98 L'avventura

[rrenault]

There are no scenes actually set in Palermo, are there?

[ellipsis7]

The scene in the 18th Century villa converted into offices where Anna's disappearance is reported to the police in the fictional narrative is set in Milazzo, however the actual location was a villa in Bagheria, to the West of the island, in the province of Palermo... Similarly a scene set in a villa towards the centre of island, where Claudia waits for news of Sandro and witnesses the seduction of one of the cruise party by a young painter, was actually filmed in another villa near Palermo, home of a member of the Lampedusa family... So storywise no scenes are set in or near Palermo, but two villas in the vicinity were used as filming locations...

[ellipsis7]

As we await the upgrade of L'AVVENTURA that is in the works, it is worth noting that on the Janus Films 2013 rerelease poster, the island featured is in fact Basiluzzo, which they pass in the film, not the neighbouring island of Lisca Bianca where they actually land, Anna disappears and 'inciting incident' of the narrative kicks off...

Basiluzzo -


Janus poster -

[swo17]

Reissue coming November 25th

[manicsounds]

blu-ray.com gives it perfect scores

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver

[artfilmfan]

I like the darker image of the Criterion DVD better.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

I like the darker image of the Criterion DVD better.

That's why you get a brightness knob on your telly

[Lachino]

I like the darker image of the Criterion DVD better.

When I first saw those Beaver shots I had the same reaction, but going back over them again I find the dvd shots to be underexposed a fair bit. I prefer the bluray now :)

In any case, the original dvd was in my opinion the one most in need of upgrade of the trilogy, so this is definitely a must-buy.

[Siroco]

Huge Antonioni film locations buff.

Can anybody help w/ the list below? Or, perhaps you've visited and can share your experiences, apropos ellipsis7's photos?

Opening Rome Sequence

• Anna Father's Villa, Rome Outskirts [Via Niccolo Piccolomini in the Aurelio suburb]
  Anna/Claudia Drive to Rome Under the Archway [Anna and Claudia drive away in their chauffeured car from Via Niccolo Piccolomini on what is now Via di Villa Betania then along Via Aurelia Antica, passing under the aqueduct built by Pope Paul V]
  Sandro's Apartment, no. 20, Piazza San Bartolomeo, Isola Tiberina [Ponte Fabricio visible through the apartment balcony]

Update: Special thanks to ellipsis7's for the reference to Jacopo Benci's article "Michelangelo's Rome" in Cinematic Rome, which includes the author's pictures of these locations from 2006.

Aeolian Islands

• Yacht initially passes the jagged cliffs of Basiluzzo
  Party lands on Lisca Bianca, where Anna disappears [Has anyone visited?]. Identifiable locations on the island include the "Blowhole" and location of the fake hut.

Milazzo

• The Police station is actually the Villa Palagonia in Bagheria
  Is the train station actually the Milazzo station?
  The train scenes were reportedly shot between Palermo and Termini Imerese [Where is that rock promontory visible through the window as the guy chats up the girl?]
  Sandro exits train at Castoreale, although it's actually Cefalu.

Messina

• The mob scene occurs on Viale San Martino
  At what intersection does Sandro bribe the journalist?

Montaldo Villa

• This is actually the Villa Niscemi in/near Palermo

Troina

• The pharmacy scene was filmed on the Catanian Plain [Location?]

Road to Noto

• The abandoned (Mezzogiorno) town is near Caltanisetta [Location?]
  The kissing/train scene occurs at Santa Panagia?

Noto

• The fictional Hotel Trinacria overlooks the church of San Francesco, Piazza Immacolata
  Claudia rings the church bells at Chiesa del Collegio, which offers a view of the Piazza Municipio; this is where Sando attempts to enter the Museo Civico before spilling the ink [That drawing is what building?]

Road to Taorima

• The highway cut through the mountain is actually on the north coast [Location?]

Taorima

• San Domenico Hotel [Anybody visited? Is the interior recognizable?]
  Last scenes take place on parking lot next to Church of San Domenico (as pictured earlier in the thread)

[ellipsis7]

I am researching & writing a book on Antonioni and have visited & photographed most of these locations, including Lisca Bianca, the abandoned village, Noto & Hotel San Domenico Palace, all of which remain pretty unchanged & recognisable.... I'm afraid you'll have to wait till I finish this magnum opus till I reveal all my discoveries... You're right about Piazza S. Bartolomeo & Sandro's apartment - some good observations about the locations of the open sequence in Rome are made by Jacopi Benci in 'Michelangelo's Rome' pp 64-67 of Cinematic Rome ed. Richard Wrigley (Troubadour publishing, 2008)...

