Michelangelo Antonioni

[rohmerin]

I did an entry in my blog when I watched the film.

http://rohmerin.blogspot.de/2012/01/pri ... t-set.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[martin]

A lot of captures from Antonioni's segment are posted here. Beautiful compositions!

I would do srt timecodes for Antonioni's segment if there was an Italian script or transcript around (assuming it reflected what's actually said). But that's not very likely. And I wouldn't be able to do the translation.

[ellipsis7]

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of Antonioni's birth in Ferrara, Italy on 29th September 1912...

Article by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian - Michelangelo Antonioni: centenary of a forgotten giant - marking the same, followed by some lively reactions and commentary debating the great man and his work...

[colinr0380]

It does seem strange that Bradshaw completely misses out the stunning L'Eclisse from his retrospective!

It also seems problematic that he seems to be trying to construct an argument that people are indifferent to Antonioni simply because he is not in the Sight and Sound top ten poll and the suggestion that he is somehow out of fashion. It feels a little like trying to construct an simplistic argument that the director is somehow forgotten or undervalued that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps that explains the absence of L'Eclisse, as that painfully present and relevant film wouldn't have allowed for some of Bradshaw's conclusions?

[zedz]

It also seems problematic that he seems to be trying to construct an argument that people are indifferent to Antonioni simply because he is not in the Sight and Sound top ten poll and the suggestion that he is somehow out of fashion.

By that reasoning, 'people' (do we have their addresses?) are 'indifferent' to all but ten directors in the history of cinema. And - sad but true - most of the directors in the Sight and Sound Top Ten poll are out of fashion anyway.

[lubitsch]

While I very much wish that Antonioni would be more forgotten, it's bizarre to read such an opinion. Since 1960 was such a watershed year and he features strongly and prominently in this second modernistic movement beginning then, he's regularily writtten about, taught, shown on TV and represented on DVD. What else does he expect is supposed to happen with 50 year old films?
I find it refreshing though that he advocates the early films. His career is usually projected (as is often the case with artistic careers) as a rise and fall story and the 50s films are therefore reduced to a stepping stone, but Le Amiche and Il Grido strike me as his best films. from then on a vague ennui and existential despair sets in with progressively more self-parodistic visual compositions. Antonioni was not a very intelligent man, the evidence ranging from his postive Jew Süss review to the outlandish environmental claims of Il Deserto Rosso to his stunningly naive China film. the more he tried to become significant, the more strained the films were as is often the case with the 60s and 70s art cinema. Thankfully this time recedes back in memory, the critics of this era don't play such a significant role anymore and some historical perspective on these films and their self-indulgencies is likely to emerge in the future.

[ellipsis7]

It is important to see Antonioni's films as a continuum of development, growing out of Neo-Realism into something unique and different, so it's actually quite stupid to excise certain films, or favour a particular period... Thematically films are linked from varying decades - for instance LA SIGNORA SENZA CAMELIE, TENTADO SUICIDO, IL GRIDO, L'AVVENTURA, DESERTO ROSSO, BLOW UP, THE PASSENGER, IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN can all be seen as existential explorations of individual loss of identity... I VINTI is as much an exploration of the youth of the moment as is ZABRISKIE POINT...

It is strange that Bradshaw doesn't mention L'ECLISSE, and I agree with Colin that it's probably not there so as to fulfil PB's particular narrative, much as the limp episode from EROS is mentioned rather the superb swansong short LO SGUARDO DI MICHELANGELO also from 2004...

[accatone]

…and some historical perspective on these films and their self-indulgencies is likely to emerge in the future.

Amazing, please keep us posted on those re-writings of history and films of the time (60-70s)! Hopefully they can provide something significant instead of posting a(nother) ressentiment…

[Tommaso]

Antonioni was not a very intelligent man

This statement is obvious nonsense if you've ever seen the man in Wenders' "Chambre 666" or read any of his later interviews. It makes more sense if you add the adverb "politically", though. The 'evidence' you mention is a clear indication that Antonioni was decidedly uninterested if it came to political questions. In this respect, the 'environmental' claims in "Deserto Rosso" are only in the film as an 'outward' reflection of the mental decline of the Vitti character, in whom Antonioni's sole interest lies. You could make a similar accusation of vagueness if it comes to the stock exchange sequences in "L'eclisse". Such vagueness, on the other hand, works very much to the benefit of a film like "Zabriskie Point" where it perfectly reflects the political naivity of the student/hippie rebels the film portrays.

