people working on such a clichéd, shallow level, which is insulting
I think people are expressing their perception of the experience in terms of feelings evoked by the films. That can be different than intent – is it shallow?
What is shallow is using literary descriptions such as metaphor, symbolism, and metonymy – as if visual thinking is a language. Language only refers to the other senses; visual thinking is a direct perception.
Visual thinking is about the power dynamic between objects – that is Antonioni’s depth.
Metonymy is about conflating one thing with another – denying the dynamic; being unaware of the space and its properties in terms of power relationships.
-Could you expand on this extrapolation?-
I think you’re lingering on semantics here. How about this: for Bergman there is a transhistorical interiority, for Antonioni there isn’t?
Using a word such as metonym as opposed to metaphor is not the same as using a word such as “hot” when something is really cold, or “red” when something is blue. In other words, the one does not cancel the other out. They are closely related concepts. “Ennui” is an entirely subjective thing, as is “bleak,” insofar as those words describe the way people experience objects in the world, and in no way suggest points of view that are factional or exclusive. The importance of “aesthetics” or “formal properties” of a work of art as opposed to content or ideas is likely to shift according to what is being discussed, because ideas and perceptions and indeed philosophies are mercurial, which makes them exciting.
But I was thinking about how Zabriskie Point is a perfect example of Antonioni’s views about the razing of the old to make way for the new, and the obliteration of the old morality. We have these young people oppressed by the corporate greed of the generation of their parents, starting a revolution and then literally blowing the parents and their constructions up. Their beautiful desert where they frolic and make love blissfully in the dunes is being corrupted by developers, represented by the girl’s father, providing a fake, manicured Eden. The most interesting thing is that television commercial that the development company watches in such satisfaction, where life-sized mannekins pose by their pools or in their kitchens or tennis courts. Those mannekins are so creepy, with their frozen smiles, and seem to represent death, the deadness of the generation that wants to only make more and more money and ruin the landscape. Like the Italian futurists, Antonioni was blowing up the the past, the enormity of European history and its awesome architecture and churches. He replaces those churches with his odd factories and desolate houses in Red Desert, and his mansions with their elaborate swimming pools in Zabriskie Point. But these structures are oppressive too, and quickly begin to take over and rule the people who built them, needing in turn to be rejected or destroyed. As the great futurist Marinetti said: “The past is necessarily inferior to the future. That is how we wish it to be. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dangerous enemy: the past, gloomy prevaricator, execrable tutor?”
Traveling in Europe, I could actually feel the oppressiveness of European history through the architecture. The beauty and awesomeness of the churches is so undeniable as to make us feel awkward and insignificant next to them. What can we create that is as great as that architecture, indeed as big as the power of the Christian church? Marinetti in his zeal to destroy the past indeed worked with Mussolini to bulldoze over Roman ruins. What’s interesting is that Bergman felt more or less the same way, not about architecture maybe, but about the mental and emotional structures that the church created. When he got rid of God, then he could live, create something, not feel so measly and humble and small and wretched. Then he could be a man.
Bergman’s achievement was in speaking so deeply and with so much insight about all of the things that were forbidden in polite culture: the death of God, the pain of male female relationships, the anguish of mortality, the horrors of losing one’s mind or identity, the struggles of the artist, the shame and complexity of sex and desire, and especially of female desire.
We can see these same struggles in all of the great filmmakers of that era. Pasolini and Fellini and Bresson had their own ways of dealing with God and history, not to mention Buñuel. But Antonioni found his utopia in the landscape. I still see some of his films as relating to westerns in that sense. It’s all about people getting outside those oppressive historical structures and then seeing what happens. The American west is a place that’s still in flux, still a frontier of sorts, with lots of space that’s still undeveloped, especially in the desert. So it’s interesting to see him set his film about the utopian dreams of youth in California and Arizona. He was of course wrong that the hippies would save the world. But in a way we are still living with the legacy that the ’60s created. Now perhaps,, at least in America, we have the opposite problem: too much youth culture and freedom, and too little structure and history.
What is shallow is using literary descriptions such as metaphor, symbolism, and metonymy – as if visual thinking is a language.
Oh, ok. Find someone else less shallow to talk to, then. Bye!
LEAVES
The thing is – the guy explicitly says that Antonioni does not use metaphor. This sort of thing gets carried into unqualified statements such as the following: Antonioni’s cinema is metonymic.
As such, your statement on that point is false on that point. I’m having trouble understanding how you can reduce our lengthy discussions into such gross simplifications and distortions as “she said Antonioni is bleak therefore she means Bergman is not bleak.” Let me quote the sentence in question that you wrote in a thread entitled ‘HOW DO PEOPLE FEEL ABOUT THIS ASSESSMENT COMPARING BERGMAN TO ANTONIONI’:
To say that Antonioni does not find people interesting is not to say that his work is not interesting, or that he does not make people interesting to us in his films. He is simply expressing a dark view of humanity, which I would argue only makes his work more interesting (more bleak, more severe).
More bleak in comparison to what? I seem to have assumed: Bergman, since this is a thread about comparing Bergman and Antonioni. Apparently you intended this to be an implied but unreferenced ‘more bleak than it could have otherwise been’, which is a very odd and misleading grammatical construction, so… yeah. Maybe there is some human error in play that isn’t solely my fault? And, reading back, you clarified the point, sort of – not by actually addressing the wording which was and is still misleading, not by attempting to understand how another reasonable person could interpret your statement in such a way, but by merely stating: ‘I never said Antonioni was more bleak or severe than Bergman.’ I’m not going to look at the style/political example, and perhaps there I was completely in the wrong, and for that I apologize, but, you know, people make mistakes. I don’t begrudge you yours, but you ain’t perfect, I can tell you that much, and you don’t seem to make any effort to understand how anyone else could think other than you. Take, for example, when you started this conversation with a quote from interviews with directors and then repeatedly referenced some statement that Antonioni supposedly made, without ever pointing out which statement that was in order to erase confusion over what you were saying, which turned out to be not the statement Antonioni made which turned out, in my opinion, to not in any manner at all to be representative of what you said that Antonioni said, so I guess we all have our faults that make discussion difficult, no? I mean, if you really want to cagalogue each other’s barriers to discussion we can do that. I think it would be far easier to assume that perhaps we both make mistakes both in writing and in reading and attempt to mitigate misunderstandings through clarification rather than denunciation.
As for ‘conspiratorial’, it is a reference to these people acting like conspiracy theorists – ’They’re out there, I know it, trying to say that Antonioni is about ennui and that his camera is metaphorical, not metonymic.’ They are reactive statements, reacting to either air or assumption – and reacting against assumptions is the behavior of conspiracy theorists. Of course this makes me a conspiracy theorist, as well, but it’s all in good fun. lol.