With the special on Antonioni's films - starting with "Il grido" from 1957 - and the contemporary critics we begin a new section of FIRST Arte dedicated to the great cinema of the past, particularly Italian. Great cinema never gets old. Every generation finds new stimuli, new food for thought, new motivations in the great films that have marked the cultural history of our country. They always see each other differently, with the sensitivity of the moment. The fact is that these films appeared on the screen at a certain time, they were shot for the audience of their time. But how did the public of the time welcome, judge and feel them? Film criticism can be an important filter for understanding the initial success of a film, which may not coincide with today's.
So we decided to offer our readers the reviews of great films (great ones that would become later or soon after) by the major Italian film critics. Articles that appeared in the daily or specialized press of the time. An Amarcord of film criticism. We were saying about Antonioni that it is the first special. Here are Antonioni's films of which you can read a vast review of the critics of the time: The Grido (1957), The Adventure (1960), The Night (1961), The Eclipse (1963), The Red Desert (1964), Blow Up (1966). At this point we will publish for the first time in Italian translation Antonioni's long interview with Playboy released in the November 1967 issue. The films Zabriskie Point (1970) and Professione: reporter (1975) will then follow. Have a good time travel!
Movie: The Scream (1957)
Tullio Kezich
I went to visit the set of The Scream in December 1956 on the Seicento by Gino Mercatali, an assault photographer, the first who brought us to “Settimo Giorno” some “stolen” images of the champion Coppi with the White Lady. Gino drove the car like a reckless reckless, getting into the worst fog I've ever come across. I remember that it was incredibly cold in the square in Francolino and that I was only able to arrange the interview towards evening, back in Ferrara, with Antonioni still half-frozen who had slipped into his hotel bed fully dressed to warm up. On the other hand, due to mutual shyness, I was unable to interview Alida Valli in the tavern where we had sheltered during a break.
A brown, stocky man turns the corner of via Andrea Costa and stops for a moment. The fog descends lower and lower, it's cold and on the embankment overlooking the village of Francolino black figures of peasants stand out. We are a few kilometers from Ferrara, outside the barrier of Corso Porta Mare. A blonde woman comes forward from down the street. The man approaches her, they are facing each other. People are already gathering around them, something is about to happen. The man hits the woman with a slap, another slap: he pushes her against the wall and hits her again. She tries to flee, but he grabs her arm with her left hand and continues to strike with her other hand. A cyclist passes in the background. Nobody says a word. The man and the woman are in front of her: her face is red, her hair is messy and a braid that came undone during the struggle. They look at each other with hatred.
Halt, repeats itself. The director Michelangelo Antonioni enters the square illuminated by the spotlights and says something to Alida Valli, who still has a contracted face from the slaps received and her eyes full of real tears. Steve Cochran, almost embarrassed, locks her in her arms and touches her cheek with a kiss. The seamstress of the "troupe" throws the fur over the shoulders of the actress and hands her a glass of grappa. The hairdresser immediately gets to work around the braid.
The fog is humid, heavy. Antonioni, in a blue coat with the collar raised and a black and red skier's skullcap, repeats the instructions to Cochran in a low voice: we hear articulated, precise English. The actor nods, then has him indicate the exact point where he has to drag Valli for the last slaps. The assistants get busy reorganizing the movement of the extras, skilfully piloting the peasant women with handkerchiefs on their heads and the old men wrapped up in iron.
The circle of the curious is getting closer and closer. The cameraman Gianni Di Venanzo still monitors the lead light through the exposure meter and grimaces in perplexity. Franco Cancellieri, the producer, seems worried that the fog won't force us to leave everything there at any moment. The English dancer that Antonioni has chosen for a part in the film, Lyn Shaw, has even disappeared in the fur coat and she thinks that perhaps she was better off staying in Milan with the "girls" of Dapporto. The production manager, Marciani, is already preparing the program for the following day: the sea storm in the Polesine has forced the "crew" to change almost all the exteriors. Antonioni works to build a town put together with pieces taken here and there, passing from Occhiobello to Pontelagoscuro, from Ravalle to Copparo, from Porto Tolle to Porto Garibaldi. But Marciani's constant concern is the fog that haunts the film forcing abrupt changes in the agenda: and sometimes, when the fog isn't there, it has to be created artificially to complete certain scenes that began in gray weather.
