Analysis of Michelangelo Antonionis Films - Movie Review Example

Film Analysis: Antonioni The Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni is renowned for the visual impact of his films, both the black and white trilogy of the early 1960s consisting of L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and l’Eclisse (1962) and his works in color which began with Deserto Rosso (1964). To some extent this could be said of all film makers, since the moving visual image is what distinguishes cinema from static art forms like painting and writing, and the breadth of possibilities of the screen far exceed the confines of live theatre. Antonioni is, however, more than any film maker, completely obsessed with and enchanted by the visual aspects of film. This does not mean, however, that he has given up on conventional aspects like narrative, plot and characterization. It means that these dimensions stand in a different relationship to the images than one might expect, or, in the words of Antonioni himself when speaking of L’Avventura: “My film is neither a denunciation nor a sermon. It is a story told through images…” The authorial presence of Antonioni, therefore, is to be found in the images, and this is what distinguishes him from other directors, and makes his work so distinctive and memorable in the history of European film. When L’Avventura was first shown, it was met with a combination of recognition and incomprehension. Echoes from the avant-garde and existentialist philosophy were clearly discernible in the situation of a group of young people on holiday in Sicily, displaced from their usual urban location, and finding suddenly that one of their number has just vanished. Houston notes that the film recalls “reports from the frontiers of alienation” and regards it as “one of the most significant post-war films.” (1980, p. 87) Non-Italain audiences were also captivated by the austere beauty of the island location: it is a landscape that not many people had seen in films before. It was not so much the theme that shocked audiences, but the fact that the fate of the missing character Anna is never revealed. The film starts with her disappearance, and defying all conventions of the time, ends with no further clue as to what happened to her. The other characters carry on their lives, and the audience is left unsatisfied and still wondering. This was a signal of the authorial style that Antonioni was to use in later films. The next film he made, La Notte, has an urban feel to it, and the two main characters Lidia and Giovanni wander through the city of Milan as if they do not belong there. Arrowsmith identifies themes such as nomadism, a society in transition, and transience and points out that Antonioni stretches the camera techniques to make the point that the human beings are not necessarily the absolute center of everything: “Again and again in la Notte – I counted at least five occasions – the human figures in the foreground reveal their transience by disappearing from the frame, and the world that was once background becomes the subject” (Arrowsmith, 1995, p. 54). This critic notes also that the film ends on an outward sweep of the camera over trees, having briefly seen Lidia and Giovanni posed against two single trees, one straight and one twisted (p. 64-65). The two trees are obviously meant to be connected with the two characters, although it is not entirely clear which tree relates to which person. When the camera pans out, it becomes evident that there are many more trees, of all different kinds, and the implication seems to be that the two humans are just random people, part of a huge world of others, and not of particular interest. The “background” in Antonioni’s films is never passive, never just a reflector of the human beings’ moods, but always a counterpoint to their experience. The world of things also seems to be given its point of view, and this is a calmer, more serene state of mind, where it does not matter if the loose ends of the plot all tie up to make a neat ending or not. The third film in the trilogy, L’Eclisse tells what on the surface is a romantic story about a couple, the mesmerizing and astonishingly beautiful Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. These two actors represented the quintessential idols of the early sixties: stylish, modern and open to a freer kind of urban sexuality than the Roman Catholic traditions of rural Italy. By choosing Vitti again, Antonioni encourages his audience to think back to previous films where she played similar characters. The studied boredom, and the playful but strangely distant lovemaking of the two seems to build on previous Antonioni studies of alienation and miscommunication. The situation, for it is really scenario rather than a full blown plot, is that Vittoria falls in love with her mother’s stockbroker, and they have a series of secret meetings. The scenes shift from their rendez-vous outdoors, to their intimate moments indoors, and various other locations indicating aspects of both their separate lives. It is very noticeable that there are long spells without real dialogue. The camera dwells lovingly on their embraces, or explores the architecture and ambience of the stockmarket where the Delon character works. Delon’s workmates are mostly unattractive older men, stuck in old fashioned formality or caught up in greed for financial gain on the stock exchange trading floor. Delon, in comparison, is carefree, desperate to escape the stressful office environment and flee to the charms of Vitti. In this film, too, there is an extremely strong sense of place. Arrowsmith notes that “If one had to select Antonioni’s leading contribution to the art of cinema, it would have to be his way of relating character to environment” (1995, p.90). This is undoubtedly true, but Arrowsmith does not quite express the extent to which this applies in L’Eclisse when he says that Antonioni “uses settings to represent characters’ states of mind” (Arrowsmith, 1995, p. 90). The ending of L’Eclisse shows the usual meeting place of the lovers, with all the by now familiar buildings, trees, scaffolding, road markings and fences. There is a very strong mood conveyed by these images, but in no sense is this directly