BTW in my avatar image that's the island of Dattilo with Lisca Bianca half hidden behind the right hand edge, photographed at ~0530 (alba/dawn) from Panarea last July....

[Siroco]

I am researching & writing a book on Antonioni and have visited & photographed most of these locations, including Lisca Bianca, the abandoned village, Noto & Hotel San Domenico Palace, all of which remain pretty unchanged & recognisable.... I'm afraid you'll have to wait till I finish this magnum opus till I reveal all my discoveries... You're right about Piazza S. Bartolomeo & Sandro's apartment - some good observations about the locations of the open sequence in Rome are made by Jacopi Benci in 'Michelangelo's Rome' pp 64-67 of Cinematic Rome ed. Richard Wrigley (Troubadour publishing, 2008)...

BTW in my avatar image that's the island of Dattilo with Lisca Bianca half hidden behind the right hand edge, photographed at ~0530 (alba/dawn) from Panarea last July....

Sounds fantastic. Where can I pre-order ;)

Thanks for that background info on Cinematic Rome,
as well as the interesting background about your
avatar.

[ellipsis7]

It'll be a while yet, making great progress, but someway still to go till I am completely happy... But may be publishing a selected preview/advance paper in a journal shortly...

[filmyfan]

Thanks for those locations-great stuff !

Sandro exits train at Castoreale, although it's actually Cefalu.

I am going to Sicily in a couple of weeks-and wanted to find this station but having googled Cefalu-it doesn't look much like the film !

However things change of course-and is also mentioned on the commentary-but the rocks and lagoon opposite the station don't look right !

I will be going to Noto as well !
Thanks !

[Mr Sausage]

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, JANUARY 30th

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[domino harvey]

Okay, well, I know most of us have seen this. And it is something of a touchstone film in world cinema. Anyone remember their initial responses? Did you go full-on Cannes audience? Or were you on the Truffaut end of the spectrum? Somewhere in-between?

I'm pretty sure I went about it all backwards and saw the alienation quadrilogy in reverse order, so I was more than prepared for its contemplative pace and lack of concrete resolution by the time I got to it. But while it lacks for me the overwhelming alienation and isolation of Red Desert, there is something about this film that makes it grow in estimation in the memory. Just revisiting it lately, it's remarkable how consciously placed within the frame Antonioni's blocking of actors is. It's funny that Bergman rejected Antonioni (and also insulted Vitti), because they both have a similar reliance on blocking, though Antonioni's methodology is less bold than Bergman's oft-parodied compositions. Maybe Bergman's objections were another case of human tendency of how we often react most strongly to the same flaws in others we also possess (not that I find such aesthetic adherence a flaw in either director, of course).

In contrast to Bergman, however, Antonioni often turns towards framing and imposing architecture and landmarks with the same level of attention he devotes to his human subjects. This no doubt contributes to some readings of Antonioni's films as cold or indifferent, in marked contrast to Bergman's wealth of warmth. However, I think this film and the others that make up the four-pack pick at recognizably human and universal scars of loneliness and emptiness, with the internal struggles turned inside-out in the grandeur of one's surroundings, overwhelmed and overshadowed. How appropriate that our ostensible protagonist is swallowed up whole by that small yet overpowering craggy island sticking out of the water, never to appear again. The infamous unexplained disappearance is an admission that there's no answer to many of the questions we ask. While it has inspired countless art house cryptic wannabes in recent years to feel free to reject narrative resolution as though such a thing automatically equaled Art, L'Avventura's evasiveness with conventional resolution as a methodology has never been done better in cinema before or since.

[knives]

My response through all three viewings has been, "well that's nice I guess," which to be fair is my standard response to Antonioni who I'm so neutral on I've managed to competently argue him and his movies from all sides. All the same this was my first Antonioni at a period when I was really getting into films exactly like this, yet along with Ugetsu which I think I saw in the same week even this was more a realization that just because a film is aesthetically interesting doesn't make it personally affecting. i think that is one area where the Bergman comparison isn't terribly useful. Bergman seems concerned about these themes du jour in an emotive way and personal way as if they are his own while I find Antonioni more interested in them as an act of scholarship, but not even a contemporary ethnography which would be interesting to me, but like an archaeologist deciding on the history of an extinct race. Perhaps that form of investigation works (incredibly) well for others, but for me it is an instant neutralizer to even the best of his movies (that Red Desert adds in a genuine love for Vitti is probably why it works best for me).

