KANCHENJUNGHA (Satyajit Ray, 1962)

Satyajit Ray’s first film in color is, like the later black-and-white Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), a “holiday film”; Calcuttans are vacationing in Darjeeling, a hill station with Kanchenjungha, one of the highest peaks of the Himalayas, beyond—except that, for the duration of their stay, fog has blocked their view of the mountain’s reality, inspiration and hope. On this, their last day there, will the fog lift?
     The expectancy is correlative to the suspension of the Choudhurys’ lives—in Darjeeling, of course, but also back home: the lives they have brought with them. Indranath, the industrialist-patriarch, is too expectant of a transformation that can come only from within. He more or less gently tyannizes his family, while his wife, Labyanya, must contest his authority, for instance, in the matter of the marital match he is engineering for one of their daughters, out of his view. Their other daughter is adulterous in her marriage, a reflection of the level of success in family matters that follows from Indranath’s authority. Now someone, a young stranger, directly challenges this authority, signaling a breakthrough. Indranath discovers his own humanity. The fog lifts.
     This beauteous film unfolds in real time, but judicious editing helps prevent this from becoming a stunt. Ray, working for the first time from his own original (Ibsenian) script, captures everyday reality, and yet achieves, also, a lyrical result. His is a film of walks and conversations, full of long-shots of resort guests walking and of guests watching others walking. Kanchenjungha looms in the background, struggling for breath to cross our line of sight full and clear. We are not just responsible for what we do. We are also responsible for what we see.
     These people who walk: where are they going? Their “Limited” view might be: “Omaha.”

ABHIJAAN (Satyajit Ray, 1962)

Abhijaan (The Expedition) is beautiful—another great work by India’s Satyajit Ray. It is about a boy’s struggle to retain dignity and even effect a rise in status after he loses, first, his wife and, next, his job as a cab driver. Taking his quarter-century-old Chrysler with him, the boy attempts to establish a taxi service in a remote, rural part of India. The film is also about his relations with two women: one, an English teacher, the sister of a friend, whom he loves but who loves someone else; the other, a prostitute who is owned by a businessman who is willing to help him in order to use him and his taxi service for smuggling activities. In some ways this 1962 film anticipates the even greater Ray film The Middleman (1976).
     Oh, this is the only Indian film I can recall in which I’ve seen cacti growing!
     Soumitra Chatterjee, 27 at the time, is yet again tremendous in the lead role. Chatterjee, of course, is Apu in The World of Apu, Umaprasad in Devi (for which I named him best actor of 1960), Amal in Charulata (for which I named him best supporting actor of 1964), and Sandip in The Home and the World (for which I named him best supporting actor of 1984)—all of these, Ray films as well. (Chatterjee, like Ray, is Bengali.) Still at it, still prolific in his seventies, Chatterjee can justifiably lay claim to being the world’s greatest living film actor.

IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

A searching film, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman (Identificazione di una donna) is the work of a master who began in the 1940s as a documentarian. Free of affectation, almost magically keyed to the immediacy of the moment, it’s full of authentic mystery. Resistant to explaining what does or doesn’t happen in terms of either a situational context or the pasts of its characters, the film becomes a sharp test of our Keatsian negative capability; secure in our seats, we nevertheless are somewhat cast adrift. Like his L’avventura (1960) or The Passenger (1975), Antonioni’s Identification gives us a delicious sense of adventure.

There’s a fractured story of sorts. Niccolo (Tomas Milian, wonderfully, at times maddeningly even), the central character, is a fortyish filmmaker. Like Antonioni, he doesn’t think of himself as an intellectual artist—rather, as an explorer, a discoverer of sights and sounds and rhythms of experience. Current destination: a film identifying his “ideal woman,” whoever she may be. As anyone familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) knows, though, this particular aim can end up plunging one perilously into the abyss of self. Is there some other film Niccolo could be making now? A science-fiction film, his little nephew suggests. Ah, something out there rather than inside himself. It takes Niccolo a while, but that’s where he ends up going. In the meantime, Antonioni sticks with Niccolo here on earth.

The “ideal woman”-thing is, after all, a bad idea. Niccolo’s marriage has ended. In the course of this film, two consecutive love affairs of his will meet their demise. All three relationships, then, locate the shaky ground on which Niccolo’s fatuous notions of “ideal womanhood” wobble. Needless to say, Niccolo isn’t giving a second thought to his being the “ideal man.” He knows damn well he can’t measure up. The trouble is, neither can anyone else.

Women, it seems, must always disappoint Niccolo for an unsurprising reason: he is always disappointing them. Partly this is the result of his great difficulty at focusing in the present moment with the woman he is with. Mavi (Daniela Silverio, who has an unshakable look) has detached herself from her family; despite this, Niccolo obsesses on them. This is especially true regarding Mavi’s stepfather, who Niccolo is convinced is behind anonymous threats he has received. With Ida (Christine Boisson, in a great performance), Niccolo obsesses on the past—on Mavi, who may be a stand-in here for the wife whom Niccolo has lost. Space in the first instance, and time in the second, then, seem to undermine these two relationships of his. Therefore, his taking up at the last his nephew’s innocent suggestion to make a dumb Star Wars-level piece of escapism, which finds Niccolo (on film) star-trekking toward (the newspaper says) a dangerously expanding sun, can be seen as his corrective way of jolting himself out of space and time—and into the moment.

