THE
ROVING EYE We all live in an Antonioni
world By Pepe Escobar
PARIS - Michelangelo Antonioni died this
past Monday at 94, less than 24 hours after Ingmar
Bergman. The talk from Paris to Rome is of a
cosmic joke by the supreme film buff Up There,
like a crossover between Persona and
L'Avventura staged by Woody Allen.
Antonioni was not only the great painter of the
cataclysmic 1960s (yes, he had a sensibility like
a Renaissance master's, such as his favorite,
Piero della Francesca). He was a painter of
the
world we now live in.
How would he film
the US war on Iraq, a critical case of
"incommunication" if ever there was one? The
cultural cliche du jour rules that
Antonioni was the master of incommunication.
That's ridiculous. Decades before mobile phones
connecting with everything except the dry
cleaners, Antonioni was rather focused on what is
worth being communicated.
Well, on the
surface he painted the narcissistic bourgeoisie of
the late 20th century in the wealthy North. Deep
down he painted the human condition as framed by
geography and social life, not only through its
silences but through its (sometimes muted) cries
of agony. Not accidentally, Il Grido
(1957), which dawned on Antonioni as he faced a
wall, depicts a man enveloped by his despair as if
he were being crushed inside four walls.
Italian critic Aldo Tassone, a very close
friend of the maestro, recalls how he loved to
laugh about the cliche. Privately, Antonioni was
extremely cheerful and had a formidable sense of
humor. Monument to film Alain Resnais described
him as "ice, but ice that burns". Antonioni
elegantly fire-bombed postwar neo-realism to go
one step beyond and dwell on silences and spaces
between people. His key subject matter, as Tassone
recalls, is cities, airports, hotels - everything
that evokes alienation and physical and emotional
separation. That is, our world today.
One
mythical day - at the set of Il Grido - the
maestro found Monica Vitti. And from 1960 to 1962
he created a trilogy of absolute genius -
L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse - painted
in the most gorgeous black and white in the
history of cinema. The late, great American film
warrior Samuel Fuller, in Jean-Luc Godard's
Pierrot le fou, tells us that "life is in
color, but black-and-white is more realistic". In
the first part of the 1960s the elegant, discreet
Michelangelo and the flamboyant, ebullient Monica
made four films and lived together - on two
separate floors in a Roman palazzo linked
by an elevator.
L'Avventura was
released in 1960, the same year as Federico
Fellini's La Dolce vita (the two directors
were very good friends). Apparently the subject
matter is the same: the spiritual malaise of the
Italian grand bourgeoisie. But in L'Avventura
something literally, visually, actually goes
missing - and that happens to be none other than
the "main" character. Existential dread never had
as beautiful a face as Monica Vitti's.
Well, it had, when Antonioni coupled
Monica with an impossibly gorgeous Alain Delon in
L'Eclisse (The Eclipse). In the
final, sublime, absolutely wordless 10-minute
sequence, they are supposed to meet each other in
a deserted suburb, but of course they don't: it's
the camera that caresses us with desperately
lonely suburban life breathing like a patient
approaching death.
When Antonioni moves to
shooting in color (we are in the swirling
mid-1960s), he has to depict a world beyond
surreal. From tragedy in black and white he roars
through psychedelic fatalism. Thus another -
international - trilogy of genius: Blow-Up
(swingin' London), Zabriskie Point
(California), The Passenger (North
Africa-Spain).
In Blow-Up - the
definitive image of swinging' London, based on a
novel by Julio Cortazar - fashion-photo icon David
Hemmings thinks he has shot a murder in that most
English of parks, but then the body (along with
the photos) vanishes. Is it too much sex? Too many
drugs? Too much rock 'n' roll? Is it madness? Is
it surrealism? All this plus the bare shoulders of
a young Vanessa Redgrave and Jeff Beck destroying
a guitar playing live with The Yardbirds.
Zabriskie Point was shot in
gorgeous CinemaScope and helped to sink the MGM
studios - a poetic metaphor in itself, as
Hollywood could never imagine what it was buying:
a modern Renaissance master plunging into the
corporate destruction of the American west via a
1960s California mix of groovy free love and
no-holds-barred progressive politics. Once again
the final slow-motion sequence of the exploding
desert dream house to the sound of Pink Floyd's
"Careful with that Axe, Eugene" not only takes the
(psychedelic) cake but still wipes the floor off
any critique of the ravages of capitalism.
The Passenger could be seen as a
newsman's dream movie. Jack Nicholson is a roving
television correspondent who changes identity with
a dead man in their small hotel in North Africa.
Hyper-groovy 1970s chick Maria Last Tango in
Paris Schneider joins the ride through a
turbulent arms-dealing/terrorism-tainted southern
Spain. Once again the ending - an eight-minute,
no-dialogue, circular traveling shot - tells the
whole story of alienation and separation. In
silence.
Antonioni was absolutely in love
with women - and not only La Vitti. His camera
basically filmed - and filmed around - women. The
maestro considered them to be the privileged
mirror of humankind. One more reason for him to
remain absolutely modern, post-modern,
post-everything today. Bergman was theater - a
descendant of August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.
Antonioni was, is pure cinema: image, landscapes -
much more crucial than any dejected characters.
Words, for him, were just a detail.
Silences are golden. We still carry on,
between silences, to the distant sound of war.
Buona notte, Michelangelo.
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