I wrote the Bergman stuff before you added in that last paragraph, but to clarify I'm not doing the cold v warm thing here which is stupid and not terribly useful. Antonioni is clearly very curious and invested in the characters he is manipulating so I'm not even sure if calling him cold is accurate. Rather I mean, and this is were my tongue will betray me, I find Bergman more egocentric while Antonioni is almost an anti-auteur auteur trying to render himself an open window rather than a pair of glasses. The egocentric approach is easier for me to go into dialogue with in part and in another part as I mentioned a bit I'm not sure if this non-observational approach to the window method works for me at all. It certainly fails utterly with Mizoguchi, Hou, and Tobias Lindholm who I also think try it.

[Mr Sausage]

I remember my first (and so far only) viewing of the film as mostly cold and indifferent appreciation. I could see what it was doing well enough, and nothing about the deliberate pace or indeterminacy bothered me (I generally like those things). It's just that nothing evoked a strong response in me. Same for both L'eclisse and The Passenger, the other two Antonioni's I've seen (tho', oddly, I like that last one the most just because it struck me as funny how badly the main character wanted to be in an adventure/suspense movie, but just never could manage to get it going). Maybe a revisit would change my opinion, tho' it's not likely given I had the same response to three different films seen over the course of many years. And, looking back, L'Avventura does seem very focused on achieving just a single effect.

I'd love to know what people find so miraculous and affecting about this movie.

[domino harvey]

Knives, that's an interesting reading to see Bergman as egocentric and Antonioni as more of an "open window," though I think it betrays your preference for one auteur over the other (a preference you willingly confess). I think Antonioni approaches his subjects not coldly or indifferently (which is how I read your "window" comparison) but cautiously. His characters are kept at an arm's length, but rarely farther. He's not a neutral party, he has perspective and a vantage to share, but he does so in a meted-out methodology that is built on trust going both ways. Having recently seen many of the films Antonioni made leading up to this, there really is a sea change in how character and plot are enacted within L'Avventura. Il grido hinted at the shift, a little, but the jump from that to this is still pretty wide to my eyes. I don't think it's a methodology made from a lonely architect filming humans for a detached investigation, but rather a director trying to capture abstract human emotive states without resorting to melodrama (where he previously dabbled more freely) or even conventional dramatic stakes

[knives]

I certainly didn't mean indifferently. I used the term manipulated in a very direct way which if anything I thought was where my bias was going to show. That manipulated may be a negative way of seeing your vantage. There's a lot of window directors I like. Bresson, Imamura, recently Clarke, but that is also why I gave the distinction between the two window approaches from the observational living and the investigative dead. I think caution is the perfect term and your usage great. Perhaps better than a window is a reporter looking up a cold case (or maybe sticking with my secondary archaeologist comment). I see him as someone striving to fill the holes to the event so as to to get at the why (this is just a simple rephrasing of your last point I suspect). Maybe off screen the world, being Antonioni, already knows what happened to the friend leaving just the question of how which of course leads to Vitti who turned out to be more interesting to the world. I respect that a lot even if it doesn't touch me emotionally or intellectually much.

[domino harvey]

I'd love to know what people find so miraculous and affecting about this movie.

Since it's fresh in my mind from our previous discussion of Red Beard, if it helps, I read seemingly every single Kurosawa thread the same way. While reading effusive praise and the well-argued pinpointing of intricacies and insights in Kurosawa's works, I always feel an overwhelming sense of "I don't hate what Kurosawa does, but I also just don't care." The things people get out of Kurosawa's films and the things I find of interest do not make for a convincing Venn diagram. So I think we all have our Not For Me auteurs!

For me, Antonioni's best works (Red Desert foremost, followed by this and L'eclisse) speak to anxieties, insecurities, and Lonely Crowd notions which can be tricky to pull-off in film. These concerns seem better suited for literature, where internal narration can elucidate the more specific emotions expressed (and the existence of their employment is less outright impressive as a result). In a movie, it's trickier. It would be easy to have a character explicitly say "I am alienated. I don't feel like I fit into this world even though I am young, pretty, wealthy, _____," but how to not just portray but embody this state in the film itself? It surely must be hard to do, because so few films have pulled it off as effectively as Antonioni here or elsewhere. I guess my defense comes down to asking what boxes this ticks for me as a viewer. Sure, it's beautiful and enchanting and frequently hypnotic, but above all my ballot needs only one item: I am captivated with its mastery of the abstract emotions it relays.