Both Mavi and Ida are younger than Niccolo. Though a renegade, Mavi is an aristocrat; Ida is a member of a stage company. (Impressing us with Niccolo’s solipsistic tendencies, we never see Ida at work.) A national celebrity of sorts, Niccolo falls somewhere in between. He is uncomfortable with Mavi because of their class difference; a party sequence highlights his unease among the upper crust. With Ida, his bugaboo is their difference in age. Sexually ferocious, Mavi rejuvenates Niccolo; but, however endearing he finds it, Ida’s youthfulness helps him to feel his years. Niccolo can’t quite compete with the boy he was fifteen or twenty years ago—nor can he compete, it turns out, with the boy whose baby Ida learns she is carrying. In one way or another, then, Niccolo doesn’t quite “fit” in his own life—a feeling that the failure of his marriage (his fault, his own sister opines) and a too-reserved relationship with his sister’s son also attest to.

Antonioni’s film—a near masterpiece—explores Niccolo’s difficulty at finding himself in his own life. It’s about, then, being lost in one’s own life, as if in a fog, when in fact what one hopes to be able to do is to have one’s life—one’s experience in the moment; the sum of one’s experiences—locate oneself. I will state the same thing a third way, adding to the description: Identification of a Woman is about being, or feeling, divorced from the meaning of one’s life, if “meaning” there be, partly the result of overcrowding space in an effort to overload the present, or of obsessing on the past, in either case attempting to bring “meaning” in as a way of compensating for the fact that the whole of one’s life, which could bring perspective and reveal the import of any given moment, remains unknown. As Woody Allen, a student of Antonioni, would do in his Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Antonioni concludes that it’s better to relax into the moment, filling it with experience, than to overload it with interpretation or borrowed content. As an artist who is committed to process (such as what’s necessary to realize a project), however, he knows that this ideal solution, so easy to posit (especially in the midst of European existentialism), must overmatch an endless series of yearnings, impulses and imperatives that contest and contradict it. Rumor to the contrary, Antonioni is only human. Relax into the moment? You try doing it.

Mavi and Ida struggle in the same quandary as do Antonioni and Niccolo, his partial stand-in. Mavi has detached herself from her society roots; this casts her somewhat adrift—into the anxious, restless, dissatisfied mode that characterizes so many Antonioni characters. (In this regard, Antonioni is the most Tennysonian of filmmakers.) Mavi’s bisexuality—Mavi eventually leaves Niccolo for a woman—is still another way she doesn’t quite “fit in,” and the pained, nearly regretful look that she, from the window of the apartment she shares with her current (lesbian) lover, casts at her lost male love as he leaves after a final visit suggests she may never “fit in” anywhere, in any kind of relationship. No matter with whom she is, in fact, Mavi impresses us as a solitary, someone who in some sense is always alone. A gloomy secret of the past seems to weigh into her present—a secret perhaps involving a sexual encounter with her obsessive stepfather, which to keep hidden from her mother, if this speculation of mine is warranted, she has had to bury deep in herself. In various ways, then, Mavi “hides”; she is an elusive soul, even a lost one, long before she just disappears on Niccolo, prompting his search for her—a search reminiscent of Claudio’s for Anna in L’avventura.

And Ida, too, is elusive. In her case the cause is her emotional honesty, which, hard on others, has her, also, ill “fitting in.” Thus she finds “gypsy” employment in the theater, which provides her with ironic cover for her truthfulness—acting, after all, is lying about who you are—even as it confirms for us her dilemma, since acting, also, provides a circuitous, and generally benign, noncontentious and uncensorable means for truth-telling. Too much honesty can be uncontainable. Ida may be “becoming” other characters in order to deposit in them the risky overflow—a “versatility” possibly related to Mavi’s class duplicitousness and sexual self-division.

Among the most beautiful in color that I have seen (the cinematographer, Carlo di Palma, worked with Antonioni on Il deserto rosso, 1964, and Blowup, 1966), Antonioni’s film contains two great set-pieces, each identified with one of the women. To elude whoever is tailing him in the city, Niccolo and Mavi take a motor trip into the country, where they get lost, and stuck, in an immense fog (which, by the way, would inspire a lovely passage in Allen’s wonderful Radio Days, 1987, also lensed by di Palma). By providing them with a kind of protective cover, this fog releases the couple’s worst mutual behavior—so much so, in fact, that the fog seems a massive projection of the anxiety and ambivalence that characterize their relationship. On the other hand, when Ida accompanies Niccolo to Venice on holiday, the other great set-piece seems to evoke this alternative couple’s stability and shared contentment. But it turns. On the water, in a canoe, Ida and Niccolo find themselves in a vast floating fog, the measured sound of lapping water adding to the melancholy to which the lovers differently respond: she, with her whole spirit; he, analytically. The “solid” relationship sways; Ida and Niccolo float apart, together. Back at their hotel, Ida learns by phone of her pregnancy, and the relationship drowns. I don’t believe that Niccolo can’t bear being father to someone else’s child; rather, he may not be able to live with someone else’s past—Ida’s, or the child’s father’s. Truly he thought he had freed himself from such backward obsessiveness by discovering Mavi’s whereabouts and current lifestyle; this indeed had revitalized his commitment to Ida. But now some boy’s baby has taken him back into the past—and this time, rather than his own, the past of someone he hasn’t met or wants to meet. And into Ida’s past—the past of one who seemed too young to have a past.