related to the main characters, since they are not even present in the scene. The point that Antonioni is making is that the “state of mind” that he wants to convey is there, in the absence of the human beings, and it is as if the place, too, is a character in the drama. It does not speak (but then neither did the human characters very much) but it has sounds and a certain kind of movement in the light and shadow, and the coming and going of traffic and nondescript people and animals. The human beings are relegated to a distant, unknown “elsewhere” and the audience is left to ponder on the meanings that are left in the space that is shown. Once again the author has pulled a masterly trick, and has forced the audience to expect a certain outcome, and then deal with the surprise, annoyance, and questions that arise when the expectation is not met. This group of three black and white films displays a unified authorial presence which transcends the surface events which occur. Arrowsmith’s attempt to analyse the love affairs in these films misses the main point altogether, since the human conventions of falling in love, getting married, and being faithful or unfaithful are meaningless constructs when seen through the eyes of those who have lost touch with traditional middle class Italian values. Chapman finds a better approach with the observation that the films have an “attenuated narrative logic that avoids suggestions of causation and that still hints at some principle of connexity” (Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World, 1985, p. 74). This is difficult language trying to express a difficult concept. Words like “connexity” and “contingency” only partly explain the lack of causal narrative logic in the films. They somehow manage still to retain meaning for the audience but it is a diffuse and personal meaning, constructed as much by the viewer as the film maker, and this explains perhaps why so many people remember Antonioni’s films with such fondness. The first color film that Antonioni made, Deserto Rosso, takes some of these earlier ideas and techniques and structures them more firmly within the consciousness of the main character, Giuliana. Monica Vitti plays the role, but somewhat disconcertingly with dark hair, and so Antonioni seems to be indicating that this film is both connected to Vitti’s other roles, but also somewhat different. Once again the scenery in the film takes on just as important, and stunningly memorable, a role as it did in the earlier films, there is an added twist due to the fact that some (all?) of it is filtered through the lens of her depressive personality. There are scenes of idyllic beauty, as when Giuliana imagines a young girl on a Sardinian beach, or when industrial and agricultural worlds meet in fields and outbuildings, but the question now is how much of this is all real, and how much just a figment of the main character’s imagination. Arrowsmith notes that the Sardinian beach scene has a nostalgic message about the feelings of the main character, Guiliana: “love and childhood are fused in the figure of the adolescent girl on her island” (p. 90) and suggests that Antonioni is trying to make out that women are more rooted to nature, and “more bound to place and time” than men. It is possible to read this idyllic little interlude in a different way, however, since the warmth and light of the sea and sand is contrasted with the cold and dark little room that Guiliana sits in. It is possible to deduce that this particular woman is fantasizing about different places and times precisely because she cannot find a place to settle and be content. The island is a dream, painted in impossibly idealized fashion, with a child too innocent to know love, and a landscape untouched by industrial civilization. The child hides in the trees when the red sails of a passing boat arrive, because the child does not want to make contact with other people. This scene is not so much about love, as about an existence before romantic love is awakened. It is an innocent state of seclusion and self sufficiency, and it is this return to a previous identity that Giuliana seems to long for. In the Deserto Rosso Antonioni is feeling his way into a new authorial position, where the psychological landscape can be given the same affectionate, intuitive and annoyingly unresolved treatment that the natural and cityscape landscapes had before. This is the kind of film that one wants to watch again once it is over, because watching the Vitti character through the film is like seeing someone age and mature from the thoughtless hedonist kind of person that Vitti played in the earlier films to this wiser but very much sadder woman facing middle age with the knowledge that love with her husband is non existent, and with her temporary lover meaningless. She is sick, and appears to be aware that she is losing her mental capacities. The landscape in Deserto Rosso is also sick, being destroyed by the industrialization that underpins modernity: petrochemicals, pollution and huge factories that dwarf all the people who work there. And yet, Antonioni makes it all beautiful in a sombre kind of way, and one wants to go back and re-examine the film image by image to trace this descent from the early sixties black and white chic into this bizarrely colourful purgatory. In summary, then, Antonioni is rightly remembered as the director who told his stories in images, and the task of audiences down the ages since these magical films were first made is to learn this new language of storytelling: one where the author refuses to lay out the links in a causal chain and asks the audience just to look, listen and intuitively understand the deep, unspoken connections between people and things in the world. References Note: References are taken from course information, and some publisher details are therefore incomplete. Arrowsmith, William. Antonioni: The Poet of Images. 1995. Chatman. Antonioni or, The Surface of the World, 1985. Duckworth, A. R. “Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cannes Statement for L’Avventura (1960). The Motley View Thursday October 15, 2009. Houston Penelope, “Michelangelo Antonioni” 1980. Sitney, P. Adams. Vital Crises in Italian Cinema. 1995. Read More