l'eclisse...what the hell?
I’m sorry: I think L’ECLISSE and L’AVVENTURA are both interminable snorefests.
BLOW-UP is watchable only because of the Swinging 60’s touches and colors… otherwise, it’s tedious and ultimately inscrutable and unsatisfying , too.
ZABRISKIE POINT is tedious, but you watch it just as a time-capsule of the “youth rebellion of 1969” and out of sheer incredulity that this could ever be entertainment.
Scorsese on L’Eclisse
scorsese’s great! love his analytical narration.
I’d love to read that interview, Frank. You can scan it and u/load it. In fact, if you have a decent quality digital camera, that will do the work of an actual scanner. I know you’ve said you’re not so technically savvy, so have one of your students get on it. They could have that bad boy ready to go in no time!
There was a collection of interviews with Antonioni published back in the sixties. I found a worn copy in the long gone Cinema bookstore- on 12th Street, if I remember correctly. You must remember that shop, Frank. You can get a lot about Antonioni’s politics from those discussions. He talks around the subject, as you can imagine. While not identifying as a Marxist, he sounds very much like one, albeit a deeply disaffected one. What did you pry from him on this?
Life Is Inconclusive: A Conversation with Michelangelo Antonioni
FRANK P. TOMASULO/1982
As I SP0KE T0 ANT0NIONI ON A DISMAL, rainy, late September day in 1982 at Cornell University, three analogies came to mind. All involved the cinema.
The first analogy was with the Hitchcock-Truffaut interviews, in which Hitchcock displaced Truffaut’s questions about psychology, philosophy, and religion to what was for him the more familiar terrain of camera angles, production details, and star profiles. Antonioni, justifiably displeased with the circumstances under which he happened to be at Cornell, likewise diverted my questions onto other paths. More than once, he replied, “When I was a critic, it was my job to interpret someone else’s films. Now it’s your job.”
The second cinematic analogy related to the horrific tooth-pulling scene in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man. To get the information (or the diamonds—I don’t remember which), Laurence Olivier is compelled to yank healthy teeth out of a helpless Dustin Hoffman. Just as violence in Antonioni’s films generally takes place off-screen, I’ve left out the gruesome details of the pain involved in this extraction of information.
My final analogy was the most disturbing. In The Passenger, an African shaman turns the tables (and the camera) on his interviewer by saying, “Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answers would be about me.” Since Antonioni’s work is the subject of my UCLA doctoral dissertation (“The Rhetoric of Ambiguity: Michelangelo Antonioni and the Modernist Discourse”), the following questions stemmed from my own research.
Nonetheless, given the circumstances under which this interview was conducted, I will let readers decide for themselves whether the information extracted was worth the effort expended by both parties.
FT: Your oeuvre, especially after Il Grido, fits into that discourse we refer to as Modernism—a term, however, which is all too ubiquitous. In the cinema, Modernism can encompass such diverse filmmakers as Wiene, Eisenstein, Vertov, Cocteau, Deren, Fellini, Resnais, Godard, Duras, Brakhage, and Snow. Some are narrative filmmakers, some are not. Some are representational artists, others are not. How would you position yourself in this form-content dialectic?
MA: That’s really your job. You’re the critic.
FT: To be more concrete, then: as a director concerned with the aesthetics of the image, what is the role of narrative in your work?
MA: My impulse, even early on in my career, was in terms of story. Even my documentary Gente Del Po is a story. The film I consider to be my best short documentary, N.U., is a story. It’s the story of a day.
FT: Do you see any similarities between your work and the films of more avant-garde practitioners like Michael Snow?
M A: I do like to experiment. Perhaps it’s in a different way. As you’ve described La Region Centrale to me, I’ve probably used the same sort of camera gyroscope to maintain balance and fluidity.
FT: What is it about narrative that attracts you?
MA: Film has always been, for me, conflict. A man, a woman: drama. My next film will be different, however. It will be a man versus three other men. It’s tentatively titled The Crew, and it will be shot here in the United States. I have the locations, the environments, almost all picked out. The story and the characters will follow. I will be meeting my American producer in New York next week to work out the details.