What a joyous tonic Antonioni’s Identification is to all the strident, empty stylizing, sociologizing, politicizing and manipulation that take up so many screens nowadays. Here is a film concerned instead with matter most humane and urgent and, even where solemn, both fresh and refreshing: while living our lives, how we conceive of those lives in order to understand ourselves and, through this understanding, others. Antonioni isn’t too interested in the couples per se (in frame after frame Niccolo, especially, becomes almost invisible—perhaps Antonioni’s reaction to Niccolo’s solipsism); what matters more is how mysterious pressures invisibly weigh in on these characters, leaving Antonioni and us to wonder whether our own lives, too, are an elusive fine thread whose course is best picked up somewhere unexpected, uncharted, somewhere far, far beyond our familiar sensible or emotional galaxy, in the direction of the sun’s perfect (if dangerous) clarity—somewhere beyond the clouds.

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

What I have done here is cull entries about films by Michelangelo Antonioni from three lists, including the 100 Greatest Films and the 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece and Spain, which you will find elsewhere on this site. Also, elsewhere on this site you will find full essays about some of the films included below and one other film by Antonioni, “Chronicle of a Love Affair.” Perhaps I should also add that “L’eclisse” (”Eclipse”) is currently my fourth favorite movie of all time and “L’avventura” also places in my top 25 films.

1943
PEOPLE OF THE PO VALLEY. Released in 1947, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Gente del Po is a documentary, some of whose material involving a woman’s care of her sick young daughter feels scripted, possibly “reconstructed.” Luchino Visconti’s documentary-like, also nonprofessionally cast La terra treme (1948), about struggling Sicilian fishermen, surely was influenced by Gente del Po, which with its lyrical river barges itself looks back to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), and ahead to Antonioni’s fictional Il grido (1957), also set amidst melancholy gray landscapes in the Po Valley.
     Numerous shots divide the frame, such as the overhead one of a barge, center-left, proceeding forward, displacing water while still untouched water appears ahead. Humanity, even when invisible, is the key; we are conscious of the human activity involved in the barge’s motion and use. In another “divided shot,” a barge proceeds screen-right, with water below and land, including houses, above: a summation of the environment in which people, also excluded here, live and work.
     Human figures appear in both long-shot and closeup, communally and as individuals. In an extreme long-shot from the vantage of the river, a solitary galloping horse projects an otherwise unavailable freedom and possibly reflects on the German occupation. In a bravura shot the camera moves leftward like a barge, but on land, as women rake the ground under large white hats. Down below on the barge “Milano,” the mother feeds her child medicine as an identical hat hangs on the wall.
     The tremendous final movement depicts a gathering storm, with its dire potential for flood. People now move quickly to their homes, disrupting the rhythms to which the film has accustomed us. The storm subsides, but the impression of human vulnerability lingers. This conclusion owes something to the snowstorm in Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922).

1948
CITY STREETCLEANERS. Rome, 1948. Night evaporates as dawn’s light steals in. Human figures are dense shadows and anonymous. A train, marking time and infinity, passes through; substance translates into evanescence beneath a solemn sky. Slight camera movements suggest time’s sweep. An angled overhead shot shows men sweeping steps in a public square. Influenced by Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), the delightful, rhythmic magic of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Nettezza urbana, starkly photographed in black and white and jazzily scored by Giovanni Fusco, has begun.
     With daylight, our view becomes clear. We see the faces of individual streetcleaners, as well as the faces of others in the streets. We also take in the integral role that streetcleaners play—their interaction with the rest of the city. Someone throws something out of her apartment window and it becomes part of what the streetcleaner sweeps up below.
     In the course of the film, we see persons at other mundane work in the streets, with everyone contributing to the great symphony of Rome. Antonioni’s film is poetic, associative, elastic. It purges its glimpse of laboring men of the overt socioeconomic context, relegating this to an invisible realm of inference—the maintenance we observe accumulates into a metaphor for Italy’s postwar reconstruction—and thereby creating a complex double vision of (implicit) economic hardship in the present and (explicit) nuts-and-bolts activity that looks ahead, quietly and without fanfare or heightened rhetoric, to an employed, stabilized Italy in the future.

1953
THE VANQUISHED. Accompanied by the front pages of newspapers, voiceover sets the theme of Michelangelo Antonioni’s uneven I vinti: a lost generation that grew up during the war, for whom “the one law is lawlessness.” The film, then, is about postwar collateral damage.
     These aren’t Buñuel’s “forgotten ones”; they are working-class or bourgeois, not direly impoverished, but driven to escape what they perceive to be one form or another of social imprisonment. In each of the three segments (France, Italy, England), someone commits murder and himself dies or will be executed by the state. Each killer is older than his predecessor, and each episode, I’m afraid, is progressively weaker; but the first, at least, is splendid. On a day’s holiday in the country, amidst one of cinema’s loveliest renderings of adolescent ache, one envious working-class schoolboy, as planned, shoots a bourgeois classmate dead, robbing him. The money, which wasn’t the point in any case, turns out to be fake. The college student in the second episode stays out all night; while his father thinks his son is painting the town with a girl, the boy is really engaged in a smuggling operation. Even less interesting, except as it vaguely anticipates Antonioni’s later Blowup (1966), is the concluding episode, where a man collects money from a newspaper for reporting the discovery of a woman’s body in a park. It turns out that his wasn’t a chance discovery; he murdered the woman precisely to collect the money. There’s a message there somewhere; this is strictly Alfred Hitchcock Presents-level irony, with smug TV-level comic relief around the edges.
     It is understandable that this schematic film is always regarded among Antonioni’s poorer efforts. Taken alone, though, the French episode—actually, all three episodes are in Italian—is a small naturalistic gem.

