Michelangelo Anotonioni's style in his films is founded and established on his interest to represent the existential emotions and the repressed nostalgic reflection of his characters through the landscape, architecture of mise-en scene, the long takes and the visual cues. The boredom, depression, nostalgia, emptiness, perplexity, confusion, anxiety, alienation and loneliness always raise the questions for audience to engage philosophically with the cinematic text. The artistic self-expression and desire to offer a modernistic representation of the primary structure of the human existence in terms of confronting with the internal contradictions and a journey through our interior landscapes become the subject to investigate in his films. Of Course, for Antonioni, an expression of existential angst or alienation is typical response to the art-film milieu of the period as Brunette states in his book: "This focus can be also explained historically by the fact that in the late 1950s European existential philosophy, as popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre and others after World War II, began to filter down to more popular artistic forms such as the movies" (Brunette, 1).
The hermeneutic interpretation of Antonioni's films can be seen as the work of the audience to discover his unattainable meaning as Brunette states:
"The vast majority of Antonioni's films thus can be seen as collections of signifiers that turn out to have ambiguous signified(which is not a bad description of the world, either), and this impetus, this need to interpret, to make sense of experience, occurs even on the level of the shot. Important narrative or even cognitive information is often withheld, and the constant visual mysteries that results also contribute to a certain "hermeneutic pressure" that is always present" (Brunette, 4).
As the German director Wim Wenders remembered about Antonioni's speeches on the future of the cinema and his statement through his confession that " I am not such a pessimist. I've always been someone who tried to adapt to whatever forms of expression coped best with the contemporary world[about Antonioni's cinema]" (Wenders, x). of Course, the socio-political conditions of the world affect Antonioni's architecture of vision as Brunette states in his book:
"It is all too often forgotten that Antonioni was, like every other artist, responding to specific social, cultural, and moral problems that had risen as part of il boom, Italy's amazing fifteen years economic recovery collapse at the end of the World War II. Pier Leprohon, who, ironically, was a chief architect of the 'alienation thesis', was almost alone among earlier critics of Antonioni in also insisting that both L'aventura and Fellini's La Dolce Vitae, which appeared the same year, were first and foremost testimonies on their period" (Brunette, 6).
Through his aesthetic vision, Antonioni demands of his spectators to feel the mood of the scene through the visual cues and clues rather than only following dialogues as Wood states in their writings:
"There is a similar refusal to explain emotions to the audience. Both show us evidence and make us draw the conclusions. The difference is in aim. Antonioni is trying to describe the character's emotions through their behaviour. He uses the camera to present the behaviour so that will interpret it in a specific way, and be able to correlate our interpretations into a general conclusion" (Wood et Cameron, 6).
Indeed, Antonioni's films can be viewed and realized by the spectators as the cinematic text which violates against conventional rules and expectations as Chatman states in his book: " The slow editing pace, the careful, subtle, measured camera movements, and the long holds on faces and details of location violate their[audience] expectations and elicit the question that producers most dread-What's this movie about anyway?"(Chatman, 1). His desire to highlight the discussion about boredom and anxiety raises the question of existential struggle as Wood continues in their writings: Boredom in Antonioni's movies is always the main component of a life devoid of any purpose except enjoyment, and reduced to a search for ways of passing the time" (Wood & Cameron, 12). At the same time, the presence of the politics of femininity and the gender issues can be detected and followed as another aspect of Antonioni's cinematic reflection specifically for his strong female characters as Antonioni tells in his interview:
"I think that woman is inclined to have a deeper perception of what happens around her than man has. Possibly this is due to the fact (but I may be completely wrong) that she is used to "receive". Just as she "receives" man into herself and because her pleasure consists precisely in this "receiving", then I would dare to say that she is even naturally prepared to "receive" reality in this absolutely feminine way. Woman has, more than man, greater possibilities of finding solutions suitable to the circumstances. I do not think that this is to man's disadvantage. On the contrary, very often he counts on it" (Antonioni, 228).
