July 30 will forever be remembered as one of the bleakest days in film history. A few hours after Ingmar Bergman s death was publicized, the Italian media announced the death of another great European filmmaker whose works, along with Bergman, Fellini and the French New Wave auteurs, defined the cultural scene of the 1960s.
Michelangelo Antonioni s death at 94 signaled the end of a generation of filmmakers that transformed cinema from entertainment to serious art.
I was introduced to Antonioni’s world later in life. For some years, his films were on top of the unseen film collection I was cautiously reluctant to approach.
Then on a Saturday evening a few years ago, Blowup, Antonioni s biggest commercial success, was screened on TV and I decided to give it a shot. For the next 111 minutes, I was glued to my couch, unable to move, glimpse away or think.
The film followed a photographer (David Hemmings) in swinging 60s London as he cruises a city that appears so full yet feels so empty.
He photographs a couple in a park and later suspects that he might have shot a murder. Amid the free sex, drugs, fashion and Rock n Roll, the disaffected photographer finds a temporary distraction and a sense of significance in his brief enterprise, only to reach a dead end. The film ends with the mystery unsolved, with a final shot of a group of mimes playing imaginary tennis, with no balls or rackets, as the photographer drifts away aimlessly.
Antonioni s London was not the idolized place many of the younger generations constantly perceived it to have been. It was, in fact, no more than a dismal anarchic spot with self-absorbed rovers lost in time.
Alienation, emotional emptiness and the fall of western civilization were some of the main themes that formed the basis of Antonioni s films.
Long before the huge success of Blowup, Antonioni shocked the world with a film that would change the course of film history. The year was 1960 and the film was L Avventura.
L Avventura (The Adventure) premiered in Cannes to a hostile reception from the audience who jeered the film and walked out halfway through. This was no ordinary story with a solid plot and sympathetic characters. The film revolved around a young rich woman who disappears during a boat trip. Shortly after a few days of search, her lover and best friend become entangled in an affair. The search is suspended and the film shifts its attention to the new lovers. The film ends with the man betraying the best friend with a famed socialite/prostitute for no apparent reason and, like Blowup, the mystery of the young woman is never solved.
Despite the catastrophic reaction, the film went on to win a Special Jury Prize and was named by the revered American critic Pauline Kael as the best film of 1960. Surprisingly, it became a sensation, propelling Antonioni to the top of the most exciting filmmakers list and attracting hordes of loyal followers.
L Avventura is a film about a group of rich, idle, bored Italians in a fruitless search for sensual pleasure. Their lives ultimately amount to nothing. They hop from one meaningless relationship to another and are incapable of loving anyone and they don t receive any gratification from being loved. In her review, Kael described them as too shallow to be truly lonely.
Yet there was something excessively attractive about those sad wealthy characters, maybe due to the fashion in which Antonioni photographed them. The film featured long, sometimes unbroken, takes of these beautiful people projected against incredibly beautiful, yet palpably melancholic, empty spaces that felt like a series of visual poems.
The images of Monica Vitti, one of the most voluptuous women to grace the silver screen, were transfixing and Antonioni expanded his vision further with the following two parts of the trilogy: La Notte (The Night) and L Eclisse (Eclipse).
Antonioni s films are set in a post-God world. Bergman s films questioned the silence of God; Antonioni, on the other hand, didn t even acknowledge the possibility of his existence. Unlike common belief, his films inclined further towards post-modernism than existentialism.
Antonioni s films were a long examination of what s lurking beyond all the goals, activities, joys and habits we set for ourselves, which is plain emptiness. Everything we adopt in our lives is essentially a tool to protect us from the emptiness of the modern world; even God, according to Antonioni, is a means of distraction, of injecting a sense of purpose in a purposeless world. His films are attempts to capture the ephemeral moments of self-definition in the midst of ambiguity and flux.
I recommended L Avventura to a friend of mine a few months ago. He hated it, saying it bored him to death and that he didn t even finish it. I was outraged, although I deduced beforehand that that might be his reaction. But I just couldn t entirely shake off the idea of how anyone could fail to feel this emptiness I saw everyday in the blank faces in the streets; in the soulless parties where everyone tries to communicate with one another and fails; in the silence born out of the desperate noises of the city; and in the moral conundrum plaguing the psychological fabric of my generation.
Antonioni s Asian protégées Ki-duk Kim, Hsiao-hsien Hou and Kar Wai Wong have carried the maestro s torch, drawing a dejected portrait of the modern world using Antionioni s poetic visual grammar. As truly great as these three, and several other contemporary European filmmakers are, none of them possess the audacity, urgency and power to ask life s biggest questions the way Antonioni and Bergman did.
Antonioni was famous for the montages he created at the end of his films. The prophetic sequences of shots at the end of L Eclisse linger in my head the most. After he completely abandoned his two protagonists, Antonioni presented a sequence of an industrial, naked, empty Rome. This is a glimpse of a distant, mechanical world yearning for attention and warmth. The montage ends with an eclipse of a celestial white light; the eclipse of humanity and, now, the eclipse of the last of the greatest filmmaking.