Even your earliest piece of evidence, the infamous "Jud Süß"-review, must be put into perspective. Of course a statement like "if this film is propaganda, then I want more propaganda" (quoting from memory) is problematic from today's point of view, but it mainly illustrates Antonioni's primary interest: film aesthetics. If he goes on to mention that the film is very effective and perfectly paced, well: that's what it is.

[ellipsis7]

Re. "Jud Süß" 1940 review - there were 2 naively nuanced versions, the latter more tempered on further consideration, and the piece really has to considered as a minor footnote in a considerable body of critical work at the time... As MA told French critic Jean Clay, referring to the influences he was under at the time, "C'est vrai, c'etait un compromis. Je ne suis un homme parfait."... In this time of war and fascism, it was an important learning experience, as MA developed his style, eliding direct political statement for more subtle engagements with reality as he saw it...

For instance this is from his report on the 1940 Venice Film Festival....

“There were no white jackets at Cinema San Marco on the evening of the inauguration, nor plunging feminine necklines. The exhibition was officially opened during the hours of darkness, the hall's atmosphere felt very different from what had been usual in past years (things were otherwise in the days of the Lido under the gorgeous lights that seem to us the memory of a time before we were born). In time of war, the war was also there to exert its imposing presence on the Festival, in the absence of the Venetian social life, everything seemed more subdued and intimate, austere...

...At midnight it was all over. Officials, filmmakers and audiences came out in silence (the darkness makes everything fall still, where, previously, the artificial light induced excitement and volubility of speech). Different scenario and tone, the film continued outside. Venice looked truly unreal, so dark; lights glided on invisible canals, and seemed to come from nearby silent falling stars; periodically, street lamps created strange perspectives: there could very well appear, round the corners of alleyways, old Venetian masks, and no one would be surprised.

Piazza San Marco like a soft glade surrounded by tall hedges. At the bottom the tower, a huge black cypress.”

[MichaelB]

This statement is obvious nonsense if you've ever seen the man in Wenders' "Chambre 666" or read any of his later interviews.

One of the reasons why Chambre 666 is so heartbreaking is that Antonioni is one of its only interviewees who seems genuinely enthused by the potential of the technical and cultural upheavals happening in cinema in the early 1980s, and he's bursting with ideas for new projects, which his subsequent stroke and paralysis prevented him from realising.

[lubitsch]