Of course, from critics point of view on Antonioni's films the difficulty of relation between the sexes is obvious and implied through the thematic structure of the cinematic text as Brunette indicates in his book:
"Putting in this way, however, can imply once again that Antonioni's theme is primarily an existential or metaphysical one-for example, that the sexes are perhaps natural enemies, that they can never understand each other, and that the force of love, while irresistible, leads inevitably, in our fallen world, to a great deal of unhappiness as well" (Brunesste, 32)
In other words, the gender in Antonioni's films reacts most of the time to the existential inner void as well as the social and the environmental forces which can be found and interpreted symbolically in the structure of the landscape and mise-en scene as Wood emphasizes in his writing:"In Antonioni's world, actions are often determined as much by the surroundings as by the people themselves-either in an immediate and physical way by the setting or by conditioning from the environment which tends to limit their choice" (Wood et Cameron, 20). For instance, in L'eclisse (1962) as Arrowsmith observes in his book:
"The reeling and tilting of the changing world, the shifting reality that makes life so provisional and difficult, are thus everywhere suggested by a violent alternation of landscapes, city, country, the planned suburban world of EUR, the African motifs of Marta's apartment-all brusquely encamped. Rooms become not so much spaces but rather object-filled cubicles of indeterminate appearance; external space is exploded into bewildering landscape variety. The discontinuity of space is confirmed by temporal dissonance, for the rhythm of the time is itself shattered. Reality, in short, is now structured discontinuity" (Arrowsmith, 73).
The terms such as unpredictability and limited choices for the characters work out to be conventional in Antonioni's stylistic narrative as Wood:
"Antonioni makes his characters retain a human unpredictability. They do not perform actions worked out to be consistent with a thesis. In fact this sort of unreasoned but not gratuitous action is of greatest importance to Antonioni. 'I wanted to show that sentiments which conventions and rhetoric have encouraged us to regard as having a kind of definite weight and absolute duration, can in fact be fragile, vulnerable, subject to change. Men devise himself when he hasn't courage enough to allow for new dimensions in emotional matters-his loves, regrets, states of mind-just as he allows for them in the field of technology" (Wood et Cameron, 22).
For instance, the opaque silence and heavy residue of tense feelings at the end of L'eclisse creates existentially a kind of anxiety that dominates on the whole sequence as Brunette continues in his book:
"Obviously, these are not merely random shots and must not be thought of it in that way, Antonioni achieves formal unity of the visuals and the sound here, be once again, the precise meaning, of necessity, remains vague. Some critics find the end of the film "arid", but Tinazzi is closer to the truth when he suggests that the finale can be read as a display of the intense mystery of reality. 'It shows the loss of the sign, its critics in terms of its reference to something other. For this reason IO would be very careful about attributing symbolic meanings-which might seem very obvious-to such perceptible fragments" (Brunette, 88).
Of course, in his formalistic approach to represent the existential identity of the gender through the images, Antonioni's characters bear the formal meaning of the mise-en scene more than the objects while he is interested to the objects to express character's emotional feelings as Brunette points out in his book:
"The very vagueness of his statement indicates, once again, that Antonioni's home ground is uncertainty, dissonance, the secular mystery lying behind visible; as one Italian critic has put it, 'the only certainties in Antonioni are formal and stylistic'. Formal elements thus once again predominate over naturalistic dramaturgy, which strives always to make "psychologically realistic". As mentioned earlier, the characters, and by a kind of metonymy, the actors, are also the carriers the formal meanings, more textual elements than human beings with whom the audience identify" (Brunette, 53).
To convey the boredom which is called by Samuel Beckett 'cancer of time' Antonioni keeps his camera rolling on the actors or the occurrences in the long takes, and he draws the attention to the complex reality by putting his actors not in intellectual but in irrational environment that sometimes can be considered as a kind of surrealistic and disturbing. Through these long takes, Antonioni put the characters pinned against the wall to represent their isolation and need for protection visually such as the scenes in the beginning of L'ecclisse or almost the end of L'avventura (1960) in which Monica Vitti are framed standing but pinned against the wall.