[Mr Sausage]

Rather than 'cold', which implies a value judgement, or detached, maybe we should use 'dispassionate' to describe Antonioni's style of representation.

I do like knives' use of 'ego-centric' for Bergman because one thing about Bergman's films that isn't true of Antonioni (I think) is that the largest personality in Bergman's films is his own. Bergman's feelings, reactions, thoughts, opinions, etc., are suffused throughout his movies, to brilliant effect. His characters are often parts of himself. Antonioni, by contrast, tries not to put too much of himself in there. We are at more of a remove from him as a person than from Bergman, whose movies bring us closer to him. To use a non-film analogy (and a more extreme example), it's the difference between Dante and Shakespeare. But this shouldn't be considered a value judgement. I think Antonioni is trying to create a feeling and an emotion that lies outside of himself, that he can remove himself from once it's been created. I certainly never got the impression, watching his movies, that I was meant to share the creator's emotions. With Bergman, there was always a sense I was getting access to his own most deeply felt emotions.

Thanks for your thoughts on his effect, domino. I find those kind of defences can help me zero in on what I was missing and let me better appreciate what I'm watching. Antonioni may never be for me, but I'm open to that changing.

[Mr Sausage]

Oh, somehow forgot that I've seen Blow Up, too, which I remember liking more than Blow Out but quite a bit less than The Conversation, the latter seeming a far more vivid and pointed film.

[Sloper]

It took me ages to get around to watching my first Antonioni. I was vaguely prejudiced against him, assuming I wouldn’t warm to what sounded like very cold, pretentious films. In my teens I relied on a handful of film books to teach me about all the films I hadn’t seen yet, and some of these happened to be rather down on Antonioni. There was Leslie Halliwell, a notorious grouch who called L’avventura an ‘aimless, overlong parable with lots of vague significance...it made its director a hero of the highbrows’. Geoff Andrew in Time Out was just as off-putting: ‘if it once seemed the ultimate in arty, intellectually chic movie-making, the film now looks all too studied and remote a portrait of emotional sterility’. I seem to remember Pauline Kael giving damning reviews of La notte and Red Desert (‘boredom in Ravenna, and it seeps into the viewer’s bones’), although I know she had liked L’avventura on its original release.

Discovering Carl Dreyer helped to broaden my horizons a bit – I found myself enjoying films like Michael and Gertrud in ways I hadn’t experienced before. (I’ve had a similar revelation in the last couple of years while getting into Rivette. When there are no more of these discoveries to be made, I’ll know it’s time to die.) So I borrowed L’avventura from my university’s library, and watched it on a tiny CRT set while laid out with a bad back and suffering from depression. It turned out to be the perfect way to experience this film for the first time!

From the beginning, I was drawn in by the unassuming beauty of Antonioni’s images, not just the individual compositions but the way they flowed into each other. He’s a master of imbuing images, sounds, and later on colours, with a rhythm and dynamism. It’s sometimes said that every frame in his films could work well in its own right as a still photograph, which is true, but that frame would also lose most of the power it had in its original context. When it came to the sequence where we see the characters spreading out over the island in search of Anna, I was practically gasping in wonder – not just at the sheer aesthetic beauty of the images, but also at the emotional depths contained in them. Not to get too maudlin, but loneliness has always been the dominant factor in my experience of life – especially the kind where you become most deeply aware of solitude while in the company of people you’re supposed to feel connected to – and those shots of the island seemed to express something about the loneliness of the human condition that I had never seen expressed before, and that could never be expressed in words. There are lots of moments like that in the film: I think of Sandro running to leap onto the train, and then that long desolate station he gets off at a few minutes later; or that creepy deserted town he and Claudia visit, and that famous dolly shot through the alley towards the church as they drive away; the disorienting close-ups of couples making love, first Anna and Sandro, then Claudia and Sandro. When I saw Blow-Up for the first time, I had a similar reaction to the shots of David Hemmings creeping between the trees in the park as he photographed Vanessa Redgrave. In a scene apparently drained of any emotional resonance, those high-angle shots were weirdly moving. It was as if some previously hidden truth about how people fail to connect with each other had been captured on film. I’ve loved films all my life, but I never knew they could do this kind of thing.