FT: Why work in the United States again, considering the artistic success of Identification of a Woman, your first Italian film in eighteen years?
M A: First of all, because of the poor state of the Italian ;film industry. The films they make now are either low-budget or those lightweight comedies with certain actors like Mario Verdoni. I hate them. They’re all in dialect.
FT: Your only previous American film, Zabriskie Point, was severely criticized on its initial release, particularly by the Establishment critics, who asked, “What does this Italian know about America?”
MA: I made ten pictures in Italy and they said that my focus was too narrow. Critics, of course, say the same thing about your Robert Altman—that he doesn’t understand America.
FT: All your films—not just the more overtly political Zabriskie Point—strike me as profoundly ideological. What is the role of political ideas in your work?
M A: I don’t start from a thesis, if that’s what you’re getting at. It’s the plot which is most important. As I’m a man who lives in Italy—a very political country—it inevitably enters the picture. We feel everything in regard to politics in Italy! And not just in the cinema, but through the newspapers, art, elections … Italy is so corrupted by political scandals now. We’re against it, of course, and in favor of social justice.
FT: Since you mention" social justice," why do your films emphasize the role of the bourgeoisie more than other factions in Italian life?
M A: Quite simply because I know the bourgeois class better. I grew up with that background, as a tennis champion. That was my milieu. But it was not in Rome or Florence, but in Ferrara, which is not so aristocratic.
FT: You seem to criticize or satirize the bourgeoisie.
MA: Yes. I was so against the bourgeoisie and wanted to say something against it. Only in Il Grido and Gente Del Po do I deal with the working classes. That was in reaction to a government which didn’t want films to be about workers.
FT: Like Renoir, you portray the dialectics of decay of the bourgeoisie. This is an act of negation, in Marcuse’s terminology. But is there a solution, something positive?
MA: The bourgeoisie is sliding into nothingness. They’re disappearing slowly. I don’t know what the alternative might be.
FT: Does the reaction of Daria, after “blowing up” the corporate house in Zabriskie Point, suggest one answer?
MA: That was the personal reaction of that girl, of that character. It was not my statement. Let’s just say that I’m against certain rules of this society. Zabriskie Point really happened, in Phoenix. There was an airplane theft and a police killing. I was visually interested in this fact. The idea of a helicopter going around excited my fantasy.
FT: Your work is filled with scenes of exquisite visual beauty, moments of pure form. As a modernist, are there other artists who have influenced you: writers, architects, painters, other filmmakers?
M A: I’m not really conscious of any artistic influences at work on me. I’m now much more intuitive. I ask to be alone on the set or the location for fifteen minutes. Then I shoot the first idea that comes into my head. Pasolini, I know, wants to redo paintings in the cinema. You speak of the beauty of my images, but the best shots are cut from the films.
FT: If there are no direct influences, are there at least filmmakers who appeal to you?
M A: Only Steven Spielberg can appeal to all audiences. He’s a genius for that, but not on this earth.
FT: How do you feel about retrospective screenings of your films, when scholars and critics praise your work so extravagantly in public and attribute intentions which you hardly recognize?
MA: It’s very alienating. It’s as if they were speaking about someone else. Ned Rivkin gave me his book to read (Antonioni’s Visual Language). It’s very accurate.
FT: About your artistic intentions?
MA: You can’t ask Jackson Pollock why he made one circle black and another one pink.
MA: I would have to say that Sartre and Camus played a role. Their philosophy, as a post-war philosophy, was important to me at that time.
FT: As a postscript, what do you think about your latest honor: being named Professor-at-Large by Cornell?
MA: Now I’m a professor! It makes me laugh because I’m really more like a pupil. I want to experiment with every film. In Rome, a man once came up to me and said, “Your movies made me grow!” When I told an associate about this incident, he asked me, “was the man very tall?”
from On Film (Los Angeles), no. 13 (Fall 1984), pp. 61-64. Reprinted by permission of Frank P. Tomasulo.