On the Criterion Eclisse there's a documentary which consists mostly of interviews with Antonioni. To take some examples of the old man's wisdom from minute 45 on: Neither his gibberish about quantum physics nor his profound insights about women and their ties to the moon and mystery (!) strike me as particularily intelligent to put it mildly. Just because his utterings sound vaguely thoughtful and serious doesn't mean that they really are.
Unfortunately I do not have the capacity to explain away every idiotic utterance of people as insignificant their works. Writing positively about Jew Süss in 1940 is what it is: a crime against humanity. Trying to smoothe this out as a step in his personal evolution is not in good taste. Filming in China during the Cultural revolution and failing to register the problems reveals a thorough blindness. why should a person who is so completely naive and ignorant in this point be a sage regarding matters of alienation in our modern world? Isn't this also a complex sociological situation like in China where Antonioni failed? And about Deserto Rosso: he explicitly states in an interview with godard that the Vitti character is lacking the necessary adjustment to the modern world, so not the inhuman ambiente is the problems, but the humans which have to adapt themselves or go nuts. One doesn't have to be an environmentalist to think this is slightly nuts.
Whatever his merits as visual filmmaker were, his images have a strong tendency to dissolve into self-parody. As with most European art directors the films positively bludgeon the viewers into submission be reiterating the same points again and again and again. Every reasonably intelligent viewer should get the feelings of disillusionment and emotional alienation in his 60s films after 10 minutes but they get reiterated endlessly and with few variation for two hours. The lack of subtlety in these films is staggering and that's all the more remarkable since critics are often so fond to point out Hollywood's superficiality and obviousness.
At the same time his characters are remarkably shallow and uninteresting, the men anyway, but Vitti's women are also essentially disturbed cyphers, vaguely dissatisfied with their lives. This alienated drifter was a cliche of experimental shorts before, but already appears in a popular version in the 50s via Dean, Brando and so on. I fail to see the great progress Antonioni is providing here and the 1960 viewers who booed Avventura of the screen sensed pretty well that the emperor has no clothes. It's e.g. often mentioned how daring Avventura is for not clearing up the question where one of the protagonists vanishes, but since he doesn't care for these people, why should any of the viewers care if somebody vanishes. When Janet Leigh is murdered in Psycho we are shocked and moved because we care for her and understand her plight on the one hand and killing of the main character in the middle of the film is indeed a shocking innovation. But Antonioni has emptied his fiilms of any emotional interest, so even if some alien UFOs would descend in the middle of La Notte and exterminate the whole party one would just shrug.
This is all the more disappointing because e.g. in Le Amiche Antonioni draws sharply the images of women with different approaches to life and recognizes questions of social class, changing male-female dynamics and so on. But he progresses to purify his films ... literally from anything that would make them interesting and diversified.

[Shrew]

Just to belatedly defend Antonioni and Chung Kuo now that I've recently seen it. I'm not a big fan of the films of I've seen so far (which besides CK, are just L'avventuera, The Passenger, and part of Red Desert), but Chung Kuo was my favorite (though not saying much), because I think he does do a surprisingly good job at getting underneath China at this time.

For one, you can't blame him for coming to China and failing to pick up on the madness of the Cultural Revolution in 1972. While the Revolution is usually quoted as running till Mao's death in 76, the worst excesses all occurred previously, and the later half was relatively calm. The trouble that did exist (shutting down of universities, exiling of Red Guard youth and political enemies to the countryside or prison, crackdown on dissidents/intellectuals leading to imprisonment/suicide) had mostly already been implemented, so it wasn't as if new people were being dragged off the streets to jail or struggle sessions. Most of that had already happened. Plus, Antonioni was being pretty closely monitored by officials, so it's not like he could have gone off in search of any of these problems.

Which leads to the film's most powerful sequence: the unofficial sidetrip to the village where everyone is terrified/confused/intrigued by Antonioni's crew and their camera. It helps explain the rest of the film's odd distance toward its subjects, who rarely seem to acknowledge that they're on camera. Some of this must have been through hidden cameras and riding quickly through streets, but a great deal (especially in the countryside and factory segments) must have simply been because that's how the people were prepared to act. Thus, Antonioni manages to reveal just how much of this activity (and by association the outer face that the People's Republic is trying to present) is sham and performance. This is further highlighted by the performances that end each segment (a really creepy puppet show, a children's relay race, and a acrobatics display).

So... from what I've seen, Antonioni seems obsessessed with surface, which makes his narrative films I've seen rather painful and dull for me. But in this documentary, his acknowledgment that he can't get under the surface helps reveal that what the CCP is showing is indeed all just surface, and that depth eludes everyone.

Of course, it's also really god damn long. I'm not sure we needed that full C-section or long boat trip, or another propaganda song sung by little kids.

[rrenault]

So what is Antonioni's true place in film history if one were to be frank? He seems to have gone out of fashion in the years since his "heyday" in the sixties. Here's a quote from a Guardian article below that displays what I'm referring to:

<<With his death a reassessment of his impressive output positions him among such talents as Antonioni, Kurosawa, Ray, Wilder, Visconti. These second rung, but never second rate, directors hover fitfully behind the handful of geniuses - Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu, Renoir, Rossellini - where poetry and originality transcend matter and realism. What Bergman and the others lack is the (seeming) simplicity of expression that belies inspiration: an inspiration which makes true what would not otherwise have been apparent. In short there is an over-emphasis, an over-weaning power of expression, that obscures the counter currents of emotion lying beneath the surface of the work of those five pantheon directors, in such of their masterpieces as Voyage to Italy (Rossellini), Gertrud (Dreyer), or Lancelot du Lac (Bresson) which are truly beyond criticism.>>

