Vitti tries to stay in love with a flamboyant finance expert played by Alain Delon. They are on and off, but they agree to meet the next day. The film ends with the intersection of their rendezvous. They do not show, but that is not quite the same as their not being there. People separate in our world. They go their own ways until coincidence leads them back. But they do not forget. They are not absent. Loneliness crowds in.

Then Antonioni drew breath - the trilogy had been made as if it was all one film, arguably the most beautiful black and white the cinema would ever offer. He then moved to colour, and he seemed to recognise that the world had become insane or absurd. The next trilogy was drawn out over years and different countries, but the films benefit from being seen as a unit - Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger. The black-and-white films are tragic: they trace the defeat of love. But in these colour films, the world no longer deserves tragedy. Farce is a more likely destiny, or fatalism. And love is an attitude that has gone out of style.

Blow-Up is swinging London and a dead-eyed star photographer (David Hemmings) who may or may not have snapped the outline of a murder in the most beautiful park in the movies. Vanessa Redgrave is part of it. She demands his film. You can't just photograph people - but in truth it's all he can do. He reconstructs the moment through the pictures, then they vanish. Is he going mad or is he just going to have to live with its tidal measure?

For Zabriskie Point, MGM hired Antonioni (Blow-Up had been a suave hit) to go to Los Angeles and "do" student protest. He filmed in CinemaScope and he planned to show the physical destruction of the new American west - and of a monstrous piece of modern architecture in the desert. The film is lugubrious. Sex has atrophied. Despite the presence of Sam Shepard, we can believe that Antonioni could hardly speak or direct a word of English. But baby, when he blows the house up, you get the message. The film was a commercial disaster that began the ruin of MGM - truly, art is a wonderful thing.

The coming and going of things, the way they are there one minute and gone the next is beautifully dramatised in The Passenger. Jack Nicholson plays a roving journalist in a small hotel in north Africa, bored with his job and his life. An acquaintance in the next room dies, and Jack reckons he'll vanish and take on the other man's life. He determines to make the appointments in the dead man's diary. In fact, his London wife smells a rat and goes after him, and the new life (even with Maria Schneider as an observer) is pretty scary. Indeed, I begin to see how in its poker-faced way The Passenger is not just his last great film but his first comedy.

Antonioni worked on - cool, elegant, interesting. But he had a stroke and even with Wim Wenders helping him, the rest were open-ended. I think the process was bad for Wenders and irrelevant to Antonioni. Now he's dead in his 90s. There's no point in comparing Antonioni and Bergman. There's every reason to wonder whether the climate and culture of film - I mean the extent to which we and film-makers need it, desperately - is likely to go on producing masterpieces. In any comparison between film and the novel, Antonioni may have made films as subtle, as nuanced, as filled with doubt and certainty as the best modern writing. In 1960, or so, I think there's no doubt that the world craved such work, even if they booed it when they saw it. Now? I'm not so sure. When was the last time you met an audience that cared enough to boo a film?

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

[Nothing]

One obvious point about Antonioni is that he is one of the few great masters whose reputation rests almost entirely on a brief period, namely 1960-66.

One of the interesting things about Antonioni's career is how long it took for his talent to be recognised; it's not as if the earlier films are bad, indeed most of them are great and, to my mind, far preferable to, say, early Fellini. Even L'Avventura was greeted with initial reluctance. It seems the 50s simply were not ready for Antonioni; and perhaps the world is still not ready for his work from Zabriskie Point onwards.

[colinr0380]

I came late to Antonioni. I had seen Zabriske Point in the mid-90s but only in a panned and scanned TV version. Even in that form though the final sequence was breathtaking - somehow Antonioni created an emotional explosion, showing the event first in real time where it is over so quickly and seems somehow anti-climactic in its quickness.

But then we go in for different angles and watch different parts of the beautiful modern building be destroyed, the cuts to the next moment going quicker and quicker - a short shot of the building just before the explosion and then destruction. I get the impression he is also showing us the last moment of stability of the house as it was along with the beauty of its destruction. And then winding it back, something that would be impossible in reality - to put the pieces back together for the purpose of ripping them apart again. Just being blown up once is not enough to make up for what has occured in the film. The sound of the explosions becomes a wall of noise and then it is almost as if that is not enough - we move not just to seeing the house destroyed but elements of the house.