M A: Only Steven Spielberg can appeal to all audiences. He’s a genius for that, but not on this earth.
What did he mean by:
but not on this earth.
That was really insightful – so many things to consider especially about plot & narrative.
Great job Frank !
When I first saw L’Eclisse, in class, I was blown away. I waited excitedly for the next week for us to discuss it. I went to class prepared with as much as I could get out and say before, I expected, everyone else said it first. I spent a good fifteen minutes talking about everything I could think of—the angles, the eclipses (everything, I say EVERYTHING, in this movie is an eclipse because if you notice it, it’s covering something else) and ellipses (another form of eclipse, in a way), the alternative use of neo-realism to a separate thematic direction, the use of architecture, the framing, the mise-en-scene (mushroom-cloud shaped watertower in the background, the use of African motifs), I talked and talked.
Finally I stopped and the room was silent. I worried that I had said too much that other people had wanted to say and that I had dominated too much of the conversation, and I should have let other people speak and bring up their perspectives. My professor nodded and said, “Well, before I start, does anyone else have anything to say?”
Silence. Then a voice.
“I didn’t get any of that from watching it. I didn’t really think anything happened in this movie at all.”
And then the entire class chorused “Yeah…” My heart sank a little.
So my professor and I spent the rest of the class talking about how awesome L’Eclisse is and pretty much ignoring the rest of the class.
Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, but the fact is that every single frame in this movie sent shivers down my spine. If it did not affect you in that way, that’s just simply unfortunate. I have watched this movie dozens of times since, and even wrote a 26 page research paper comparing it to Performance (basic thesis: modernism vs. post-modernism use of disappearing characters), my other favorite “I could watch this a million times no matter what anybody thinks” movie.
—PolarisDiB
I was blown away by my first Antonioni film La Notte.
Dane, you didn’t talk about plot and story though, did you?
I found Antonioni’s emphasis on plot and story a surprise from the interview.
@ Frank after almost 30 years will you answer the question:
How would you position Antonioni in this form-content dialectic?
Also, I found this significant given my POV that conflict is the basis of human interaction:
MA: Film has always been, for me, conflict.
I am utterly ashamed that I have not seen L’eclisse at a time when I find great affinity (if only I had the right to use this word) with the work of Antonioni.
But since all the Antonioni admirers are camping here, may I ask if anyone has thoughts on La signora senza camelie or any of his other earlier films?
@ LAW
FT: To be more concrete, then: as a director concerned with the aesthetics of the image, what is the role of narrative in your work?
MA: My impulse, even early on in my career, was in terms of story. Even my documentary Gente Del Po is a story. The film I consider to be my best short documentary, N.U., is a story. It’s the story of a day.
I see his later style in his early films. I think Antonioni was a person with very strong visual sensibilities who felt he was about plot & story. That combination in his consciousness is perhaps what makes his work clearly unique.
I think people with strong visual sensibilities immediately gravitate to his style.
@Robert W Peabody III: Probably a book could be written about the form-content dialectic in Antonioni’s films. In fact, such books HAVE been written.
If pressed, and in brief, I would say that Antonioni epitomizes the modernist idea that form = content and content = form. In other words, “beauty is truth and truth is beauty.”However, in his cinema, meaning is transmitted on different “wires” than in conventional films. One must be more attentive to mise-en-scene, subtleties of gesture and sound, temps mort, and other cinematic articulations rather than the customary means: dialogue and action.
Thus, Polaris’s classroom example above demonstrates the degree to which mainstream film has conditioned the taste and sensibility of the mass audience to ONLY rely on obvious cues and conventions to make sense of movies. (I had a similar example when I screened BLOW-UP to a class of GRADUATE filmmaking students. Most just “didn’t get it” and that was Antonioni’s most accessible and successful film.)
Antonioni’s films DO evince a concern for drama, conflict, human beings, etc. but that interest is conveyed differently. For example, in the opening scene of ECLIPSE, the discord between the man and the woman is not enunciated completely through dialogue but, instead, through an abstract expressionist painting on the wall, an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, and the whirr of an electric razor and a fan. (I wish I had those images to post.)
