Michelangelo Antonioni has a perversion concerning ellipses…that is, the segments of time or speech where something merely trails off, descends into nonaction, non-thought. (In German poetry, there’s an even more potent equivalent, “gedankenschlag” -- a “thought-dash“.) In Antonioni’s films, often these elliptical periods are laboriously sustained, dragging the viewer through fields of tedium with the conscience of a documentarist; other periods of time are vaulted without care. What moves Antonioni to show one sequence of events that’s of no particular importance to the narrative, and not another of approximately equal importance? Perhaps he’d crawl through them all if he had the time. The impression one gets that Antonioni’s films are “all interstice” - that is, “all made of parts that would have been cut from another movie” comes from the fact that, in a film like The Passenger, the ‘interludes’ of relative inaction don’t allow the viewer to disengage, as most movies permit briefly between things that “happen”. Instead, we’re dragged through the itchy tedium that Nicholson’s character experiences for what feels like days on end. That’s what people remember about an Antonioni film: no one gets out and says, “Hm, that didn’t feel like two hours.” Because he keeps his characters and their environments largely impenetrable - save for a few moments in each film where their transparency is terrible, it’s almost impossible to get “lost in” an Antonioni film to the extent that time slips away. But, being always the outsider, you have the time and the space to be a careful observer, a fact that always makes me wonder why there’s not more writing about Antonioni.

It could almost be said that Antonioni infuses his films with modern architecture like Malick uses nature – but instead of the latter’s seductive panning, which complements and draws attention to the kinetic property of nature, Antonioni’s shots are still, decentered, showing the impassiveness and stolidness of these modern structures – his is a peculiar conceit, in that he believes that he must differentiate his characters from his architecture, as if the disparities were not naturally existing. Like his facades, many of Antonioni’s characters (Nicholson in The Passenger, Monica Vitti in L’Avventura and L’Eclisse, David Hemmings in Blow-Up) are impassive, impenetrable, intractable – but with an edge of frivolity, or sometimes lightness, or serious play, that never really undercuts the gravity. To see Antonioni on a big screen is essential – only then do his characters seem to have the weight and latitude that the films suggest. Footfalls then do seem worthy of their prominence. Like Bresson, Antonioni’s wordless stretches are filled with sound – whether it be the clanking of a gate or the clatter of heels on pavement, or shouts from a faraway street, the sounds positively fill the space. Unlike Bresson, however, Antonioni doesn’t seem to believe in the “primacy” of sound - that it evinces far more than the visual spectacle; that’s why, in Bresson, you can hear the rustle of money in peoples’ pockets when they walk by. Rather, Antonioni uses sound to anchor a wordless shot or scene: the eerie rustling of woven tarps on a half-finished apartment building, the beating of a fan in a sweltering room, footfalls in a grand hotel lobby.
It’s often remarked that Antonioni’s films consist of a series of discrete events. This is the case, if one is simply analyzing them in terms of the absence of a traditional narrative which emphasizes continuity and causality; finding these elements not present, or at least repressed in favor of a documentarian kind of revelation, one might feel justified in assuming a direct link between Antonioni and the neorealist movement that preceded him. De Sica, Rossellini, and Visconti are generally agreed to be at the center of this movement, although, as with many critically-vetted movements that show a certain permanence, the definition of neorealism has come to be so broad and simplistic (adjectives derived from proper nouns either dilute or disappear; they’re transitional words that mediate between popular dynasties) that many directors identified with the movement have distanced themselves from it. But I think it’s a mistake to assume such a direct lineage – while I don’t contend the fact that the success of these directors set the stage for Antonioni’s eventual recognition, they share only stylistic similarities. Consider Pontecorvo’s The Wide Blue Road (1957) to be an exemplar of Italian neorealism. Like his contemporaries, Pontecorvo examines working-class subsistence, drawing out the pathos and humor inherent in a single family’s quotidian existence, uncovering the terms by which they predicate themselves and the world, and staging events by which their individual responses evince these principles. Of course, The Wide Blue Road moves far beyond this provisional formula. But it’s clear that Antonioni’s films don’t share this common foundation. While most neorealist filmmakers didn’t consider themselves to be primarily “political” filmmakers, the fact remains that it’s difficult to show the hardships of the working class without building a case for social change alongside them. The argument comes together of its own accord. Of course, not all films about working-class struggle make a comprehensive social statement – some, like Mamma Roma or Jackie Brown, don’t extend their conclusions (if drawn) beyond their protagonists.

