Let’s talk Antonioni films and scores….or lack thereof
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PART V:
Professione: Reporter
My personal Antonioni favourite has always been Professione: Reporter (1975), especially because it combines a thriller element (a genre I would have liked to see him in more often) with the director’s usual storytelling around the influence of places.
If identity transfer has been a recurring theme in Antonioni’s filmography, it has never been formulated more literally than in Professione: Reporter: Journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) is on assignment in the Sahara Desert and at one point decides to take over the identity of his deceased hotel neighbor Robertson (Charles Mulvehill). However, he soon becomes entangled in a dangerous network of arms smugglers.
Antonioni’s social anthropological eye is introduced early in the film when Locke arrives in a small village in a jeep. The camera is at a good distance, silently observing. It is an inhospitable environment: sand, flies, sweat and wind swirl in the scorching sun, in open desert landscapes where Locke becomes terribly small – as alienating as the valley of death in Zabriskie Point. He tries to communicate with the locals, but he can’t; it’s almost as if he doesn’t exist. Here lies the whole motivation for his later identity takeover.
Locke’s situation eventually takes us to Barcelona and Spain. Here, too, there is fertile ground for significant surfaces. At one point, he meets a mysterious, untitled girl (Maria Schneider) in Antonio Gaudi’s distinctive Casa Milà. As they move through the building’s protruding, corpulent roof decorations, their relationship is also defined. On a ledge below, an established couple is arguing, but Locke and the girl are still in the initial phase of their fleeting relationship; an exploration of each other that is manifested physically in the winding architecture.
Later, Locke will somewhat reluctantly meet Robertson’s contacts in a disused hotel complex outside the city: No people. Large, open spaces. White, monochromatic brickwork. Strongly perspectived lines that encapsulate the character, alienate and signal an uncertain future. A true “Noto city”, in other words.
The famous closing scene nevertheless remains the clearest staging of both Antonioni’s documentary gaze and the places that are heavy with personality. We are in a hotel in Osuna outside Seville. In one and the same seven-minute take, the camera drives from the hotel room where Locke is, through the narrow window bars and out into the square outside, before turning and returning to the hotel room. In the meantime, action is taking place both in front of and behind the camera, signaled only by sound. A whole series of cars, people, animals and groups pass through the square, as well as a restless Maria Schneider. In line with the director’s occupation/reconquest theme, the surroundings have taken back “life” just as Locke himself is leaving it.
Professione: Reporter marks the end of Antonioni’s golden age, in my opinion, but it is by no means the end of his career, even though he loses some of his relevance in the last three decades of his life – partly due to failing health.
Transition and self-reflexivity
Five years after Professione: Reporter, Antonioni returns with a curiosity of a film: Il mistero di Oberwald (1980), an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s play L’Aigle á deux têtes (1946). Like Chung Kuo – Cina, this one is also hard to come by, existing only as grainy television footage from the decade it was made. The film is a theatrical and stilted affair – on the one hand a return (or perhaps even regression) to the director’s dialogue-heavy films of the fifties, on the other a strangely experimental exercise in style.
The action is set in the 19th century, in a castle in the Swiss Oberwald, and is a kind of chamber drama about a queen’s relationship with her assassin; in itself an unusual historical epic from a director who has always been concerned with the present and modernity. But the strangest thing is the choice to shoot on video, and to color the images in red, green and yellow tones. According to Antonioni himself, the electronic recording method was a move that gave him both more immediate control over the cut and the opportunity to use color to create a kind of melodramatic, poetic work. iv
Well, it doesn’t really work. Even Monica Vitti as the Queen (in what would be their last collaboration) gives only a faint whiff of former grandeur. There’s really no exploitation of the castle’s many nooks and crannies; the atmospheric storm at the film’s beginning remains a parenthesis and the progression is both dusty and tenuous.
Then Antonioni returns to more familiar territory with Identificazione di una donna (1982). This too cannot be considered a masterpiece, but has many recognizable stagings of existential crisis and weathered relationships. The filmmaker Niccolò (Thomás Milán) struggles with a meaningless existence – illustrated by constantly positioning him against large, white walls. When he finally finds a potential partner in the mysterious Mavi (Daniela Silverio), this too remains an unattainable ideal. The fog has probably never been thicker in Antonioni’s films than when Niccolò and Mavi drift apart on the country road. He attempts an ‘identity takeover’ with the young and cheerful actress Ida, but it is never the same.
In the closing scene, Niccoló and Mavis’ final break is illustrated by the molding in a glass door. On one side of the molding stands Niccoló, on the other Mavi. At one point, even Mavi turns her back, so that the gap between them becomes irrevocable. As in La notte and L’eclisse, Antonioni uses architecture and furnishings as relational markers.