Here’s an example where the pillar of the Roman Stock Exchange separates the man and woman, and cuts the woman in half. To a student of Italian painting, this composition resembles a religious scene with the donors depicted on the left and right EXCEPT THAT the main focus is on the alienating nature of capitalism (the column). In addition, the man is positioned on the dominant screen right portion of the screen while the woman is cut in half and minimized by the mise-en-scene. Antonioni seems to be saying that we have made a religion of money and that it interferes with human relationships, exemplified by a later scene when the man (a stockbroker) kisses the woman through a pane of glass.
His work is made all the more brilliant by your response – thanks.
What did you make of his Steven Spielberg comment?: but not on this earth
Robert W. P: Antonioni’s comment about Spielberg — “but not on this earth” — was a joking reference to E.T., which had just been released in 1982.
How would you position yourself in this form-content dialectic?
It is nice to see this thread revived and see Frank’s interview with Antonioni posted thanks to Robert. I appreciate all the comments added by Pranaya Rana, Frank, Robert, PolarisDib, and others here. It is always good to get new takes and insights into this most enigmatic of directors.
PolarisDib – My own sentiments regarding the brilliance in every single frame of L’eclisse matches yours. Antonioni was the master of the significant, symbol-laden frame. You can watch his scenes many times and still see subtle hints in juxtaposition of objects, people, pictures, etc. He expresses in his concrete way of framing the abstract intent at the heart of his films. Like all the great directors, he is very aware of each frame and how they inter-connect to tell a story visually. He had the eye of a great photographer and artist. I know through interviews that he was very attracted to abstract expressionism in painting and talked with de Kooning, among others, of similarities of his cinematic visual style with those of painters from this period.
Through Frank’s interview, we learn that Antonioni was a student of existentialism, as expressed by Camus and Sartre. Existentialism in this context is the ultimate philosophical take on alienation – how each of us is caught in a null-void, where meaning cannot be found outside ourselves in the forces of society, religion, or politics. Any truth is subjective and perhaps can only be found in the struggle itself to find meaning. I recently saw Visconti’s adaptation of Camus’ The Stranger with the great Marcello Mastroianni. Good as this film is, we can but wonder how Antonioni would have adapted it.
Antonioni became one of the great visionaries in film of this radical reconstruction of philosophical meaning. Blow Up, and Antonioni’s earlier Italian work, became a symbol in film of a profound alienation felt by many in the 60’s with the world around them. His films from this period cannot be seen without the context of the times to put them in perspective. Do any of the younger posters feel that alienation now? It is a different age, I imagine – as it should be.
One thing I notice after recently re-thinking some of Antonioni’s themes is his use of ‘absence’ to create a mood. In Blow Up, we have the ‘absence’ of the body when Hemmings walks back to the park where he first saw it. In L’avventura, we have the ‘absence’ of the frivolous young woman that launches the fruitless search. In L’eclisse, we have the ‘absence’ of the two main characters at the end. In each case, the element of absence – of something missing – seems to allude to a significant void. Perhaps in this we can see Antonioni’s true roots in 50’s/60’s existentialism. I think it impossible to look at his films without seeing how this becomes a philosophical statement by Antonioni – a statement about the lack or absence of something significant in modern life.
Of course, for those who can’t see or appreciate his stark aesthetics, they see ‘nothing’ instead of this ‘absence’. That is why Antonioni will always be a director who appeals mainly to those of a certain aesthetic or philosophical bent. He is the master of the void – the absence – in modern cinema. For some, his films are a revelation, for others (as above) a ‘snorefest’.
For anyone wishing to explore the topic further, see this older thread:
Polarisdib — That class shoudl have been interrogated as to what they thought ’"something happening" meant.
polarsdib – the exact same thing happened in my class. what school do/did you go to?
@Joe Arthaus Do any of the younger posters feel that alienation now?