1955
LE AMICHE. Clelia has returned from Rome to Turin, her hometown, to manage a fashion salon. In the hotel room next to hers, Rosetta attempts suicide by pill overdose, drawing Clelia into Rosetta’s circle of friends, which is dominated by sharp-tongued Momina, whose extramarital lover, it turns out, is the architect of Clelia’s salon. Clelia herself falls in love with Carlo, the architect’s assistant, while Rosetta has been stretched to the breaking point by her affair with Lorenzo, a painter who is jealous of fiancée Nene’s greater commercial success. Nene (Valentina Cortese, brilliant) is a ceramics artist. Once Rosetta has recovered, Momina coldbloodedly encourages her pursuit of Lorenzo. (At one point she chides fragile Rosetta for the incompetence that her unsuccessful suicide attempt demonstrates.) Rosetta’s next try at suicide succeeds. At the salon, Clelia “loses it” and publicly lambasts Momina. Unexpectedly, Clelia’s boss doesn’t terminate her employment; Clelia can work again for the firm back in Rome. Lorenzo ends back in Nene’s arms. He asks why she puts up with him. Nene responds, with subtly devastating rue, “Perhaps because you come at so high a price.” Clelia leaves by train for Rome as Carlo hides while watching her depart, fearful of exposing his broken heart.
     One doesn’t expect this much plot from Michelangelo Antonioni! But from Cesare Pavese’s story “Three Women Sun,” he has created a solemn, sensible vision, one without recourse to religion, in which what matters most are the psychological inquiry, especially into the mental lives of the female characters, their unsettled spiritual state, and the shimmering poetry of Turin’s deserted streets at night, which is correlative to this. Assisting Antonioni in the elusive, mysterious atmosphere that he conjures in The Girlfriends is composer Giovanni Fusco’s delicately haunting music and Gianni Di Venanzo’s evocative black-and-white cinematography.

1957
IL GRIDO. Mechanic Aldo abandons lover Irma, taking their child, when she refuses to marry him upon news of her husband’s death. Aldo drifts through gray industrial landscapes in northern Italy.
     The Cry’s depiction of a man’s life at loose ends finds Michelangelo Antonioni unhinging conventional narrative in order to invent a more flexible and poetic cinematic form stressing human behavior and the environmental factors contributing to it—Neorealist aims, but considerably less tied to the requirements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century storytelling. Perhaps the melancholy landscapes may be too refined to counter with sufficient gusto the tyranny of plot (L’avventura, 1960, will complete the task); but the insinuative background of workers demonstrating against a proposed American airbase, not to mention the use of a poster advertising national integrity, doubles as a sly kick at the Hollywood way of pushing a plot line forward to connect a series of formulaic dots.
     In retrospect, we see from whence Antonioni came; at the same time we grasp more fully at what his inspiration, Roberto Rossellini, was aiming with his composite portrait, in Paisà (1946), of a regionally varied national character. A brisk move away from traditional “plottedness,” Paisà’s episodic nature reduces “story” by multiplying it—a method achieving especial grace and beauty in Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950), where the episodes are less like miniature stories or films, as in Paisà, and more like impressionistic brush strokes. Whereas Paisà resembles a completed jigsaw puzzle whose piece outlines remain discernible, Francesco is more than the sum of its parts, and a distinct whole that has thoroughly absorbed the pieces it comprises. This marks a formal departure from Neorealism that Antonioni, Rossellini’s heir, brings to fruition even as his work keeps addressing contemporary themes and (for now) the lives of ordinary people.

L’AVVENTURA (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France, 1960). Antonioni launched cinema’s greatest trilogy with The Adventure. Two souls, her lover, Sandro, and her friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti, Antonioni’s partner and muse at the time, phenomenal), search for Anna, who is missing from their party on an uninhabited island. In the course of this adventure, the two become a couple and lose the thread of their search. What had brought them together no longer matters—except to us, who miss Anna, who at first seemed to be the film’s protagonist. Finding ourselves the projection of the pair’s conscience makes us a participant.
      The fragile nature of relationships; the ties that loosen and unbind: Antonioni shows the abstract way that modern humans live, giving themselves up to experience. These characters demonstrate self-estrangement and an inability to make emotional contact with others. Visually, L’avventura translates the concepts figure and ground into the relationship between humanity and landscape. Daunting Sicilian locations fail to do what we expect locations to do in a film: locate the characters and their story. Instead, they project the vast spaces, the disconnects, between, among and within characters who lack moral and sensitive rootedness. Here is a film about will-o’-the-wisps.
      Antonioni had mined the poetry of bleak landscape before, such as in The Cry (1957), but never to such intoxicating effect. Used to their own abandonment, the landscapes appear to reveal (or mimic) the idle, empty, well-to-do characters. This is a film of long- and wide-angle shots, in which characters are often on the verge of becoming lost to the eye. It is about how, like Anna, we all can be lost in this modern world of ours—lost to ourselves and others. Its overarching theme is the signature one of the sixties: alienation. But Antonioni investigates its character rather than exploiting a fashionable mood.

