[Antonioni] e il suo messaggio modernista (in inglese)
stanz
Much has been said about the advent of the new style of
artistic production in the early part of the twentieth
century, a movement labelled "modernism". The artists of
this period were reacting against the conventions that
preceded them, yet modernism was much more than this. It was
a way of expressing a new, fragmented, unclear way of life,
a chaotic world view brought on by such devastating factors
as the
Industrial Revolution and World War I. Life could no longer
be understood through traditional means of expression. What
people such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Pablo Picasso
invented was a new and challenging modern language, one that
could better depict the chaos of modern life. It was also
around this time that the new invention of cinema was
evolving, and people such as Dali, Léger and Deren were
creating their own languages in this cinema. Yet it was not
until the late 1950's that the language of modernism would
be inscribed fully into narrative film, with the arrival of
the work of Michelangelo Antonioni.
In his work, Antonioni creates a language out of silence, a
language based on images and not on words. The difficulty of
communication, a subject dealt with in detail throughout his
career, mirrors the difficulty the viewer has in
comprehending Antonioni's own cinematic language, a language
which
communicates the alienation and fragmentation of modern
life. Since his language mirrors modern life, it is fraught
with ambiguity, confusion, inconsistency and incompleteness
-- form and content become part of the same language system.
The modernist movement is a search for meaning within things
that cannot be understood. This might seem to be a lost
cause, a cause that admits defeat before it even begins.
Yet, even though our surroundings and our inner lives cannot
be understood, the language of modernism (with some work)
can
-- and it is here where the exhilaration of modernism
emerges. Two things must be taken into consideration when
dealing with modernist texts:
First, a sensibility that understands and accepts the
condition of psychological chaos and of the
chaotic uncertainty in the external world that
generates such internal confusion and dissonance.
Second, and equally important, . . . modernism assumes
that this first condition can be and has
been captured and transformed into a viable system of
communication. (Malamud 26)
This viable system of communication is the language of
modernism, a language that may seem unintelligible without
some knowledge of how it works. The difficulty some have
with modern texts is due to the fact that "comprehension of
a system underlying . . . idiosyncratic art is necessary if
the
audience is to understand and appreciate the art itself"
(Malamud 11). Modernism is a language that must
explain itself to itself; its defining elements are
contained within the text, not prescribed from without. With
modernist texts, understanding (if it ever comes at all)
arrives only from close study of the language system defined
within the text (or a particular body of work) itself, not
from an already-defined, easily understandable language
template that can be thrown over the work in order to
effortlessly interpret it.
The use of a new modernist language system is not arbitrary
-- it is not just form without content, nor is it "art for
art's sake". Modernist language systems "must communicate to
and through a world of alienation, confusion, distortion,
acceleration -- a world turned upside down" (Malamud 12).
Another important aspect of the language of modernism is its
difficulty, due to the ambiguousness of its signifying
practice. Again, there are two reasons for this:
Simplicity in language seems insincere, naïve,
irreverent to those trapped in the midst of the
dizzying modernist vortex, and generally irrelevant to
the sense of external complexity that
pervades the modern age. Second, . . . logic and
reason, which follow from simple and straight
forward language, can be obstacles to valid kinds of
experience and imagination. (Malamud 8)
What modernist texts deal with is the incapability of humans
to clearly understand their own lives, so the language used
in these texts mirrors this. "The modernists themselves
professed to believe that their writing, while difficult,
must necessarily be so -- that only such difficulty
adequately portrayed modern
life" (Malamud 7). The difficulty, then, of "reading" a
modernist text mirrors the difficulty of "reading"
daily life, in all its contradictions and ambiguities.
There is certainly a difficulty in understanding any
particular Antonioni text, in that he defines within them a
cinematic language all his own, a language that lies only
within the bounds of the text. The difficulty in
interpreting the text formally becomes a significant part of
the content of Antonioni's films as well, for it is exactly
this problem of communication that he endeavours to address.
There is little dialogue in his films, and, as Chatman
points out, "even when there is dialogue in Antonioni's
films, there is no guarantee that it will ensure
communication" (89). Zabriskie Point opens with a meeting of
student radicals which eventually dissolves due to a
breakdown in communication between the different factions.