The stagehand who strikes the clapperboard has already prepared the new number: 123/2. Cancellieri looks at the time, increasingly worried: it's really true that in cinema, time is money. La Valli returns the fur to the seamstress with a shiver. Steve Cochran takes a jog to warm up and pretends to throw a few punches at an electrician who is disguising a cable. The electrician laughs, everyone laughs. Cochran remakes the faces he made ten years ago, when he was leading man in "vaudeville" with Mae West.
Operator ready, actors in position, lights in place. Clapperboard: one hundred twenty-three second. Steve (everyone now calls him that) makes a last face at his daughter Andy, who is waiting for him at the edge of the frame holding the coffee thermos, and is once again a worker from the Ferrara area, at the corner of via Andrea Costa.
Michelangelo Antonioni decided to take Steve Cochran as the protagonist of The Scream after seeing it in Hot dollars. He had been looking for a suitable interpreter for a long time: the film takes place around Ferrara, in towns that the director has known since he was a child and with familiar-looking characters, but Antonioni could not imagine any actor in the part of Aldo. He was already thinking of resorting, for once, to an interpreter hired from the street, although he doesn't like the system very much. Then one evening, at the cinema, he found the image of Cochran. "I need a guy like that," he whispered to a friend in the dark room. "Why don't you telegraph him and ask him if he wants to come?" It was an idea.
Now Antonioni seems satisfied with his choice. Steve is a careful and conscientious actor. Like all the Americans who come to work with us, he has a bit of a habit of regretting the methods of Hollywood, where everything takes place according to meticulous plans and where the pace of work, even for the performers, is always restful , office worker. But Cochran is getting used to the uses of neorealism with sporting ease: he understood that to make a certain type of film you have to adapt to suffering from the cold, following the whims of the weather and feeling greasy after eating the meat from the "baskets". .
Since it is also a shareholder of The Scream (distribution for the American market has been ensured, where Antonioni is still practically unknown: only Chronicle of a love was given to TV), the actor wants to understand everything, questions and disagrees. It doesn't seem true to him that he is leaving the category of “bad guys” for once, to which Hollywood has more or less confined him and he doesn't want to waste the opportunity. He arrives in the morning with his briefcase under his arm like a lawyer, and takes out the typescripts of the planned scenes, which he carefully reviews, assisted by a small court: daughter, daughter's friend, administrative adviser, girlfriend of the adviser, American screenwriter for translate the dialogues. Despite all this, Cochran often asks the director for advice and even had a tailor take him with him to be sure that a certain stage suit was what Antonioni wanted.
These encounters between American actors and Italian cinema are truly curious. Sometimes they give discouraging results, as happened to the director who had to shoot an entire film with a famous actor who was perpetually drunk, abusive and loud. Other times the collaboration is born under favorable auspices. Antonioni, for example, is enthusiastic about Betsy Blair, who worked for a few weeks on part of The Scream: “She's one of those actresses – she says – with whom everything becomes easier. It's no wonder she's been so successful. Betsy Blair takes hold of the part of her, penetrates her with intelligence so subtle that she can afford to say: such a line rings false, I think the character ought to express herself differently: and she finds in the moment the exact words, the irreplaceable tone” .
The cry yes announces as a film with many actresses. In addition to Alida Valli, Betsy Blair and Lyn Shaw, there is Gabriella Pallotti (the discovery of The roof by De Sica) and Dorian Gray, who perhaps we will hardly recognize because the director wants her to be brunette and with short hair. Five women for one man is quite a lot even on screen. The presence of so many actresses in The Scream has aroused a certain curiosity about the subject: but Antonioni does not want to tell it. “This time – he announces laughing – I want to do like Chaplin”. That's not true at all, of course: all the more so since there are no secrets in Italian cinema, everyone is very well informed or as soon as there is something in the air that you shouldn't know, someone arrives immediately, with a touch of mystery, to reveal the entire background . Also the subject of The Scream it is an open secret, which everyone bends over backwards to reveal.