And what perfect explosions, the slow motion captures the beauty of destruction, whether it is the speaker rotating in perfect time away from the television; or the amusing touch of the chicken carcass taking flight for a moment with its wing stretched as if to try to catch the air again; or the books flying upwards, perhaps a comment on how they were trapped on the shelf unread and now the knowledge they contain has been freed!

It shows us perfectly what just that one explosion means to the girl - it takes us into her emotions as powerfully as the sex scene with hundreds of naked couples at Zabriske Point itself did earlier in the film.

And that beautiful final shot where we are left wondering if it was all just in her imagination, and if it was whether that is just as good an ending as if the house had actually been destroyed - it shows that she still has some free will and has chosen to reject that lifestyle without needing to cause death and destruction in reality to liberate herself.

But then as she walks to get back in the car it is now dusk, which suggests that perhaps the destruction did occur and she has been standing marvelling at it for hours...

A beautiful ending to a sometimes dated, but always interesting film!

That was the only Antonioni film I had seen until September 2003 when I finally got a copy of the Criterion disc of L'Avventura and watched it during some holidays from work. It was one of the best experiences watching a film that I have had in the last few years, it felt like I was watching the future of cinema in a film made forty years previous (which was both amazing and at the same time a little depressing!) - the story was absorbing and the images spectacular. I think that is what makes Antonioni an absolute master for me - some filmmakers would illustrate their disillusion with societal structures by making nature beautiful and architecture ugly and making their points by contrasting between them. However in L'Avventura nature is liberating but can also be harsh, windswept, barren and almost uninhabitable - perfect for a getaway, but you wouldn't want to live there all year round, even if you might entertain thoughts of doing so during your trip! And Antonioni makes even the restrictive, repressive buildings or objects that stand for the more negative aspects of the world he creates look achingly beautiful, even while they cause unease in the characters (and perhaps it is the beauty that in itself causes unease, in the sense of not being able to live up to the standards set by the world around you, or of Sando's architectural creations never being able to match up to that which already exists).

Then a few years after I saw the DVD of L'Eclisse and again saw a film which left me stunned. The attempts to connect without understanding the reason why; the arbitrariness of the relationships that conceal deep yet undefinable emotions, undefinable even to the characters themselves; what seems to be half-hearted attempts to keep relationships from falling apart between the couple, and by Riccardo at the start of the film, which are doomed as they do not really understand how their relationships started in the first place so they have no basis of understanding on which to try and connect with each other.

And then that haunting ending. Life goes on, with or without us, with only the audience left to place meaning and memory onto the location of significant events, even if they were only significant to us and not to the world at large - to the people who look similar for a moment to someone we recognise and to the objects that we associate with a moment in time. No place is truly virgin territory. What stories could locations tell of events that occured there? Places that bare the traces of the people that interacted with them, played out their stories with them as a backdrop, made even more tragic when they are ephemeral areas such as building sites, destined to be changed out of all recognition except through the haze of distant memory - and sometimes on film...

[Michael]

David, that's a very nice piece you just wrote. I agree with you about The Silence - of all Bergmans, this is the most emotionally sickening for me. I find that as I get older, now approaching 40, I prefer Bergman's 1950s films more and more, especially Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries, both containing so much exquisite joy and delicious wickedness. After watching Harriet Andersson suffering through a handful of dramas - Through a Glass Darkly, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander (still haven't seen Summer with Monika), I can't tell you how wonderful and cathartic it was for me watching her playing the sexy maid in Smiles for the first time last year. And EVA DAHLBECK! Jeez, why didn't Bergman use her more?

colin, I hope you write for a living. Thanks for starting my day.

[ellipsis7]

The script published in Italian reproduces his camera plan from the explosion in Zabriskie Point - 17 separate cameras running at varying speeds and positions, many hugely overcranked, special stock from Kodak and banks of reflectors to light.....

"...vigilance, wisdom, fragility..."

[kinjitsu]

[quote]A Director Also Elusive on Home Video by Dave Kehr

Unlike Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni is poorly represented on DVD. He did not have the good luck to make most of his films for a single, state-subsidized production company, and as a result rights to his films are spread around the world and are often difficult to track down.

