On Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni was obsessed with distraction. No other artist focused on inattentiveness to the degree of intensity on display in his best films. His subject was the alternately bored and viscerally excited modern human being, but he had the extraordinary discipline to keep himself from becoming such a person. His characters often broke down, losing sight of each other, their own desires, their barest needs; through it all, Antonioni would retain his trancelike alertness. He indulged long takes, luxuriating in static images and masterfully sustained tracking shots of characters flitting aimlessly from excitement to crushing boredom and loneliness. The extravagant tension in his extravagantly composed films derives from this crucial difference between sensibility and subject.

His landmark L'Avventura (1960) opens with a boating trip of wealthy, sybaritic Romans to an island off the coast of Sicily. It comes abruptly to a close when, unexpectedly, the main female character, Anna (Lea Massari), disappears. The rest of the party searches for her. It proves fruitless. They stop searching and forget about the missing woman. Her bereft, insecure architect husband, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and another member of the boating party, Claudia (the ubiquitous Monica Vitti), begin an affair (l'avventura means both "the adventure" and "the affair"). They gradually lose interest in each other. Ferzetti's interest in architecture revives, then declines. One night, Vitti catches him sleeping with a prostitute. The next morning, they are bitterly reconciled. The film ends.

These episodes often seem to take forever. Sometimes, the foreverness is contained within a single shot, as in the last scene of L'Avventura, where the camera tracks the motion of Monica Vitti's hand as, excruciatingly, it hesitates to grasp Ferzetti's shoulder. (When it finally does, the relief is acid and incomplete.) Antonioni had developed a new, elliptical style of filmmaking that, for all its strangeness, appeared to reproduce the staccato/legato rhythms of everyday existence, at least, the existence of a particular class in the Western world. "Eros is sick," Antonioni wrote, in a laconic statement that accompanied the premiere of the film at Cannes (where the film received boos, catcalls, and the Jury Prize). "Man is uneasy, something is bothering him."1 The impasse his film depicted—between people; between men, women and their environment—was intellectual, moral, erotic, at once more real than the "neorealism" that had dominated Italian film just a few years prior, with its unyielding preference for impoverished subjects.

We see a crucial example of this wealthy unease in L'Eclisse (1962), in a scene that depicts the stock market in Rome. Alain Delon's mercurial stockbroker leaps around in a surge of frenzied brokers, all of them screaming prices at each other. Antonioni focuses intently on the crowd: under the prolonged scrutiny of the camera, the energy of the scene drifts into tedium. The gorgeous mania of the market devolves into rationalized barbarity. Suddenly, one of the brokers announces over a PA system the death of a distinguished colleague. They will observe a moment of silence. All the brokers fall silent and bow their heads. The market, though, will not stop: the silence is interrupted by the continuing ringing of telephones. At first, this is funny; ironic, perhaps. But the moment of silence goes on and on, and the phones keep ringing. Long after the apparent "point" has been made, the scene endures, and the monotony of distraction becomes terrifying. When the "silence" finally ends, and the screaming resumes, the feeling of release we might have expected is vitiated by the deeper feeling of being unsettled.

In the seven-minute dialogue-less sequence of scenes that concludes L'Eclisse, we catch a glimpse of one newspaper headline: "L'Era Atomica," the atomic age. Then another: "La pace é debole." The peace is weak. It encapsulated the whole spirit of Antonioni's project. The peace we had purchased in the postwar Western world had cost us dearly, and we could see evidence of its instability everywhere: our inhuman architecture ("these buildings are madness," Vitti says of the modern architecture in L'Avventura), our failing marriages and relationships, our relentless search for new "adventures" to consume. The overarching accord was centered on the rather grim supposition that neither superpower was dumb enough to try to blow the other up.

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Antonioni's masterpiece had a title that referred to this predicament, Blowup (1966), which was about the restless life of a London fashion photographer. The pacing of the film had increased somewhat dramatically—scenes and settings changed with much more rapidity than in his previous films—but the overwhelmingly deliberate camerawork and plotting remained uncompromised. Blowup was set in mod, "swinging" London, and whoever marketed the film clearly wanted to emphasize the viewer's chance to play voyeur. Like ads for the teen-sex-and-drug-use exploitation flick Thirteen (2003), the film's trailer, scored to the Yardbirds' "Still On" (the band and song make an appearance in the film), was a rapid-fire sequence of still images of female nudity, pot-smoking, and general moral lassitude (e.g., people lounging on couches in post-coital laziness). You were supposed to wring your hands with anxiety and irrepressible jealousy all at the same time. It helped that the film was released without a rating.