From here begins what can roughly be called Antonioni’s “self-reflexive period”, in which he looks back on his career and his themes through a kind of meta-perspective – visible in both documentary and fiction films. First up is the short documentary Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (1983) in which Antonioni returns to the island that was so significant in L’avventura. There is no narration, but the music and soundtrack from L’avventura indirectly comment on the locations from the film. In this variant of the occupation/reconquest theme, it is not only life that has reclaimed the island that once held so much meaning, but equally a nostalgic look back to the time when the director himself “broke up” from the gnarled earth and shaped a new film landscape. The soundtrack from L’avventura thus takes on the role of the phantom ghost from the original film; the whiff of a spiritual, past presence.
In 1985, at the age of 73, Antonioni suffered a stroke that not only rendered him speechless but left deep scars on his entire body. However, this did not stop him from making more films, with the help of his new wife Enrica.
The first film after the stroke comes four years later, in the anthology film 12 registi per 12 cittá (1989), a commission for the 1990 World Cup in Italy (of all things), in which important directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Mauro Bolognini and Franco Zefirelli are asked to create a portrait of a chosen Italian city. Antonioni’s part is (naturally) about Rome, and is entirely devoted to the city’s art – static observations of statues and murals, sometimes brought to life with 3D-like camera movements around the objects. Now it is the gaze itself that will be thematized; the creative force that once lay behind the ancient works of art.
Two more short documentaries are released shortly after. In Noto, mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, carnevale (1992), the places and phenomena are allowed to comment entirely on their own, without narration or action. He revisits the actual “city of Noto” that has meant so much to him; in this case via the city’s monastery, surrounded by insidious gargoyles. Helicopter sweeps over an active volcano signal a seething local temperament; a gateway to hell, before he lingers on the moonlike landscape of Stromboli – buried in ash and coal like the industrial landscape of Il deserto rosso. The film ends with a carnival sequence, but observational and from a distance. People are strictly speaking just pieces shaped by their surroundings.
The second documentary, Kumba Melha (1992), is a delayed release of footage that Antonioni shot as early as 1977, from the Hindu pilgrimage to the Ganges. Most of the film is a slow pan filmed from a boat – a sober display of the enormous crowds bathing in and drinking(!) from the sacred but undoubtedly bacteria-infested river. As in his first documentary Gente del Po, the camera searches for and captures interesting objects and people along the riverbank – an almost spiritual or hypnotic progression that in a way stages the spirituality of the phenomenon.
…to be continued
PART VI:
Beyond the Clouds
Al di là delle nuvole (1995), perhaps better known by its English title Beyond the Clouds, is Antonioni’s last full-length feature film. There was long doubt if this was an authentic work, since Wim Wenders was involved as co-director in an attempt to assist the communication-impaired director on set. But most of Wenders’ material ended its days in post-production when Antonioni dug into the editing, so there’s really no doubt – the finished film oozes the master director in every frame: A retrospective meta-work.
The film’s untitled protagonist and narrator, played by John Malkovich, is a director in search of something he can’t quite articulate. When he says early in the film that he is “not a philosopher, just an observer,” it becomes quite clear that this is Antonioni himself. This is not least articulated in the surroundings – oppressive fog and perspective streets, especially a long half-corridor with columns that form both diagonal and vertical lines into the horizon.
Al di là delle nuvole is both an anthology film and a network film (with tentative connections), which Malkovich’s ‘Director’ both narrates and participates in himself. But each individual story bears Antonioni’s spatial characteristics to a greater or lesser extent, a kind of ‘what’s what’ of his entire career. Some examples:
Early in the film, we are introduced to a possible couple among the columns in a half-corridor; the lines of the columns both open up and delimit the dynamics of the relationship – like the Gaudi sculptures in Professione: Reporter. The all-encompassing fog returns when the Director finds an abandoned playground on the beach – a kind of wide-open, melancholic space that initiates a new story. The search for the “ideal woman” is manifested in typical ways, as when the Director himself follows a woman (Sophie Marceau) through narrow alleyways in a picturesque port town outside the tourist season. Or when Carlo (Jean Reno) returns to his empty penthouse apartment in the third part, abandoned by his wife – again with strict vertical lines and a space that has been occupied, but is now reclaimed by emptiness. Or in the last part when Niccolo (Vincent Perez) follows a young woman (Irène Jacob) through the cobbled, abandoned streets of Aix-en-Provence; the labyrinthine streets become an image of his tentative path to her heart.
Indeed, when even Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau – the stars of La notte – return as a painter and his lover in a brief interlude, and Mastroianni tells her about the value of copying from ‘the great masters’, we understand that this film is more about retrospection and revelation than anything else. The red, thematic thread running through the stories is diffuse; this is primarily a summary work of Antonioni’s filmography and auteur traits.