1961
LA NOTTE. In his trilogy, Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte occupies the dead-center between the hopefulness with which L’avventura (see 1960) ends and the utter desolation of L’eclisse (see 1962), which begins and ends with the end of a relationship. It is a gray, weathered film that ends with a standstill in love that may yet be set back into motion. We certainly hope that life is still possible in Giovanni and Lidia’s marriage, and we appreciate their courteous, civilized treatment of one another in this troubled time of theirs. Their humanity, then, forms the basis for our hope that the couple may yet prevail. In retrospect, the conclusion of the trilogy, although it deals with a different (and unmarried) couple, eclipses all such hope.
     Giovanni and Lidia visit Milan to see Tommaso, a dying friend, in hospital. From this we can see their decency and compassion; few filmmakers have such fondness for their characters as Antonioni does. But, also, Tommaso functions symbolically to suggest the emotional and spiritual exhaustion that each of the marital partners feels. It is after Lidia learns of Tommaso’s death that she tells Giovanni she no longer loves him. She feels this way not because of anything that Giovanni has done but because of what he hasn’t done; exhausted himself, he hasn’t been able to pull her out of her doldrums. In Antonioni, a marriage isn’t an island; Giovanni and Lidia are affected, severely, by the alienating modern world in which they find themselves. Antonioni wouldn’t think of cheapening the moment with sentimentality, so it is all the more heartrending when he reveals that Giovanni, a writer, is so lost to himself that he fails to recognize his most intimate words as his own.
     Marcello Mastroianni is wonderful as Giovanni.
     Night is Antonioni’s most moving film.

L’ECLISSE (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France, 1962). Eclipse completes Michelangelo Antonioni’s towering black-and-white trilogy of modern alienation and uncertain European identity. (L’avventura, see below, La notte, 1961.) It begins with the end of a romantic relationship and ends with another; Vittoria (Monica Vitti, magnificent) is the constant in both. The film begins and ends in near silence, with an overwhelming sense of vacancy.
      L’eclisse’s frames are composed in intricate, dynamic depth—a depth that evokes modern times, where, rather than keeping hidden below, a now thoroughly known-about, hence objectified, unconscious so intrudes on the surface of human behavior and thought that, rattled and unsure of themselves amidst self-criticism and second guessing, people seem lost in their own lives—the problem of identity that Vittoria’s frenzied dance, in African brownface, apotheosizes. Compounding this is the wobbled European identity as a result of western Europe’s loosened and lost moorings in colonialism—and this, too, Vittoria’s dance brings to the fore. Moreover, Antonioni relates all this to another concern of the 1960s: materialism. Materialism depersonalizes everything, even intimacy; thus Antonioni shows columns at the Roman Stock Exchange dividing future lovers Piero and Vittoria—a sign of the societal ill that will infect their relationship. The columns are orderly. What passes now for order is divisive rather than integrative—an idea stunningly expressed in the film’s conclusive series of bleak, thinly populated nightscapes: a world of order with nothing left to order: form outlasting content. The sparse presence of humanity suggests humanity’s now largely empty core.
      Piero and Vittoria have not kept their date. L’eclisse sharpens despair to the point of apocalypse, signalling in the failure of two individuals to remain a couple the end of the world. By indirection, then, Antonioni touts the primacy of love. L’eclisse is the most powerful film ever made about two lovers.

1964
IL DESERTO ROSSO (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France). A coda to his titanic trilogy, Antonioni’s The Red Desert continues his consideration of alienation, the signature theme of the sixties. In Ravena, in northern Italy, the film follows another unsettled soul, Giuliana (gorgeous Monica Vitti, superb), a plant manager’s wife, this time peripatetic in an industrial landscape. For whatever she is searching, at one level a sense of self and integrity, Giuliana won’t find it in her extramarital affair with an engineer who, passing through, is already poised to abandon her. In her drab, cold, rainy milieu, the only bright colors are from paint on walls and plastic products. Thus Giuliana dreams of another, radiant space, one of sand, unpolluted ocean, clear sky—and of freedom and escape.
      Giuliana’s “sickness” is the modern condition. What the eye takes in reflects our ambivalence toward the modern world. Outdoors, lakes are polluted and polluted air assumes a terrible grandeur, while at home a helper-robot hints the high technology to come—which, while easing work, marginalizes people, as does all the manufactured stuff that turns a home into a house: a circumstance at which Giuliana’s agitated care of her sick child at one point levels a furious assault.
      The film’s celebrated use of color as a means of expression rather than decoration contributes to Antonioni’s vision of a world out of joint. (Carlo di Ponti is his cinematographer.) It is the world of products that Antonioni will blast into space in Zabriskie Point (1969)—things that take over our lives, sapping our strength, cutting our humanity off at the knees.
      Antonioni has always insisted he isn’t a political filmmaker, and I take him at his word. However, his Red Desert delivers a blow to capitalism the force of which few ideological films can match.

