[Thor Joachim Haga]

Alright. Again, the English translation comes from an A.I., so don’t blame me for wonky phrasings. But I think it looks reasonably well. I’ll do this in installments.

PART I:

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI’S SIGNIFICANT SURFACES

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, characters and places speak to each other. When someone enters a room, the room in turn not only reflects their state of mind, but also injects new content into our experience of them. The director’s fascination with alienation and identity crisis is always deeply cemented in the nature and architecture that surrounds them.

July 30, 2007 remains one of the strangest dates in film history – within hours of each other, both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni passed away. Whether they were particularly close is unknown, but Bergman was often lukewarm in his description of the Italian master director. “He is an ‘aesthetician’,” Bergman once said, “who spends a lot of time on a single shot but doesn’t understand that film is a fluid flow of images /…/ Of course, there are some brilliant parts in his films, but I don’t understand why Antonioni is so highly regarded .” Antonioni, for his part, spoke less frequently about his colleague, who was five years younger, but reportedly told The Telegraph that “Bergman was only concerned with questions of God. I myself am not interested in unraveling spiritual mysteries . ”

Now, let’s not overdramatize either – it wasn’t really so much a rivalry as a misunderstood evaluation; an incompatible worldview that separated them. Moreover, there are more similarities between them than they might themselves have admitted; I see Antonioni in Smultronstället (1957) and Bergman in La notte (1961), for example. But what Bergman didn’t understand was Antonioni’s fascination with place, space, geography and landscape – markers of an inner soul life or an existential crisis. Where Bergman was from the inside out, Antonioni was often from the outside in – especially from Il grido (1957) onwards. Ultimately, it’s about significant surfaces .

Narratologist and critic Seymour Chatman highlights precisely this aspect in the book Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World (1985) – still considered the foremost literary work on Antonioni’s filmography (alongside Roland Barthes’ sweet “love letter” to the director):

“The central and distinguishing characteristic of Antonioni’s mature films /…/ is narration by a kind of visual minimalism, by an intense concentration on the sheer appearance of things – the surface of the world as he sees it – and a minimization of explanatory dialogue. The rendered surface is eloquent once one has learned to read it, and, even more, to accept its aesthetic and narrative self-sufficiency” (Chatman 1985: 2)

Through this prism, several of Antonioni’s auteur traits emerge: the alienation from the modern and modernity itself (monochromatic, cold surfaces and stringent, encapsulating lines), fateful paths into the unknown (strongly perspectived streets and landscapes) and, not least, complicated identity structures, where characters occupy a space for a time; becoming a kind of organic extension of it, only to abandon it completely, or in favor of something else.

Antonioni’s characters are on a perpetual search for something they cannot quite articulate or achieve. This is also the consistent ‘sideways’ element in his films: either one searches for something within oneself, or one searches through another partner, but it usually ends in unhappy, fleeting acquaintances that rather lead to more insecurity. This process is also mirrored in the surroundings – long, observant camera runs or extreme close-ups of small people in unintelligible landscapes, sometimes crushed down by oppressive fog.

It is important to point out, however, that these thematic and stylistic trends were not perfect from the beginning, and also varied in their presence throughout his career. Place as a significant surface, with both evocative intrinsic value and meaningful symbolism, is something he comes to gradually in his film aesthetic exploration.

The documentary gaze

After a few years as an assistant to other directors, Antonioni finally received his own directorial assignments in the mid-1940s, in a series of short documentaries about everyday life and phenomena. Both quality and ambition vary considerably between them, and several have a more curious or pragmatic quality – Superstizione (1949) about rural superstition, Sette canne, un vestito (1948) about a textile factory or L’amorosa menzogna (1949) about a colorful picture magazine. La villa dei mostri (1950) tends towards something more place-oriented, with its observations of the statues in the Bomarzo garden – and thus an interesting parallel to Antonioni’s very last film Lo sguardo di Michelangelo (2004), a kind of connection between the first and the last of his life and career – but it is not so much poetic as it is more newsreel-like in its presentation.

There are really only two of these short documentaries that stand out from our perspective. One is his very first film, Gente del Po (1947), which was begun as early as 1943. The 11-minute film is a depiction of the people who live and work on the banks of the Po, more like a film essay, and with minimal narration. It is as if Antonioni follows the flow of the river in his imagery as well; slow, calm panning – often in a flat, melancholic light – that captures both chugging boats, disheveled workers and poor settlements along the way; often from a good distance. The film flows like the river.

The second is NU (1948), an abbreviation for ‘Netteza Urbana’, the Italian sanitation service. It is, if possible, even more sober in its approach than Gente del Po, with less narration and a greater emphasis on sociological observation. It basically covers a day in Rome, from sunrise to sunset, with an emphasis on street sweepers, janitors and garbage collectors. But the scope is actually broader than that – in several parts of the film Antonioni shifts focus from the sanitation workers to ordinary people in their daily activities, all shrouded in poverty and post-war depression. Perspective-driven streetscapes, tall buildings, claustrophobic alleys and monuments from Roman times – all organically connected to the city and the landmarks they surround themselves with, but at the same time alienated from them; a whiff of former grandeur.

In these two films, in particular, we sense the germ of what would eventually become one of Antonioni’s hallmarks: the documentary, searching gaze. Initially, there is no political commentary here, but by constantly alternating between near and far, and by picking up small details in people’s immediate surroundings, places are also given a meaning that is greater than themselves; an extension of something spiritual. Thus, they actually have more in common with the director’s ‘golden age’ from 1960-1975 than the following feature films of the 1950s.

…to be continued.