With all the frenetic activity related to gizmos and gadgets, maybe they suffer from a lack OF absence
Drunken Father of Old asked me to explain what I meant in another thread by “everything eclipses everything else” when talking about L’Eclisse. I wrote him a PM but I liked it enough I decided to add it to a pre-existing thread. This is one of the highest ones I found that has a good discussion going in it. Perhaps there is still more to be said!
Here is my response to D’FoO (whom I do not pity):
I’ve rewritten this essay in various forms way too many times, I probably should just find my old school essay with research et al and get it published or something, but I’m going to just sum this up for you
1) The first and most readily observable instant is the fact that in almost every frame, there is one major object in front of another or in between two others. Often in the case when it is not shot like this, there is some sort of framing device, like a literal picture frame, a window, or a POV out a window (for instance, in the plane scenes). That’s the easiest part.
2) In the beginning titles we begin with a pop song, and then it fades out and becomes a doom song. What sets the tone of the movie, the pop or the doom? What is the culture at the time, the pop or the doom? It’s both, but only one can play at a time. The one eclipses the other.
3) The majority of the movie is narrative and focuses squarely on Vitti and her relationships. Then suddenly all of that is eclipsed by a non-narrative ending that shows a society under fear of the bomb. OR, has that whole story been eclipsed the whole time by the culture we’ve been focusing on, the rich and decadent?
4) Vitti’s character seems very attracted to African objects and motifs—the scene in the explorer’s apartment, the scene after the plane ride when she is attracted to jazz music and finds a shop where black people are sitting outside. Her society has eclipsed this “naturalized”, “savage” society—or does her apparent thinking of it in that way, as a sort of free and releasing society, eclipse the way its been modernized and turned no more special than her own?
5) I only go back to the opening sequence after the titles after establishing easier to see things like above. The entire opening sequence is Vitti stepping around a room, trying to put her relationship with this man in perspective. The entire time a mushroom cloud looms outside, but we never know it. Once we do, we GO outside, but at that point the man follows her, trying to put her into perspective. This is the first set-up of eclipsing spaces between scenes that occurs, and continues throughout the movie. Whenever we are in one space, some other space that is effecting it is hidden until a reveal. This is both indoor/outdoor space, public/private space, and the much more ephemeral space of the relationships between characters.
6) From there, in general, each scene builds upon each other as a sort of reveal/reversal of the previous, in a stacked quality. Each time the body or space of the narrative is established for the viewer, something then gets in its way. The viewer tends to follow along with the more “love story” aspects of what is going on, though those scenes are punctuated, often violently, by something else entirely—a trip, a stock market crash, a man drawing a rose, etc.
“Miscommunication” is a big theme of Antonioni’s trilogy, and here it works largely as a matter of two very strict framing techniques: positioning, and eclipsing. The characters MUST wander around because there is no comfort, satisfaction, or understanding in one spot, and if they do not move something else will obfuscate them. So they move, but in the process obfuscate or get obfuscated. It’s a movie built around the frustrations of finding the best perspective for understanding, but every time a character turns his or head one way, a blind spot appears behind them.
And above all, the macropolitical meanings are missed when one is so involved in the minutae, and vice versa.
—PolarisDiB
I think the first few times I saw Eclipse, I placed a lot of emphasis on the bomb imagery, but as I see the film more and more, the mushroom cloud water tower and the newspaper at the end seem to have more of a place in a more fundamental nature/industry dichotomy that, to me, informs all of Antonioni’s work (all the way back to his Gente del Po documentary in which we see peasant farmers chopping a field of grain as a giant boat pushes past them, blowing smoke) up through Red Desert (during and after which his dominant concern shifts to conflicts between subjectivity and the objective experience of the world…or something like that).
Anyway, for me, the key scenes of the film are 1) when Vitti returns home from her split-up and stands, staring out of her window at the trees in the wind, the mise-en-scene placing a brick wall between her and the exterior and 2) after the African dance (which I think you have a nice reading of, I read it as a fun but rather misguided attempt to get back in touch with some imaginary of what nature was), Vitti dashes after her friend’s dog and is astounded when she sees a series of metal poles clanging in the wind, resembling a kind of industrial correlate to the beauty of the trees.