Are such sentiments not without merit. Is Antonioni really not the equal of Ozu, Bresson, and Renoir. It seems to me there may be a bias amongst certain critics and film viewers who prefer filmmakers that display more of a "rugged humanism", and Antonioni certainly doesn't fit that bill. I'm wondering why. Why must the greatest filmmakers allow themselves to be pigeonholed within the category of "rugged humanism"? Are there not other ways of making a film. Are Antonioni's films just too precious when placed alongside films like Pickpocket or Boudu Saved from Drowning? Was that the cause for an inevitable backlash? Did his films present themselves way too overtly as being "high art", whereas the films of Ozu and Renoir weren't quite as self-aware in that regard? Some might say it can be attributed to a general backlash towards mid-century modernist "Euro art" cinema in general, but Bunuel, Godard, and Bresson all seem to have survived the tide, while Antonioni and Resnais are seen as "them arty sixties" guys.

There's a strand of thinking among some, but not all cinephiles, that treats only the "rugged humanists" with merit (i.e. Renoir, Vigo, Rohmer, Bunuel, Kiarostami, Alonso, Fassbinder, Ozu, Bresson, Ford, Rossellini, Pialat, Akerman, Godard. and so on.) In the process, guys like Antonioni, Resnais, Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi, Visconti, Bergman, Fellini, and Kieslowski, for instance, wind up falling by the wayside.

For the record, I love every single one of the "rugged humanists" I listed, but it seems limiting to me to only value filmmakers who cleanly fall within that category, unless you feel, of course, "film as art" and "rugged humanism" are synonyms.

[repeat]

Maybe I'm just totally uninformed about the state of criticism, but I don't recognize my idea of general consensus in any of this - the way I see it, the "five pantheon directors" of the sixties are Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini, Godard, and Kurosawa, and I don't know of any general backlash against any of these people ever having taken place.

BTW just out of interest, what makes you place Godard with the rugged humanists instead of the artsy formalists?

[rrenault]

BTW just out of interest, what makes you place Godard with the rugged humanists instead of the artsy formalists?

Watch the apartment scene from Contempt all on its own. The half-hour hotel room sequence in Breathless will suffice too, as well as the first few minutes of the film for that matter.

[repeat]

Watch the apartment scene from Contempt all on its own. The half-hour hotel room sequence in Breathless will suffice too, as well as the first few minutes of the film for that matter.

But surely Contempt is an outlier in his 60's oeuvre; if you think about his whole career, or even just the other 60's films, I don't see how he could fit that side of the dichotomy you suggest. Or, for that matter, how (post-Marienbad) Resnais fits in with the cool artsy types. Also, how come is Bergman in the second category - Bergman, who couldn't understand why anyone would want to watch a film about a donkey?

I don't know, maybe I don't get the idea... Anyway I don't know of any Antonioni backlash, I think he's exactly as overrated as he's always been.

[rrenault]

Bergman's films have strong metaphysical elements while Godard is still heavily grounded in the physical. And Rossellini once called Resnais a "decadent aesthete".

[Mr Sausage]

What do you mean by "rugged humanism"?

Ozu and Dreyer are the least "rugged" of any filmmakers I've ever seen. Dreyer is also one of the most formalist of any of the filmmakers you mentioned. Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer are usually grouped, along with Tarkovsky, as "transcendentalist," which is the opposite of humanism.

Also, who are the cinephiles that don't favour Bergman, Fellini, Tarkovsky, and Mizoguchi? This all sounds like one big straw-man.

[rrenault]

Look at the quote I posted. Okay, Godard, Ozu, and Bresson may not be "rugged", but they're all far more humanist than Antonioni is. And I didn't even mention Dreyer in any of my previous posts.

[Mr Sausage]

That's not very helpful.

There is a lot about that quote that's stupid and I don't see a reason to believe it's anything more than singular, let alone try to make a coherent system out of it.