Critics often cite Antonioni’s rather tongue-in-cheek claim that he’s “the man who took the bicycle out of neorealism”, picking out the bicycle as a symbol of the nostalgia and romanticism that pervade the neorealist films. His protagonists are members of the leisure class, and if not, have (at least nominally) glamorous job titles: foreign correspondent, fashion photographer. If directors like De Sica approached their material with the sharp, sparkling eye of a caricaturist and the conscience of a documentarian, then Antonioni hands us a caricature that we’re disappointed to find looks just like us – and we’re not holding a surfing trophy or a pair of jazz shoes or anything like that. We look bored. Antonioni, like Robert Bresson, subtracts the interest from every event, leaving viewers with the impression that the film they’ve just seen consisted of every scene that would’ve been left out of another film. But, unlike Bresson, he doesn’t strive to make the remarkable seem unaffecting by instructing his actors to respond listlessly in nerve-wracking situations; rather than bleaching every bit of the spectacular from his scenes, he simply counterweights it by giving equal consideration to the by-products of an event: the compulsive rearranging and fidgeting of a woman involved in a lovers' quarrel; the sound of dripping water from a car that’s been pulled from a lake with a dead body in the front seat; the activity of an old man seated on a bench across a wide dirt road while police rush to apprehend the protagonist. On a larger scale, he balances the impacting parts with so much silence, stillness, wideness, and impassivity that they seem dwarfed by the momentous calm and uneasy lull of the rest of the film.

To characterize his films as consisting of a series of events between which no connection is explicitly forged misses one important point – instead of the neorealists’ obsessive objectivity, he places the universe of the film so close to the characters that it practically becomes a secondary epistemology. Thus, the sense of fragmentation and impenetrability we feel in a film like Blow-Up or L’Eclisse is the product of the inability of the main character (who becomes our cinematic “avatar”) to connect these free-standing events with one another.
Antonioni frequently uses disorienting images to remind us of this fundamental disconnect, to disrupt our attempts to place the images and dialogue on some sort of diegetic continuum – filling the frame with a portrait of a Kenyan woman who, for a split second, might be standing in the unfamiliar apartment; tight shots of sourceless, pixellated vegetation in a blown-up photograph; the edges of a Gaudi building. In the way a director like Pasolini believed in using ellipses to “force us into” the film (i.e., by making us account for the absences – filling in the gaps, we put ourselves into the film), Antonioni isolates images or events to suspend our attempts to build a world, so that the cinematic universe supervenes on our thought, rather than ours on it. He places us alongside the characters who are unable to bring the disparate phenomena of their world together. We can’t avoid sharing their epistemic upheaval; there are simply no ligatures between the phenomena, and we can’t fabricate these connections without some raw material, which, when we find it, we discover to be unmalleable. Both Pasolini and Antonioni utilize the “excluded middle” to entice the viewer into collusion with the film’s universe, only Antonioni keeps it evasive. That’s the supremely frustrating thing: our viewing experience disposes us to treat L’Eclisse like a psychological film, when it is actually as unyielding as the frontage splashed across the screen, but this tenuous suspension (we hang between our own identities and those of the characters, unwilling to withdraw and unable to connect) is what I think Antonioni desires to create. (He has found, I think, the most direct formula.)

Theresa Smith

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