1966
BLOWUP. The coolest, most happening movie of the “Swingin’ Sixties” was made by someone in his mid-fifties.
     A self-absorbed London fashion photographer (David Hemmings, superb) snaps photographs in Maryon Park, prompting a woman (Vanessa Redgrave, anxious, vibrant, haunting), apparently with her lover there, to demand the roll of film. The boy refuses. After successive blowups of portions of the developed photos, he comes to believe that the assignation preceded murder. In the park at night, he locates the corpse. But both photos and the body subsequently show up missing.
     Michelangelo Antonioni’s brilliantly directed Blowup, inspired by a Julio Cortázar story, claims a mesmerizing first half that follows the photographer about, including into an antique shop, where he buys an airplane propeller; when the mystery plot kicks in, though, the film turns feeble. However, the contrast created by black-and-white photos in a (beautiful) color film is surprisingly powerful, and the photographer’s gradual slippage into his humanity convinces. Moreover, the return to the park and the finale are fabulous, with the protagonist, embracing the illusionary nature of reality, tossing an imaginary ball to a couple engaged in pantomiming a tennis match.
     Sound is as exquisite as image in Blowup: the rustling of tree leaves in the breeze; accompanying a closeup of the boy’s face as his eyes follow the ball, the sound of this imaginary ball as it strikes opposing racquets. The boy’s face registers the loss of innocence—the loss of the safe, insulated, egotistical world in which we first found him. This conclusion is wry, satisfying and deeply moving—the equal of the finish of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
     One thing more: Blowup contains the best movie line ever. “I thought you were in Paris,” the photographer tells a model at a party. Zonked, she replies, “I am in Paris.”

1967/70
ZABRISKIE POINT. In the 1960s, when he made Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni had made masterpieces: L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, Il deserto rosso. While a richer piece of work than any that won a best picture Oscar in the sixties or the seventies, Zabriskie Point is very thin by Antonioni’s standards.
     America, its subject matter and where the film is set, probably has something to do with that.
     Two strangers, a college student and a dropout, both 19, end up by happenstance an adventurous couple in Death Valley; the boy is fleeing the Los Angeles police, who wrongly believe he killed an officer during a student demonstration.
     The film has some verbal wit; for instance, when one demonstration participant is being booked, and “associate professor of history” proves too long for the form, the officer writes down “clerk”—which of course is what he is. But more to the film’s credit is its sense of outrage at American cruelty and injustice. Some of this film is gut-wrenching.
     Some of this film, though, is soft and silly, Zefferellian. When the pair make love amidst vast white rock and sand, an orgy—a sappy love-fest—materializes scored to an original composition by Jerry Garcia.
     But the finale is stunning and brilliant. Following Mark’s murder by police, Daria imagines a gigantic explosion sending all sorts of U.S. material things high up into the heavens, including, pointedly, a packaged loaf of Wonder bread. Throughout the film, commercial signs dot the landscape, and actual people seem to have suited their behavior to a plastic commercial display. I can’t say that Antonioni succeeds in linking commercialism to other forms of U.S. dereliction (such as racial inequities); but the film goes out with a bang, and with desert cacti (and Antonioni) giving America the finger.

1975
THE PASSENGER (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, France, Spain). Written by Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and the director, Antonioni’s The Passenger, a baleful, delicately mournful mystery, tests assumptions about identity, responsibility, authority. Antonioni also prods our perception to the full—for instance, by setting critical action just beyond the camera’s range so that we must listen carefully to hear what is going on.
      David Locke, a fatigued, jaded journalist, starts anew by exchanging identities with a corpse in a North African hotel. Maintaining professional distance, seeing detail but always missing the larger picture, Locke has held himself aloof from the revolutionary upheavals he has been covering, discounting their relevance to his own life. Now his new identity places him dead-center in the opportunistic, politically non-committed world of gunrunning.
      The Passenger critiques the assumption that the only connections the West can have to the Third World are colonialist, insisting instead on a shared humanity that links all people’s fates. As reporter, Locke stresses the eye (“Tell me what you see now . . .”); as artist, Antonioni stresses the soul.
      Antonioni’s penultimate shot resolves his material. (To be precise, it’s a gyroscopically “smoothed” meshing of shots whose outcome gives the appearance of a single slow camera movement.) From inside to out, through a close-barred window in a Spanish hotel, the (seemingly) steadily moving camera draws connections among disparate humans, including Locke, and elements of geographic and political space—indoors, outdoors, indoors again (now using a doorway instead of a window)—before the camera returns to Locke, dead, in his room. Failing to perceive all the connectedness that the camera has just elegantly drawn, Locke has taken a circular stroll into the arms of his own defeatism, uncovering the death lurking beneath the mask/metaphor of the original identity-exchange in Africa: for us, a cautionary experience.