The Criterion Collection has taken two of Mr. Antonioni's most important films under its wing, issuing superb restorations of L'Avventura (1960) and Eclipse (1962), each with supplementary material. But the other installment in his early-'60s trilogy of alienation, La Notte (1961), has a different distributor (Fox Lorber) and is available only in a bare-bones edition.

None of the striking short documentaries, made between 1943 and 1950, that made Mr. Antonioni's reputation have been given an official home video release. A small Italian-American company, NoShame Films, issued a fine double-disc version of his first feature length film, Cronaca di un Amore (“Story of a Love Affair, â€

[David Ehrenstein]

Zabriskie Point is a fascinating film maudit. It looks ravishing but sounds odd. While there are a few professional actors in it (Rod Taylor, Paul Fix) he cast non-pros in the leads in the hope of capturing people who were that era.

Mark Frechette made one other film (for Francisco Rosi) then joined Mel Lyman's cult, robbed a bank, was captured by the cops and was finally murdered in prison.

Daria Halprin married Dennis Hopper.

The script was a hodge-podge. You can tell all the lines Sam Shepard wrote. The Death Valley "love in" is rather silly. The destruction finale is overwhelming.

It's Antonioni's Party Girl.

[colinr0380]

Mark Frechette made one other film (for Francisco Rosi) then joined Mel Lyman's cult, robbed a bank, was captured by the cops and was finally murdered in prison.

Daria Halprin married Dennis Hopper.

I'm trying to figure out who had the worse fate!

[Gropius]

Just as shameful, if less conspicuous, is home video's almost complete neglect of Mr. Antonioni's television and documentary work

That would be another good candidate for Eclipse, but I don't see it happening.

[Awesome Welles]

Just as shameful, if less conspicuous, is home video's almost complete neglect of Mr. Antonioni's television and documentary work

That would be another good candidate for Eclipse, but I don't see it happening.

God, how I wish. It would be a great way to commemorate his life's work by making it more available.

[kinjitsu]

[quote]An Appraisal: A Chronicler of Alienated Europeans in a Flimsy New World by Stephen Holden

Decades before it was given a name, Michelangelo Antonioni recognized the malady we now call attention deficit disorder. In his great 1960s films, “L'Avventura,â€

[ellipsis7]

Antonioni's approach to Zabriskie Point (1970) is maybe best compared to his next film Chung Kuo - Cina (1972) his 3 part nearly 4 hour documentary on China... In both cases he was an outsider looking in on societies in change, the forces of conservatism being rocked by new progressive movements... In both cases he was welcomed and facilitated... And in China, despite being constantly watched over by minders he produced a result that outraged the communist authorities (China's ban was lifted only recently)... A wonderfully acidic pamphlet was published by them in English to denounce the film - "A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks - A Criticism of M. Antonioni's Anti-China Film China by Renmin Ribao"....

The techniques used by Antonioni in making the film are also extremely reactionary and despicable.

With regard to the selection or cutting of scenes, and how to handle them, he took few at all of the good, new and progressive ones, or took some of them as a gesture at the time he was shooting but finally cut them out."

This gaze of Antonioni, his selective and individual view, was the same characteristic that provoked such criticism from American commentators with Zabriskie Point, albeit being cast there as a puppet of the left rather than the right, the authenticity of his work again being called into question..

...To me his gaze is his poetry, non judgmental, but piercingly truthful... and this ability to see and depict things in the gaps of space and time that are invisible to others, is at the core of his genius....

BTW my son managed to download the entire 3 parts of Chung Kuo - Cina onto one of our computers as a Real Player file - no subs and took several weeks on broadband, but it's great to have & watch...

[tavernier]

From Stephen Holden's piece:

Among the European masters of the 1960s, only Jean-Luc Godard, that most modern of modernists, remains.

I'd put Bellocchio and Olmi in there too.

[Gropius]

Just browsing through Senses of Cinema, I found this footnote to an article on Bresson which yokes the two deceased in a double dismissal:

He [Bresson] dismisses Antonioni as a mere photographer and Bergman as someone wrongly dependent on rhetoric.

I'd still take Antonioni's 'mere photography' over Bresson's 'transcendental' Christ-mongering, although that's a squabble for another thread.

[Barmy]

I don't write off the early work. But I think only Cronaca and Il Grido could be considered great films. Both hold up very well today.