Moreover, the existential maladies of the characters can be embodied in their subjective sexual desires and frustrations which can be referred to death of the emotion or transcendental values. For example, in Il Deserto Rosso (1964) in the semi-orgy scene the talk of aphrodisiacs represents a desire to sexual intimacy as Wood states in his writing:"The scene of abortive little would-be orgy in the hut reveals the film's true moral position unequivocally. The cheaply promiscuous pawning and sniggering talk of aphrodisiacs-pornography on the most infantile level-illustrates the trivializing of sex and of human relationship that marks the adjusted characters (Corrado, initially at least, finds it distasteful)" (Wood et Cameron, 116). The erotic passion found in Antonioni's cinema seems to be connected crucially with the text as it has something to do with the transience and anxiety of a kind of apocalyptic world. Arrowsmith finds in L'ecclisse:
"The dark, ominous side of suppressed reality-whose beauty we see enacted as Love, however transient-is the story of Vittoria and Piero. Transient and fragile; its fragility is also expressed and explained by those images of a world slipping away, its latent aggression largely but never wholly screened by the flow of mostly peaceful images. And the fragility of Love, in turn, partly explains the latent apocalypse implicit in these closing images of light and dark, which make sits epiphany in the image of Faustian Eros disclosing itself as last for what it is: the other suppressed reality of dearth, Thanatos, looming over all the arrangments and peaceful orders of a world organized for aggression-aggressive Eros almost incapable of love" (Arrosmith, 84)
If in L'avventura the static compositions, the long takes and the landscape shape the events, in Il Desserto Rosso, zoom out and use of color profoundly and fundamentally give the scenes a sense of exploration and deciphering of underlying meanings of the cinematic text through which the continuity of the relationship between the characters undergoes the turbulence and morality. For example in L'aventura the vulnerability and fragility of human relationship between Sandro(Gabriele Ferzetti) and Anna(Lea Massari) can be observed through the landscape of the island which is harsh, rough and barren while everybody tries to find a place to walk on it. In Il Desserto Rosso Giuliana's (Monica Vitti) gestures and expressions create the terrified complex contrast with the abstractive out of focus shots or the objectified mise-en scenes, for instance, the scene in which Giuliana drives her car to commit suicide is a perfect exemplary mise-en scene through which her alienation with the environment is represented in terms of foggy landscape, the static and the immobile figures and the bodies of the other characters. Indeed, her negative alienation including her desire for isolation and individuality strives and struggles with her positive alienation which can be defined as her enthusiasm to be a part of the group as Moore discusses on L'eclisse:
"Negative alienation, then, does no more than name the necessity for which positive alienation supplies the want. Thus the goal of positive alienation is correspondence and community, just as the goal of negative alienation is individuality and a contemplative isolation. The dialectic between negative and positive alienations defines the normative flow of aesthetic and disengagement within healthy cultures, and so it is imperative that Antonioni emphasizes the positive if he is to offer cinema a s one means by which an erotically sick culture might return to moral health" (Moore, 169).
But the fantasy is the only illusory and non real treatment for the sickness of Eros. In addition to alienation Nomadism and diseased Eros are the other existential maladies which can be found in Antonioni's films. This nomadism brings solitude and loneliness for Antonioni's characters. Also, for Antonioni. the existential anxiety and identity is the problematic issues which can not be solved easily based upon the scientific approach or methodology. One has to realize that what Antonioni persuaded to do is ultimately optimistic and a kind of attempt to bring reconciliation between the painful individuation and desire to be a part of the group. For Antonioni as an artist, everything in the world is uncertain and seems to change all the time and people is always looking for something else to overcome on their own internal emptiness which connects them with the existence of sex, money, power and drugs.
Antonioni, Michelangelo. A talk with Michelangelo Antonioni on His Work Film Culture, No:24, 1962.
Antonioni Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996.
Arrowsmith, William. Antonioni: The Poet of Images New York: Oxford University Press, 1885.
Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 1998.
Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World Berkeley: university of California Press, 1985.
Moore, Kevin Z. Eclipsing The Commonplace: The Logic of Alienation in Antonioni's Cinema Film Quarterly Vol. 48, Summer 1995.
Wenders, Wim. My Time with Antonioni London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
Wood, Robin & Ian Cameron. Antonioni Praeger Publisher, 1969.
By: Morad Sadeghi
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