1980
THE OBERWALD MYSTERY. Experimenting with video, Michelangelo Antonioni based his Il mistero di Oberwald on L’aigle a deux têtes, which its playwright, Jean Cocteau, himself filmed (boringly) in 1948. Gorgeously videographed by Luciano Tovoli, this color work—a symphony of filters—reunited Antonioni with Monica Vitti, who is brilliant as a nineteenth-century queen whose King Frederic, age 25, was assassinated on their wedding day ten years earlier. Now the Queen is the object of an assassination plot.
     Sebastian, who might be a time-transplanted member of the Brigate Rosse (indeed, Antonioni throughout reflects on current politics), has penetrated the Queen’s castle retreat at Oberwald to murder her. The Queen herself spins the tale that seemingly assigns the 25-year-old this role. Moreover, she solidifies this role assignment by announcing she will kill Sebastian if he does not kill her. Between the two, the Queen seems to be the playwright, Sebastian her captive audience. This is certain: Sebastian is the very image of the young Frederic. Perhaps Mystery’s most phenomenal shot is the quick one that introduces the trespassing boy’s face in the same frame as a portrait of the King.
     Who can doubt that Pirandello is an influence here? Yet the shimmering, spooky effects by which Antonioni turns the castle into a haunted place suggests Strindberg in his later expressionistic mode. In another phenomenal shot, the Queen’s ghost—someone else’s memory of her shortly after Frederic’s assassination—diaphanously moves down a corridor toward the camera. Like so many others here, this shot is ineffably sad, a distillation of the reality and hope with which the King’s death robbed this woman. (Her ongoing contest with her vicious offscreen mother-in-law perpetuates the theft.) Her taking the boy as her lover is a futile attempt to reverse time and reclaim the past.

1982
IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN. Niccolo, a filmmaker, has difficulty focusing on the woman he is with. Mavi has detached herself from family; nevertheless, Niccolo obsesses on them. With Ida (Christine Boisson, superb), Niccolo obsesses on the past—on Mavi. Niccolo takes up his nephew’s innocent suggestion to make a dumb Star Wars-level piece of escapism, which finds him (on film) star-trekking toward (the newspaper says) a dangerously expanding sun, to jolt himself out of space and time and into the moment.
     Niccolo and Mavi take a motor trip into the country, where they get lost, and stuck, in an immense fog. By providing a kind of protective cover, this fog, a projection of their anxiety and ambivalence, releases the couple’s worst mutual behavior. When Ida accompanies Niccolo to Venice on holiday, the other great set-piece seems to evoke this alternative couple’s stability and shared contentment. But it turns. On the water, in a canoe, Ida and Niccolo find themselves in a vast floating fog, the measured sound of lapping water adding to the melancholy to which the lovers differently respond: she, with her whole spirit; he, analytically. Ida and Niccolo float apart, together. At their hotel, Ida learns by phone she is pregnant, and the relationship drowns. Is Niccolo able to live with someone else’s past—Ida’s, or the child’s father’s?
     What a joyous tonic Michelangelo Antonioni’s Identification is for all the strident, empty stylizing, sociologizing, politicizing and manipulation that take up so many screens nowadays. Mysterious pressures invisibly weigh in on his characters, leaving us to wonder whether our own lives, too, are an elusive fine thread whose course is best picked up somewhere unexpected, uncharted, far, far beyond our familiar sensible or emotional galaxy, in the direction of the sun’s perfect (if dangerous) clarity—somewhere beyond the clouds.

1995
BEYOND THE CLOUDS. Based on his short story collection That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Beyond the Clouds—with assists from Wim Wenders—is a spacious, summary work, a mystery of sorts, that gathers up moods and images, ghostly echoes, from the filmmaker’s past. Its theme is the gap (wherein the human heart is most guarded and secretive) between desire and attainment, imagination and reality. What the enchanted eye takes in, the flesh can’t hold; even as love overwhelms with powerful emotion, it shifts, confounds, remains elusive.
     In the film’s final episode, suddenly captivated by a girl he catches sight of (Irène Jacob, sublime), a boy pursues her for the balance of the day and into the night, only to be told by her that he cannot see her again because she is entering a convent that morning. He asks, “What if I fell in love with you?” She: “You would be lighting a candle in a room full of light.” The boy’s flaming moment of impossible love reflects the girl’s love for Jesus; for, by intensifying her glow, this pure devotion of hers, with its effortless capacity to still the boy’s exaggerated mortal anxiety, proves an irresistible force of attraction for him, although it is precisely, also, what makes her unsuitable for him. The boy has not been fooled or victimized, either by girl or cosmos; rather, he simply doesn’t grasp—as so often we do not—the impetus behind his falling in love and, as a result, lights upon a partner who must abandon him. Piercingly, the “relationship,” stillborn, ends before it has begun.
     Always Antonioni urges on us and on himself a fuller view of things; and the fuller the view, the less knowable and more mysterious humanity and life itself show themselves to be.

2004
MICHELANGELO’S GAZE. Text introduces this fifteen-minute film: “In 1985 Antonioni suffered a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair. In 2004, through the magic of cinema, he made this visit to San Pietro in Vincoli.” This visit, then, enables the artist to transcend imaginatively his limitations. We’re about to witness an illusion.
     Light, then his shadow, precede Antonioni as he enters the immense structure through an outside door. The angled overhead long shot establishes his small place in the universe. He is Everyone. As he enters another part of the hall, again his shadow precedes him. The sound of his footsteps confirms his materiality. (Later, he coughs.) Sacred music is heard toward the end, but mostly this is a silent—the dream that is cinema.
     Michelangelo Antonioni, bespectacled, looks up at the other Michelangelo’s Moses. Closeup of Moses’s head; tighter closeup; Moses’s eyes; upward pans; Antonioni gazing; closeups of Moses’s impassive eyes; Antonioni searchingly gazing. The camera views Moses from a myriad of perspectives.
     Antonioni’s hand feels the sensuous folds of marble. A closeup of the human hand as it moves forward (in hauntingly subtle slow motion) collapses the identities of both Michelangelos; for isn’t the sculptor reaching through eternity to the creativity he left behind, and isn’t the statue the film that Antonioni is creating? The sixteenth century; now; eternity: time itself collapses.
     Motion and the illusion of motion: dissolves; the camera, panning across features (such as the flowing beard), seems to animate the statue, releasing it to the flux of the artist’s own mortal condition. Before exiting the hall, Antonioni pauses for a backward glance and passes through a shaft of blue light to the outdoors. The camera does not follow. It remains in the dream.
     Antonioni won’t give up art a moment sooner than necessary.