Not only that, but it belies your own terms. His great filmmakers make films "where poetry and originality transcend matter and realism," which, as far as it's coherent, is neither rugged nor humanistic. And his criticism that "there is an over-emphasis, an over-weaning power of expression, that obscures the counter currents of emotion lying beneath the surface" is not against formalism--like I said, Dreyer is amongst the most formalist of filmmakers, with Gertrude as his most formalist work--it's against thudding over-statement. That he includes Dreyer but not Kurosawa--one of the more rugged and humanistic directors, assuming I understand what you mean by those terms--among the first rate ought to show how little his opinion rests on either formalism or humanism.

So, again, where are you getting your terms and what do you mean by them? And who else besides you and maybe the author of that piece makes these divisions?

[repeat]

Also, who are the cinephiles that don't favour Bergman, Fellini, Tarkovsky, and Mizoguchi?

Well, I don't particularly like Bergman or Fellini (although I do admire certain films of theirs), but I don't think that makes me any less of a cinephile. I think there's a seed of an interesting discussion in what rrenault is saying, but too much generalization and too unclear a dichotomy. As for the Guardian quote, it's probably not a representative example of critical consensus - these first and second rungs of his seem even less clear to me than this rugged humanism vs. artsy cool distinction.

As to Antonioni's anti-humanism, Luc Moullet outlined some of his problems with that in this excellent essay (also worth reading if you want to understand why an erudite cinephile might dislike Antonioni).

Pace Rossellini, that received idea of Resnais as an hyper-aesthetic or hyper-intellectual director has always tended to obscure his real subjects and obsessions which are very humanist indeed.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't understand what this conversation is supposed to be about, besides that some people like certain filmmakers and some don't. I don't see why anyone should try to systematize (and universalize!) this arbitrary taste based on an equally arbitrary and incoherent quote from one article.

Also, I have no idea what you or rrenault mean by "humanism," or why humanism or (a lack of it) is a marker of greatness.

[rrenault]

I'm not saying humanism is a necessary marker of greatness. There just seem to be several people who would regard people like Bresson, Bunuel, Rossellini, Renoir and Ozu more highly than they would Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi, Bergman and Kieslowski largely due to the fact the filmmakers in the former group would have a seemingly stronger sense of what one might term "physicality". It's sort of like you're either an Antonioni fan or a Rossellini fan. Likewise, one is either an Ozu fan or a Mizoguchi fan. There often seems to be a "high modernist" backlash in certain circles. Bresson and Rossellini for some reason tend to appeal more to postmodernists than do Bergman and Antonioni.


But at the end of the day, my main question is why do Bresson and Ozu seem to be a tad higher on the totem pole than Antonioni and Bergman? I've mainly been hypothesizing why this may be the case, but I still can't seem to come up with an informative explanation that's free of postmodern bias.

[Mr Sausage]

There just seem to be several people who would regard people like Bresson, Bunuel, Rossellini, Renoir and Ozu more highly than they would Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Mizoguchi, Bergman and Kieslowski largely due to the fact the filmmakers in the former group would have a seemingly stronger sense of what one might term "physicality". It's sort of like you're either an Antonioni fan or a Rossellini fan. Likewise, one is either an Ozu fan or a Mizoguchi fan. There often seems to be a "high modernist" backlash in certain circles. Bresson and Rossellini for some reason tend to appeal more to postmodernists than do Bergman and Antonioni.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find more than a couple of people whose taste has exactly that division and for any of those reasons (Bergman and Tarkovsky are intensely physical filmmakers, very concerned with texture and physical objects). I think this trend is mostly your own invention. I don't think there are really many people whose taste lines up exactly like this.

None of the filmmakers you mention in this post are either modernist or post-modernist. Appropriating literary periods for film is extremely problematic, especially when none of those films fall within the necessary historical period.

But at the end of the day, my main question is why do Bresson and Ozu seem to be a tad higher on the totem pole than Antonioni and Bergman? I've mainly been hypothesizing why this may be the case, but I still can't seem to come up with an informative explanation that's free of postmodern bias.

You want an account of the accidents of personal taste?