In L'avventura, Claudia watches a young couple on a train,
engaged in what seems to be simple, innocent
flirting. She laughs at them, realising the "surfaceness"
and the banality of their discourse, yet when they
start to talk of love, she becomes sullen, realising that
the emotion of love can never be communicated
through verbal language. In Il Deserto Rosso, Giuliana has a
conversation with a foreign sailor; the fact
that neither of them understand each other's language seems
irrelevant to them. It would seem that
vagueness of communication, whether it is in a tongue we
understand or not, passes unnoticed through
our daily lives.
Antonioni's cinematic language, then, relies not on words to
communicate meaning to the viewer, but on
images. Blow-Up provides the perfect analogy for the way
Antonioni wishes images to function in his
films. The sequence in which Thomas, the fashion
photographer protagonist of the film, increasingly
"blows up" a series of photographs, has no dialogue
whatsoever. The photographic images are, in effect,
cinematic images; Antonioni wishes the audience to pay
attention to the language of the image, and not the
language of words. The images say much more than any words
could. However, just like the humans in
his films that can never say what they mean (or vice versa),
images are not definitive and precise either.
Does Thomas really capture a murder on film? Is there really
a gun-holding hand sticking out of the
bushes, or is it just shadow-play, a trick of photography?
The final sequence of the film plays off this
unstable nature of communicable "truth" within the
photographic image: a band of "hippies" plays tennis
with an imaginary ball, a ball which Thomas is invited to
toss back to the players when it is shot over the
fence. "Placing his camera, his source of communication with
the real, on the grass, Thomas throws the
imaginary tennis ball back onto the court. At this moment
the sound of the ball joins the illusion" (Lyons
170). The audience may not see a ball, but the characters
seem to, and the soundtrack seems to verify its
presence. Does it really matter if the ball is there or not?
The point, then, is that images are just as open to
interpretation, just as fallible and unreliable as words are
when it comes to their communicative powers.
Antonioni's trepidation when it comes to relying on verbal
language is a direct result of his modernist
tendencies, tendencies born from the modernist mistrust of
an intelligible and comprehensive surface
depiction of reality. Mistrust of an outside, understandable
world results in an alienation from this reality,
an alienation Antonioni's characters have exhibited
throughout his career. Modern life has become much
too oppressive for Antonioni. Man-made landscapes are
foreign, lacking any empathy for the humans
who happen to inhabit them; they are spiritually and
physically empty. Think of the cold, oppressive and
vacant buildings of L'avventura; the polluted factory
"desert" in Il Deserto Rosso, with its dead colours
and desolate decay; the commodified city of Zabriskie Point,
choked in its own urban clutter of billboard
signs and endless freeways. The city of London in Blow-Up
serves to stand for all cities, in their most
oppressive modern state:
As [Antonioni] said at the time he was filming, "I
don't want to make a film about London. The
same events could happen in New York, maybe Stockholm,
and certainly in Paris." In other
words, it is the ambience of the "modern city" and not
the particular one that is crucial. In
addition to depicting war protesters, mimes and
derelicts which represent certain social elements
of the international urban population, Antonioni
conveys a sense of the anonymity which the city
breeds. (Rifkin 31)
Antonioni heightens the oppressive nature of these
landscapes through the use of the temps mort, a device
linked to the nouveau roman movement in its modernist use of
"microrealism". The temps mort defines
and lingers upon postdiegetic cinematic space; it rests upon
a scene after the "main" action has finished or
has moved on:
This place at which the narrative dies, at which the
camera becomes distracted, is often a place in
which another, non-narrative interest develops . . .
These are places which are openly
non-narrativised, of a pictorial and visual interest
which suddenly takes hold, causes the narrative
to err, to wander, momentarily to dissolve. They are
among the most interesting places in
Antonioni's films, at which everything and nothing
takes place. (Rohdie 51)
The temps mort shot, by heightening the importance of
"background" landscape, gives it a life all its own,
one that threatens to overpower the inconsequential humans
which previously inhabited its space. What
had previously been "setting" for the characters suddenly
becomes the protagonist itself. The final shot in
Blow-Up is a perfect example of this: Thomas, depicted from
above, standing on a field of green grass,
suddenly dissolves from the frame, leaving only the
background to be contemplated and studied. The
character becomes insignificant when weighed against the
oppressive landscape, so insignificant that he
literally disappears from view.
Possibly the greatest defining motif in modernist art is its
incompleteness. No narrative is ever neatly
wrapped up in a bow and presented as a complete package for
the viewer, and the "meaning" of cinematic
form can never be definitively interpreted in Antonioni's
films. "The language of modernism may often
seem to be fraught with incompleteness" because "completion,
the presentation that is objective and
convincing for the senses, may no longer be considered
necessary or even sufficient" (Malamud 19- 20).