Regarding Camelias, to me it is somehow wrong in your second film to be making a film about filmmaking. The ending has little emotional resonance for me. Mediocre actress ends up in mediocre film....OK.

I Vinti is dated and seems like it is trying to be shocking but, at least now, it is not remotely so. And the English episode has some baaad acting.

Le Amiche has the much complained about vertical compositions of women in high heels chattering. But every director is entitled to one chick flick.

[jesus the mexican boi]

Does anyone know if there's been any statement from Monica Vitti?

[tryavna]

Slate has posted a piece on Antonioni, to complement their earlier one on Bergman. (In a deft touch of dark humor, the link that takes you to it from their main page is entitled "Who is killing the great directors of Europe?") Barmy will be happy to know that the author of this piece considers Zabriskie Point to be A.'s most underrated film.

If I were to be completely honest, I'd have to say that I still feel Bergman's loss a bit more -- perhaps only because it came first. Nevertheless, I've been appalled at the blank looks I've gotten from friends when I couple Antonioni's name with Bergman's. They seem to have a vague idea of who Bergman was, but Antonioni is far too obscure to them. How sad.

[Barmy]

There is no statement yet on MonicaVitti.com.

[tavernier]

There is no statement yet on MonicaVitti.com.

Disclaimer on monicavitti.com:

Please note that MonicaVitti.com is a private tribute website, unaffiliated with Monica Vitti or her representatives.

[kinjitsu]

I'm certain that Barmy was well aware of that.

[Barmy]

Yes, even an aging ex movie star would not authorize a website that lame.

[ellipsis7]

I like Cronaca di un amore & La signora senza camelie, and alongside Le amiche and Il grido, rate them as MA's minor masterpieces of the 1950's... Always unique and challenging, they show Antonioni's style emerge pretty fully grown from his first feature and developing onwards throughout the 1950s, as he progressed to full blown modernism and incomparable artistry...

If there is a critique, it is that he had not yet completely freed himself from others models' with the earlier films - American thriller with Cronaca, Lo sceicco bianco and his work with Fellini, with Camelie, literary 'womens' fiction' with Le amiche, Visconti's Ossessione with Il grido...

I don't think it was a problem particular to Antonioni - as Italian cinema moved on from neo-realism Visconti and Fellini also spent a while finding their exact groove as 'great filmmakers'... I think Antonioni was particularly succesful and standout, fascinating and innovative in this period...

Antonioni had of course worked previously alongside his peers also, writing for 'Cinema', the critical journal edited by Vittorio Mussolini....

As David identifies, Le amiche is very strong indeed, especially visually, and the closest to his his breakthrough, L'avventura... Think of the marvelous beach scene and how Antonioni choreographs it, and fast forward to Lisca Bianca and the search for Anna... And all through the 1950's he was experimenting and gaining confidence in the dissolution of narrative...

Catch the French Coffret Antonioni DVD with superb transfers of Le Désert rouge, Chronique d'un amour and La Dame sans camelias, plus extras including 2 early shorts... Also if you can source it, 'Michelangelo Antonioni - The Architecture of Vision', ed. Michele Mancini, Giuseppe Perrella, (Coneditor, 1986), a superb two volume pictorial analysis of visual themes, tropes and style which is really astonishing ("not only one of the most simulating and interesting on Antonioni, but one of the finest film books written in a long time" - Sam Rohdie)...

[foggy eyes]

A poem for Michelangelo Antonioni by his friend and collaborator Wim Wenders:

Goodbye Maestro


As sad as I was to learn

that you are gone,

as happy I was to hear

that you went in peace,

the way you wanted to,

conscious and clear.


Awareness and clarity,

perception and rigour

were your strengths,

and you relied on them

all through your life

and up to your death.


Modernity for you

was not a fleeting trend

but to fully seize

contemporary life

while anticipating

its possible futures.


I am proud

that I had the privilege

to meet you,

and that I was allowed to see

your mind and your eyes

at work.


You left us a treasure:

your writing, your painting

and your way of looking

that all condensed into

the timeless architecture

of your films.


Your experiences

that you shared with us

have shed a lasting light

on ours,

not just in cinema.

Grazie, Michelangelo.


Wim Wenders,

Sicily, July 31 2007