If you described moments like these, or the use of the trees in the final scene of La notte, to someone who hadn’t seen the films, they would sound ham-fistedly symbolic, but again there is something very unassuming about the way Antonioni composes these images. Bergman used to plan his camera placements the night before shooting, and then discuss them in detail with his cinematographer in the morning. Antonioni would deliberately not think about the scene in advance, arrive on the set in the morning and just spend time there on his own for half an hour, getting a feel for the place, and then compose his shots in a careful but largely instinctive way. I was kind of surprised to learn how much, by his own account anyway, Antonioni worked from ‘gut feeling’ when putting together these seemingly studied compositions, but it also helped to explain why these images had had such an emotional impact on me, in a way that Bergman’s – for all that I adore his films and find them very beautiful – had not.

I’d never heard about how good Antonioni was at observing people and relationships, or about how good the acting was in his films (at least at this point in his career). The world of L’avventura, and the relations between the people and objects in it, feel richly and carefully crafted, but at the same time profoundly authentic (however ‘heightened’ they may be at times), in a way that I would compare to William Wyler. Like Antonioni’s, Wyler’s films can sometimes seem cold at first glance, but the more attention you pay them, the more deeply rewarding they become, until even a very quiet, inconsequential moment between two characters becomes enormously powerful. When you watch Anna with Claudia, Sandro with Anna, and later Claudia with Sandro, you can feel how much work has been invested into getting these interactions right. It’s easy to criticise Antonioni for ‘over-directing’ actors and treating them like objects to be moved around the frame, but this process is only de-humanising when it’s appropriate for it to be so. As domino says, the film is exploring recognisably human anxieties (including anxieties about being de-humanised), and Antonioni can afford to be this controlling because he understands these anxieties deeply. He just knows, miraculously, how to embody them through a story, through images, and through the movements of the actors.

Knives’ comparison with Bergman above is very interesting, and in many ways I agree – yes, Bergman’s films feel nakedly egocentric / autobiographical much of the time, unflinching in their exploration of intense emotions. And yes, Antonioni is often a kind of ‘archaeologist’ when it comes to these same emotions. Mr Sausage’s Dante/Shakespeare comparison is very apt. But as with those two authors, I feel like the more ‘detached’ one is also the less ‘cerebral’ in some ways, and better at actually eliciting an emotional response from his audience. Bergman’s characters talk and talk and talk, and the talk is wonderful if you can keep up with it, but I think this is part of what stops me from feeling deeply moved by most of Bergman’s films. They make me think about emotions and relationships, and other themes that also concern Antonioni, like perception, reality, creativity, truth and so on. But Antonioni makes me feel something about these issues first and foremost; the thinking tends to come afterwards. His characters are not so talkative, nor so articulate, and in a way are therefore more recognisably human. I know lots of people who are a bit like them – I know none at all who are like the characters in Bergman (though I sort of wish I did).

Consider two similar moments (some very oblique spoilers for Winter Light and Red Desert here):

Spoiler

the minister breaking down on the floor of the church in Winter Light (‘I had this fleeting hope...’), and Giuliana breaking down and clutching the chair in Corrado’s room in Red Desert (‘I’ll never be cured, never...’). Both are incredibly powerful moments, but they affect me in different ways. I’ve experienced both emotional states to some extent: confronting the meaninglessness of a godless existence, confronting the incurability of my personal Babadook. In a sense they’re equally terrifying experiences. But I feel involved in Giuliana’s sense of panic in a way I just don’t feel involved in Tomas’s. That’s not a criticism of Bergman, I just think he’s asking for a different kind of involvement.

Perhaps it’s because Bergman always seems to be talking about himself, and because his films are so theatrical, playful and self-aware. In a strange way, his joy in the creative process (which I think is the source of much of the warmth domino mentioned above) means that he’s never quite showing us ‘reality’, even in the documentary-like Scenes from a Marriage – it’s always a kind of theatrical simulation designed to facilitate the exploration and discussion of the relevant emotional and spiritual problems. There’s far less playfulness and warmth in Antonioni, who for all his use of artifice is trying to photograph that ‘terrible thing in reality’ that Giuliana talks about, or that the photographer in Blow-Up is obsessively trying to get at. It’s not a thing that can really be discussed or articulated, it can only be – as domino says – embodied in the moving images Antonioni shows us. The people we see in his films don’t appear to be playing at loneliness and alienation, they appear to embody it, to be it in fact.

