[Thor Joachim Haga]

PART II:

Genre, middle film and gradual exploration

Antonioni’s first five feature films are situated in a very different landscape – literally – than his later works. There is little focus on location and complicated subtext; instead, they lie safely within melodramatic genre expressions. The films are carpeted with dialogue, delivered at machine-gun speed, and don’t find much time to dwell on either surroundings or significant surfaces. It’s almost as if we can sense Antonioni’s future preference when a screenwriter and producer discuss how to resolve a love scene at the beginning of La signora senza camelie (1953):

“It’s easy. No dialogue. Then no one will be bored”
“We don’t need dialogue. Lovers only need to do one thing. The less they talk, the better.”

On the one hand, these films revolve around bourgeois, well-off environments (which was also Antonioni’s own background) – the star actors in La signora senza camelie, the industrial magnate and his unhappy wife in his debut film Cronaca di un amore (1950) or the class-climbing women in Le amiche (1955). Combined with their melodramatic expression, they sometimes move dangerously close to the “Telefoni Bianchi” films of the 30s, even if the comedy factor is low and the social awareness is higher.

On the other hand, Antonioni also draws on neorealist movements, such as the amateurs he uses in his part of the anthology film L’amore in città (1953), the misfit youths in I vinti (1953) and not least the loafer and his daughter in Il grido, which is almost a variation on Vittorio de Sica’s iconic Ladri di biclette (1948).

Despite this, Antonioni’s spatial fascination appears in small flashes here too. In the French part of the anthology film I vinti , a young man kills his friend over a few francs; the climax is set in the ruins of a castle in the countryside. Antonioni, as usual, lies at a suitable distance and observes the youths running across damp grass fields, in an eerie sunset light, and then leaves the dying man among bare columns, at the bottom left of the frame, while the murderer runs into the horizon. The contrast signals disillusioned youth and broken values.

In a sequence from Le amiche, the main character Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago) visits a poor neighborhood in Turin where she grew up. The areas are deserted, with scratched brick walls, empty, black windows, bars and dusty gravel surfaces. On the most obvious level, it is of course intended to signal her class journey, but by being so wide in the shot – and with Clelia firmly centered in the middle – it also becomes an identification marker. She is not like the other rich girls in the group of friends.

Yet it is Il grido that stands out not only with a clearer spatial profile, but as the first Antonioni work in which several of his auteur traits are in place. After a brutal (and, some would say, unsympathetic) breakup with his girlfriend Irma (Alida Valli) at the beginning of the film, Aldo (Steve Cochran) and his daughter wander from place to place, in an eternal search for work and some form of peace. Along the way, he tries to replace his ideal woman Irma with fleeting female acquaintances; a kind of identity takeover, but he does not succeed.

Finally, Antonioni tones down the amount and pace of dialogue. It is slow, quiet, observant and realistic. On several occasions, the characters are placed in extreme totals, as if to really emphasize the alienation, both from existence and modernity. Aldo stumbles into construction and demolition projects and large, open spaces that are not yet developed. This is Italy in the post-war period, a devastated country that is trying to get back on its feet, but which, on the contrary, is driving the population into the gutter or into exile. These are the observations of Gente del Po and NU set in a fictional universe.

The most poetic scenes, however, are along the country road. Antonioni constantly uses strongly perspectived settings, with streets and landscapes that disappear in diagonal lines into the horizon. Sometimes the picture, or the horizon, is also filled with the director’s typical fog and haze – a signal of the unknown future far away. Other times there are more vertical lines, like the many tree trunks (with the treetops cut off by the picture frame) that stand like enclosing bars around Aldo and his daughter – the impossible detachment. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Aldo has sought refuge in a shed of a house on the muddy riverbank. The rain is pouring down and dripping from every crack in the tin roof, almost like unstoppable tears, while Aldo is at his lowest point in life.

Il grido is in many ways Antonioni’s most beautiful and emotional film; a fragile and intimate tale that combines neorealist tragedy with progressive ideas about how things, places and settings should comment on the psychological subtext. But it is told in a relatively traditional way, and a far cry from the daring masterpiece that was on the doorstep.

L’avventura

Film historians categorize Antonioni’s “golden age” in different ways. Many speak only of the alienation trilogy L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse. Some include Il deserto rosso in that group as a kind of tetralogy, others do not. For my part, however, I choose to extend the definition all the way from L’avventura in 1960 to Professione: Reporter in 1975, a period in which his imprint is strongest.

Today, L’avventura is considered a cornerstone of film history, but its notorious premiere at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival was something else, with laughter and boos in the audience – especially during the slow stretches without any significant plot development. Fortunately, a petition by prominent filmmakers (according to them, L’avventura was the “best film ever shown at Cannes”) led to it eventually receiving the Jury Prize.

With today’s eyes, it is difficult to understand this reaction, but it says something about how new and different this film language was in 1960. Finally, Antonioni could use the locations for all they were worth without caring so much about a classic narrative structure; locations that were indirectly and sometimes directly kneaded into manifestations of loneliness, alienation and lack of communication.

Already at the beginning of the film, Claudia (Monica Vitti) – Antonioni’s muse throughout several films – is staged with simple visual gestures. As the only single in the group of couples, she is at one point enclosed by fluttering curtains, seen from inside the room where Sandro (Gabriele Ferzeti) and Anna (Lea Massari) are caressing each other, or alone on a landing under the window. This naturally emphasizes her loneliness, but it also anticipates her later role in the story, when she almost takes over Anna’s identity through Sandro’s attempt to recapture his missing “ideal woman.”

Most potent, however, is the boat trip to the archipelago in Sicily. The islands lie bare and lonely in the open sea, like several of the characters in the film, and when they finally step ashore, they are met by a rocky and rugged landscape. There is almost no vegetation, but all the more dangerous cracks and cavities in the topography. In some places there are ruins of previous settlements. The longer we spend on the barren islet, the more it takes on its own mysterious identity, especially after Anna disappears without a trace. On a couple of occasions the sound of a ‘phantom boat’ is heard nearby, but no one can see it – we recall the imagined murder in Blowup (1966) a few years later, and Antonioni’s fascination with faulty perception.

Through repetition and static settings, the island’s geography gradually becomes more familiar to us: the steep and shady slope down to the boat launch, the barren stone plateau with the small, windswept brick house, the dramatic plunge into the mountain crevice with the roaring, ravenous waves far below. It is as beautiful and poetic of nature as it is foreign and cold.

A later example is Sandro and Celia’s stopover in the village of Noto up in the Sicilian mountains – completely deserted, with large, open spaces, cold, monochromatic walls and neat horizontal and vertical lines. This is a type of city and architecture that Antonioni uses frequently in his later films. The ghostly “city of Noto” becomes in many ways a distillation of the characters’ apathy, frustration and labyrinthine emotional lives.

The film’s ending also echoes these traits, when, after a late party, Claudia slowly wanders through perspective corridors, abandoned rooms, deserted streets and weathered brick walls before finding Sandro crying on a bench. The emptiness of the places signals not so much a reconciliation, but a shared acceptance of their failed attempt to cultivate an ideal that was never attainable – a theme that in many ways makes a direct connection to Antonioni’s next film.

…to be continued