The marketing worked: the movie was Antonioni's greatest commercial success, indeed, the most successful "art-house" movie of its day. But Blowup relentlessly frustrated expectations. Filmgoers must have been disappointed by the only occasional nudity, the rare images of drug use, and the rather sparing use of the London setting. One wouldn't go to this film now for anthropological details about the '60s. The characters are again consumed by nameless internal anxieties, no one more so than the main photographer (David Hemmings). Sexually rapacious and violent, his restlessness is overlaid by a deceptive mask of cool and sense of total mastery, which gradually unravels as he is forced to confront the limits of his own knowledge. One could easily imagine a parallel film that points its moral by depicting the predictable descent of the photographer into deeper levels of pornographic depravity (e.g., the number of partners and variety of sex acts grows, as does the use of drugs which, over time, will debilitate him and prevent him from performing the sex acts). Blowup knows all its own boring, voyeuristic temptations, and it forbids each one of them from coming to fruition. Among them is a pseudo-Hitchcock plot without a twist. Spying a man and woman kissing in a park, the photographer begins to take pictures of them. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) rushes to stop him. "You can't go around taking pictures of people in a public place," she cries. "People must be left in peace." "I can't help it if there's no peace," he replies matter-of-factly. She follows him to his studio, and tries fruitlessly to take the film. Later, the photographer develops the reel and begins to post the black-and-white photos around his studio. The camera pans slowly from photograph to photograph, as we follow the photographer's gradual discovery of what appears to be a murder—a stunning, near-silent sequence, composed almost entirely of the static photographs, a frustrating plot of significant glances that lead to a conclusion the film never gives us. The blowups get us seemingly closer to some kind of truth, but by the end of the movie, the evidence of that truth has decomposed and disappeared.

Despite its director, who often protested that he was not a philosopher but a man who "tells stories, narrates with images," Blowup raises so many philosophical issues, among them the troubled relationship between photography/film and reality; the instability of meaning and identity; the "sickness of Eros." But these are just keywords, which attempt to subdue and domesticate a film that yields more and more on each viewing. To me, its veiled meanings are coded into the various games that populate the film, allegorizing the social scene depicted in the film, and in the inability of the photographer to escape them. In one scene, two girls stop him, begging him to photograph them. "Haven't you got two minutes to take pictures of us?" they ask. "I haven't even got two minutes to have my own appendix out," he replies. Fidgety, he turns on a radio, takes out a coin, and begins an elaborate game of flipping the coin over and under his fingers. The camera zooms in on his hand. We realize what fantastic effort he must have devoted to make the trick appear effortless—how distractedness, pursued this far, requires a total absorption in emptiness.

All the photographer's actions reflect this frenetic absorption. He strolls into an antique shop he's thinking of buying. With hooded, bored eyes, he strikes an idle conversation with the shop owner until he is suddenly possessed by an object he likes—a wooden airplane propeller. "It's fantastic!" he cries. "I've got to have it now!" By the time the propeller is delivered, later that day, he has already forgotten about it. Talking to a woman in his studio, the phone rings. He waits until it rings four times before he leaps over several pieces of furniture to tackle it. "It's my wife," he tells the woman. "She isn't my wife really. We just have some kids." He pauses. "No, no kids. It feels as if we have kids." He pauses, and goes on. "She isn't beautiful—she's just easy to live with. No, she isn't—that's why we don't live together." He drives by a small, pathetic-looking anti-nuclear war rally. A marcher sticks a sign in the back of his car that says "Go Away." As he drives away from the rally, the sign flies out of his car. The peace is weak.

At the end of the movie, the photographer finds a group of mimes playing invisible tennis in the park where he photographed the murder. When the invisible ball flies out of the court and falls at his feet, he picks it up, and tosses it back to the mimes. We watch the progress of the ball by watching David Hemmings's eyes, which suddenly take on an air of bitter recognition, and we hear the sounds of a real tennis ball knocked back and forth. The game as allegory again: What the photographer plays everyday is this soulless game of mime tennis, whose "reality" he has mastered with the most useless ease.

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With Antonioni's death, no era has ended, least of all "l'era atomica." Those accords that underwrite our existence are as unstable, as false as ever. This falseness—the fissure between the healthy world we envision and the debilitated one we inherit and further undo—makes it easy to repeat the restless, unraveled lives of Antonioni's characters. It also makes it easy to praise those artists whose work enacts and amplifies the jittery unease that rules our everyday life—as if being distracted oneself were the same as representing and scrutinizing distraction. Antonioni reminds us that the sharpest effects are achieved by those who look unflinchingly at the pains and impasses of our time while maintaining a part of themselves that does not succumb to them—those artists who can help it if there's no peace.