While we’re on the subject of Bergman, it’s worth mentioning that he wasn’t always so negative about L’avventura. In one interview – I think it’s on Criterion’s Persona release – he talks about the necessity, for an artist, of having something to say. If you have nothing to say, don’t try and invent something; if you do have something to say, do anything necessary in order to say it. He cites the example of L’avventura, refers to the incredible difficulties Antonioni had in getting it made, but speaks admiringly of the end result, which expresses what its maker intended. I think that’s the same interview where he says he would usually rather watch a James Bond film than Antonioni, but still...

[Mr Sausage]

His characters are not so talkative, nor so articulate, and in a way are therefore more recognisably human. I know lots of people who are a bit like them – I know none at all who are like the characters in Bergman (though I sort of wish I did).

Maybe this says something about our differing reactions, but I grew up around intensely verbal and articulate people, who even in the grip of rage or hysteria would produce this tumble of perfectly formed expressive language that seemed to capture how they were feeling in all its complexity. Consequently, people standing about in confused silence is more alien to me. I know there are people like this, but I don't recognize them in my own life.

I feel the intensity of Bergman's films, an intensity that builds and builds into it bursts forward as a piercing or even devastating eloquence. I feel the intensity of very intelligent, very insightful people whose intelligence and insight is all the more terrible for how it allows them to know precisely how they are broken, how they hate, how they are empty, or lonely, or lost--and they can't but express that to you in words that are destructive or simply too late. In the end they cannot hide from themselves, from being laid bare by their own expressive facility.

Bergman's key difference from Antonioni is that Bergman draws everything out; he externalizes emotion by laying it bear and letting it seep into the environment. Antonioni also externalizes, but it's more analogical. He tries to find geometric and architectural equivalents, say, for how his characters are feeling, and allows that to generate the emotion and suggest what the rather passive, unemotive characters are feeling. Because the characters themselves don't seem quite to know what's so off about their lives, they aren't able to communicate it, so the heavy-lifting has to come from somewhere else, in this case visual analogies. Bergman prefers the visual expression to be a continuation of the dramatic expression. It provides context and intensity, but it usually isn't meant to clarify something obscure at the level of drama.

Perhaps it’s because Bergman always seems to be talking about himself, and because his films are so theatrical, playful and self-aware. In a strange way, his joy in the creative process (which I think is the source of much of the warmth domino mentioned above) means that he’s never quite showing us ‘reality’, even in the documentary-like Scenes from a Marriage – it’s always a kind of theatrical simulation designed to facilitate the exploration and discussion of the relevant emotional and spiritual problems. There’s far less playfulness and warmth in Antonioni, who for all his use of artifice is trying to photograph that ‘terrible thing in reality’ that Giuliana talks about, or that the photographer in Blow-Up is obsessively trying to get at. It’s not a thing that can really be discussed or articulated, it can only be – as domino says – embodied in the moving images Antonioni shows us. The people we see in his films don’t appear to be playing at loneliness and alienation, they appear to embody it, to be it in fact.

Great point, although I think Bergman comes from a tradition where reality is explored through exaggeration and distortion. You aren't going to get neo-realism ala La Terra Trema even in Bergman's most 'documentary' work because he feels he has to hold a magnifying glass to things in order to draw out what he sees as most real in them. So something like The Seventh Seal has such a sure sense of the physical texture of the mediaeval world, but it accomplishes that feeling by making the details especially sensuous and available to experience. So you come away with an intense impression of the physical world, with its mud, cold, beer kegs, wind, flagellation, sun, grass, etc., but it's an impression whose intensity you're not going to get just living in the world--that or any other--because few people are that intensely focused on the physical texture of the world happening around them--they're too busy living it. So Bergman brings you closer to reality while also bringing his film away from it, paradoxically.

Antonioni--I don't know, he makes the world seem strange and separate, which may in fact be how it feels to a lot of people, at least in the way Antonioni constructs. But in some ways it's not quite reality, either. It's like reality has ceased to be real in some obscure, inexpressible way. Like there's a distressing absence at its heart which its characters not only feel in general, but also pursue at the level of plot (missing girl, photographed body). It's a bit like how the characters in George Perec's A Void are unsettled by, and pursue, that absence in the text itself, an absence they'll never be able to get outside of the text to actually observe. The absence that torments them lies in the fabric of their reality, a fabric they'll never have perspective enough to know and understand.