A final look back
Besides the little-known (but again retrospective) short documentary Sicilia (1997), almost ten years pass until Antonioni’s last films, only three years before his death.
Al di là delle nuvole producer Stéphane Tchalgadjieff is behind the idea for the anthology film Eros (2004) about eroticism and love, intended as a kind of tribute to the ageing director. Antonioni directs one part himself (helped by his wife Enrica), while filmmakers who have a strong relationship with his filmography direct the other two. The choice falls on Wong Kar-wai and Pedro Almodóvar, but the latter is eventually replaced by Steven Soderbergh due to logistical problems.
It is almost a bit ironic that Antonioni’s part, “The Dangerous Thread of Things”, pales in comparison to the contributions from his younger colleagues and fans (especially Kar-wai’s contribution). Or perhaps rather symptomatic of the fact that the now 91-year-old master has fallen out of fashion. It was also scorned by film critics, who called it an ’empty’ work with an excessive focus on naked female bodies – incidentally a feature in several of Antonioni’s later films, freed from the Italian censorship of the past. Nevertheless, it has several easily recognizable stagings:
We meet the unhappy couple Christopher (Christopher Buchholz) and Cloe (Regina Nemni) who are vacationing in a converted medieval tower in Tuscany. They bore both themselves and each other and try small, distracting excursions – always staged with strongly perspectived streets and intricate paths in nature. In a quarry they hear a singing female voice – like the voice in the paradise story from Il deserto rosso. Combined, it says something about the relationship as a ‘dead end’ and a bygone ideal.
At the same time, Antonioni has transcribed his diversionary motif to become almost an ‘erotic folktale’. Christopher makes love to the woman Linda (Luisa Ranieri) who occupies another tower nearby; a kind of nymphomaniac Rapunzel. However, the subtext stops there. It is difficult to grasp what Antonioni is trying to say in this case; it is less existential crisis and more lustful desire.
His final film, the short documentary Lo Squardo di Michelangelo (2004), is a more substantial work – a literal retrospective that, despite its simplicity, can be interpreted in several meta-layers. Antonioni himself appears in the film, in a dialogue-free encounter with Michelangelo’s statues in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Just as he himself has lost his ability to speak, a connection to the mute statues arises through gaze and touch – a kind of indirect communication between the creative power of his Renaissance namesake and his own.
The camera first lingers on the columns, perspectives and depth of the church room, set in subdued evening light. Gradually we move closer as it cross-cuts between the faces and lines of the statues – here the body is a significant surface – and Antonioni’s own face, often with his eyes highlighted in a chiaroscuro-like lighting. Although the observational gaze of artworks evokes associations with earlier short documentaries such as La villa dei mostri and 12 registi per 12 cittá, this is a much more personal, tactile encounter where Antonioni’s gaze and touches constitute the ‘nerve’ of the film. Now it is no longer so much about alienation and identity crises, but more a kind of attempt to enter into time and tradition.
The end of the film has a completely unique finality about it; probably unique in the history of cinema. The camera remains at a long distance as Antonioni turns from the statues and slowly walks back through the columns, towards and through the open exit door where the light floods in from outside – a quite literal entry through the pearly gates and into eternity. It becomes almost overwhelming, but is completely in line with the director’s occupation/reconquest theme. Now he himself steps out of the spaces that have meant so much to him – both physically and spiritually – and the silent works of art remain. Even though reality has reclaimed the places, the surfaces will forever bear his imprint. He himself has become the phantom boat from L’avventura.
THE END.
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Sources:
https://walkerart.org/magazine/ingmar-bergman-michelangleo
Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World (University of California Press, 1985)
Documentary: Michelangelo Antonioni: The Gaze That Changed Cinema (Sandro Lai, 2001)
Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form (Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1953)Did any of you read this (Graham — have you wandered out of your John Williams walkthrough yet? Tall Guy?)? I’d be delighted for any feedback, good or bad. And of course, anything else on Antonioni, his films or music. But I suppose I kinda killed that option with this massive tome. Took me a whole summer to write, that one.
But I suppose I kinda killed that option with this massive tome.
Not really I just simply cannot contribute anything useful to neither thte movies nor the scores…
I’ll allow myself one – and only one – bump of this thread, because ZardozSpeaks from FSM joined this board awhile back (but has yet to make a comment). I would be very curious to hear what he thinks, being a longtime Antonioni fan like myself.
A sort of spinoff topic to this could be “places in cinema”, the very subject of the magazine issue I edited (and posted about on the previous page). I’ve always been more interested in places in cinema than stories. But yes, maybe that should be a different thread. Although there’s still plenty to be said about Antonioni’s use of it. Anyone else occupied with places in cinema?
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