CITY STREETCLEANERS (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1948)

Rome, 1948. Night evaporates as dawn’s light quietly steals in. Human figures are dense shadows and anonymous; they could be you or me. A train, marking both time and infinity, passes through, substance visually translated into evanescence beneath a solemn sky. Small camera movements suggest the sweep of time. An angled overhead shot finds men sweeping steps in a public square. Influenced by Walter Ruttmann’s silent Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), the rhythmic, delightful magic of City Streetcleaners (Netteza urbana), starkly photographed in black and white by Giovanni Ventimiglia and jazzily scored by Giovanni Fusco, has begun.

With daylight, our view becomes doubly clearer. We see the faces of individual streetcleaners, as we do the faces of other persons in the streets. The other thing that is now clearer to us is the integral role that the streetcleaners play; we see the interaction between them and the rest of Rome. For instance, one person throws something out of her apartment window, and it becomes part of what the streetcleaner sweeps up below. Another person, a man, tears up a piece of paper, the pieces falling to the pavement, and another streetcleaner sweeps them away, depositing the pieces in a receptacle as a couple (perhaps including the litterer) walk across the street through which traffic (in this context, persons driving cars, not just the cars) passes. The city is a single organism, and each person contributes to its dynamic integrity. One is startled by such a holistic view bereft of religious underpinnings.

In the course of City Streetcleaners, we will see other persons in the streets at mundane work, doing what they need to do, continuing the great symphony of Rome.

Two themes that dominate late 1940s European cinema, which often converge, are survival and work. Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1947), about a 12-year-old boy, in bombed-out Berlin, who is pressured by circumstance and family to bear the burden of financially supporting his family, is best understood in this context, as is, from France, Georges Franju’s documentary The Blood of the Beasts (1949), which surveys a Parisian slaughterhouse for a freezing reflection on the violence that human existence may require in order to sustain itself—in the aftermath of war, a jolting meditation. But the lion’s share of these works focus on Italy, which had begun its steep climb out of the economic rubble that the Second World War had imposed. Three works are monumental in this regard: Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), about a marginally employed young man who struggles to support himself, his wife and son, Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1948), in Sicilian dialect, about fishermen who unite in opposition to their exploitation by fish marketers, and (in its surreptitiously shot European version) Rossellini’s Stromboli (1949), again (among other things) about fishermen, whom we watch at work, eking out a marginal existence.

City Streetcleaners, one of a series of documentaries by Michelangelo Antonioni, is poetic, elastic, associative. It purges its glimpse of men at work of the overt socioeconomic context, relegating this to an invisible realm of inference—indeed, the maintenance we observe accumulates into a metaphor for Italy’s reconstruction—and thereby creating a complex double vision of (implicit) economic hardship in the present and (explicit) nuts-and-bolts activity which looks ahead, quietly and without fanfare or heightened rhetoric, to an employed, stabilized Italy in the future. Lacking the sentimental corners of Bicycle Thieves, it is the finest of all these achievements, including Franju’s film, except for Germany, Year Zero.

For some, this will be a preposterous statement; after all, Antonioni’s film lasts about ten minutes. Can a purely objective film that merely records (at little length) men working be so remarkable and important? I doubt it. However, the “double vision” that I have noted in introducing the film expands and deepens the film, achieving a subjective dimension freely, if implicitly, floating somewhere between hopefulness and optimism. The choice of such basic and necessary work, that is, ridding the city of refuse, facilitates our more general inference of “work to be done,” releasing startling poetry, this refuse becoming a cumulative metaphor for the debris of the recent past—the (social, political, economic) mess from the war that the nation needs to clean up. Intertwined with this is the (implicit) urgent message that Italy needs to put its people back to work. The useful work that we see implies the greater range of useful work that needs to be done, suggesting a rough equivalence between the future and fate of the nation and the future and fate of its citizens. The occasion of observing men at work in the wee morning hours thus releases, in some silent dimension that touches our souls, a hymn to humanity.

Moreover, his achievement here—the compression, with its intricate design of implicit meanings inviting our imaginative and creative inference—predicts the brilliant method of Antonioni’s later fictional masterpieces. One is a passive observer of an Antonioni film only if, daunted by its complexity and elusiveness, one churlishly shuts the film out, that is, shuts oneself out from the profound, resonant experience that the film offers. Who might do such a thing? Those too used to the kind of manipulative diversion that aims to foster such viewer passivity might do such a thing. But once one enters the creative process by which one actively participates in an Antonioni film, one experiences pleasures, and a depth of pleasure, that manipulative diversions cannot provide. I can think of no better introduction to Antonioni’s riches than City Streetcleaners, which the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists named the year’s best documentary.