ToddJ: Yes, the Nature vs. Civilization theme recurs throughout Antonioni’s work, often in a single shot. There are MANY such images in ECLIPSE, including the one near the end where we see Claudia trapped behind the metal grid of Civilization, with traffic behind her in the background; in the previous shot (and throughout the film) she had been associated with natural trees and leaves blowing gently in the breeze. Interestingly, here she wears a chain link necklace that reiterates the motif of the foreground fence, thus incorporating some of that “Civilization” into her own attire.
One other example would be the last shot of L’AVVENTURA in which the “civilized” people and the product of civilization, the deteriorating wall on screen right, contrast with the natural, potentially active volcano (Mt. Etna) in the distant background. (Incidentally, some scholars identify Mt. Etna with Claudia’s breast, while the brick wall represents Sandro, the male.) In any case, the two people are separated from Nature by a metal fence.
Now do you think Antonioni deliberately set up that second shot from L’Avventura according to Frank’s interpretation/description or was it just a coincidence that the elements of the shot appeared so concretely symbolic when viewed after the fact?
Oh how I love this film. Except the ending, which unfortunately was out of touch with the reality the rest of the film held for me, seemed like some arty overthought thing and made me laugh.
But I’d still rate it up there as one of my favorite films, just do not like how he handled that ending.
Frank: Very cool to talk to you about Antonioni (your Edifice Complex article is one of the better English-language pieces on Antonioni that I’ve seen).
Don’t forget that, perhaps most meaningfully, our last view of Vittoria has her head alone framed with trees blowing behind them. She looks away from the street (or perhaps Piero’s office, I don’t rightly remember) at the trees behind her and leaves. Cue the unfinished building ending. Antonioni seems so optimistic here about the ability to reconnect to a personal nature by accepting some edicts of the modern world (or modern love, seeing as how she can’t love Piero more or not at all, she moves away from him, just as she did with Riccardo). It’s a radically different vision of the world and its possibilities than in Red Desert where Nature’s simply a fantasy, a story you tell your ungrateful kids and their creepy toy robots when they’re feigning illness. I think that he eventually reaches an impasse in this thinking on the dichotomy around this time, hence his increasing focus on readjusting reality to meet your own expectations or hopes (although the desert sequences in Zabriskie assuredly complicate that thinking…by the time we get to Oberwald, I have no idea what the hell Antonioni’s doing, but it’s still fascinating).
As for the Mt. Edna shot from L’Avventura, I think the way that Gilberto Perez describes the opening scene of L’Avventura may serve us here. Unlike many of those writing on Antonioni, Perez manages to avoid the pitfalls of saying “This character standing here may represent this, and that one that.” Instead, he notes that Anna moves under the dome of St. Peter’s. He suggests a visual equivalence between her father’s bald head and the dome, and as Anna moves in, Perez says that it’s like she’s trying on that kind of head, and asking if it fits. I’d say we see something similar here (hence, perhaps, the comparison with the breasts?), but maybe the better shot from L’Avventura to compare it with is the close-ups of Claudia and Sandro kissing outside of the deserted city near Noto. In those shots, the deep-focus style that we often think of as Antonioni’s dominant form is abandoned in favor of a shallow-focus close-up that, with a love not yet fitting with our conceptions of nature, obscures the natural surroundings. By the end, we’re left with a fractured view, not quite yet in alignment with the strange world of bourgeois decadence (who can forget the image of feet picking up Sandro’s money?), but one remote and distant from a nature we once knew and felt in a deep and true way. Eros isn’t really sick here; it may just be lost.
Robert W Peabody III
Wow – that is interesting.
Ha ha I could see him wanting to “work” Nicholson.
his political stance is/was what? in his films? or personal?
Sounds like he was an emotional person or no? Was he off-the-cuff?
Was he reading you or did he sound like he had canned responses?
Would have loved to have been there….