Incompleteness furnishes modernism with a unique sense of
urgency and presence:
Incompleteness augments the effect of temporal
immediacy . . . The language is unfinished
because that which it describes is still unfolding.
This is a triumph of the language of modernism:
it can capture more clearly the sensibility of external
life. Whereas the old language could depict
only that which was dead (that is, completed), the new
language expands its boundaries to
include and affirm the incomplete. (Malamud 20)
Antonioni's narratives are best described as modernist,
incomplete and open texts, along the lines of
writers such as Woolf, Joyce and Proust:
A common but mistaken view is that these writers simply
give up plot -- or, to use the common
phrase, that "nothing happens" in their novels. This
simply means however that nothing
significant happens. There are no "important" events by
the ordinary standards of life. (Chatman
74)
There is no classical linear causality in the Antonioni
narrative. Actions and their consequences do not
seem to match in the classical sense. "Later events are not
self- evidently the consequences of earlier. We
may sense a relationship, but it is attenuated, indirect,
and it suggests less a particular development of
events than a general state of affairs" (Chatman 75).
Characters wander around, seeming to do nothing,
waiting for something to happen. In Blow-Up, Thomas sees the
woman he has photographed earlier in the
park, now window shopping. It seems that she is a major
character in the film, yet she runs off, and it is
the last we see of her. In L'avventura, the search for Anna
just seems to fade out as the narrative goes
along, forgotten, replaced by trivial action such as trying
on wigs, making faces in the mirror, counting at
random, or engaging in meaningless affairs. It is a search
which seems random at best.
Along with the incompleteness of narrative is the
incompleteness of image. The two are related, but it is
here that Antonioni displays his mastery over the relation
between the shot and the narrative information it
reveals. The perfect example of this mastery is the seven
minute long final sequence in The Passenger.
The shot starts as a painfully slow track from inside a
hotel room toward a window facing the square jut
outside. The protagonist (Locke) lies on the bed. The shot
moves to the bars on the exterior side of the
window, passes right through them, and then pans 180 degrees
around the square until it returns to the
window, now looking inside from the outside. Is Locke now
dead? Was he murdered during the camera's
incredible circular journey?
Each figure the camera identifies during this long take is
given equal emphasis: a car, an old man, a dog, a
boy throwing stones, the unnamed female protagonist of the
film, two black men, a police car which
rushes up, the exit of the black men. Each figure or event
is presented in an "objective" fashion; that is to
say, the events and figures that would seem to be most
important to the narrative are not emphasised any
more than the dog or the boy. In this way, then, the shot is
"incomplete" -- it does not clarify all the action
going on for its duration. It is up to the viewer to make
the causal connections and piece together the
narrative. Is it the two black men who kill Locke, or is it
the anonymous girl? Why are all these people
here? What are their off-screen actions? These questions
cannot fully be answered, a testament to the
incompleteness of narrative that is directly related to an
"incompleteness" of form.
Modernism has a language all its own, a language translated
into film by Antonioni. Many before him
used the medium of film to express their own particular
world views, yet only Antonioni created a whole
new language in film based on modernist alienation and
incompleteness. It is a language that owes more
to silence than it does to verbal language, more to stasis
than it does to action. As with all modern texts, it
requires a concentrated effort on the part of the spectator
if it is to be understood at all, a concentrated
effort to decipher the embedded codes and motifs of the
language. Yet, even when we do know the codes,
recognise the patterns and the order that seems to be born
out of his chaos, we are still never quite sure
what Antonioni "means" in his films. There is no one-to-one
relationship of signifier and signified. Every
moment in his films generates emotions in the viewer,
emotions at once simple yet contradictory, ranging
from boredom to exhilaration, and stopping everywhere in
between. Antonioni's films are not just
artefacts -- they are texts, in the true sense of the word.
They interact with us long after their running time
is finished. They are incomplete in both form and content
because they are incomplete within us as well.
They never finished working on us, through us, and in us.
Works
Cited
Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni; or, The Surface of the
World. Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1985.
Lyons, Robert. Michelangelo Antonioni's Neo-realism: A
World View. New York: Arno Press,
1973.
Malamud, Randy. The Language of Modernism. Ann Arbor:
UMI, 1989.
Rifkin, Ned. Antonioni's Visual Language. Ann Arbour,
Michigan: UMI, 1982.
Rohdie, Sam. Antonioni. London: BFI, 1990.