The director knows it very well and enjoys it: however he doesn't want to divulge the story of the film. “Why do we always have to tell the subject first? – He says – Many potential spectators, when they know the story, lose the taste for the film: and cinema is made above all for those who go there, otherwise it would be a combined thing between us ”. The ScreamIndeed, it fails to be told in a few words. We will say that it is the story of a worker, Aldo, who cannot forget a woman, with whom he has lived for years, Irma; other women pass, one after the other, in her life, in a long wandering from town to town: but Aldo remains tied to the memory of Irma and ends up returning to her. There is also a dramatic ending, which worries Antonioni a lot. But the film will live above all from the context: there will be the color of these districts, the faces of the people of the Ferrara area, the factories, the taverns, the wine and the fog.
When he announced that he was about to realize The Scream, that is, a story from a popular environment, Antonioni surprised everyone. Cinema is a strange world, in which no one escapes a precise classification: even the author of Le amiche a label had been applied, that of “director of the bourgeoisie”. Michelangelo Antonioni, now in his early forties, has been directing films for six or seven years: before that he had made himself known as a film critic, journalist, assistant to Rossellini and Carné, screenwriter and finally director of the most beautiful documentaries made in Italy. His first film Chronicle of a love, was inspired by the environment of the Ballentani case: the Venice Film Festival rejected it as the work of a debutant, but the smartest critics spoke of it with enthusiasm. Since then, Antonioni's journey has not been easy: I vinti, a film about post-war youth, had major problems with the censorship of three countries; The lady without camellias, the story of an “Italian-style diva”, sparked a semi-revolution in Cinecittà, provoking the indignation of Lollobrigida and other personalities who considered themselves targeted.
The first official recognitions came only with Le amiche, based on a novel by Pavese: and now also the critics who amused themselves by slamming Chronicle of a love write that Michelangelo Antonioni is one of the best directors of contemporary cinema.
The director of The Scream he is among those who could make two films a year, despite the crisis. In addition to having a name, he has built a reputation as a first-rate technician: there are old cinema workers who claim that they have never seen a director so skilled at making the camera move. With his somewhat diaphanous, intellectual air, Antonioni is incredibly quick and decisive: he often shoots a scene when the actors think they have to do the last test: "It's a good system - he says - for capturing the freshest expression , the gesture not yet weighed down by too many repetitions”. If he doesn't make one film after another, it's only because he can only get passionate about the companies of which he is convinced.
Antonioni already predicts that many later The Scream they will accuse him of having turned his back on his world and its themes. But the new film fits perfectly, according to the director, into his particular conception of cinema. This time he wanted to get out of the psychological limits of the bourgeois environment, to tell a complex love story that takes place among the people, on a social level where passions explode with greater violence. “Neorealism — says Antonioni — has so far almost always been a cinema of situations: the attacker whose bicycle is stolen is the most typical example. Perhaps the time is ripe to attempt to transfer realism from the situation to the character, to try to identify, in short, no longer 'types' but real men”.
In Francolino's street, the slapping scene is repeated exactly as the first time. Soon it will be night and Alida Valli continues fearless to receive the backhands of Steve Cochran, which resound like lashes. In the "troupe" everyone has the numb gaze of flu patients; the script supervisor blows her nose loudly; Lyn Shaw's round eyes follow Valli's misadventures with apprehension; the English girl is thinking that tomorrow it will be her turn. Occasional spectators are now much more numerous, because the men of the village have returned from work; Marciani had to have ropes pulled to hold them back. When the slaps multiply, someone laughs out loud. The director orders her to stop and Valli covers her face with her hands, but she still has the courage to give a half smile. Antonioni says something only those around him can hear. "Dr. Antonioni is a gentleman - the seamstress whispers - he is the only director who speaks in a low voice even when he uses the megaphone".
Da Seventh day, n. 1, January 5, 1957
Paul Gobetti
Without much hope we try to know what the topic, the subject of The Scream. But Antonioni is adamant: not, he says, to adapt to a fashion; he never wanted to talk about the subject of the film before having finished it, because it is difficult to summarize it in a few words and one runs the risk of giving an absolutely inadequate idea. However, he tells us that he is shooting the period that will correspond to an unripe spring on the screen; then he will do the winter and finally the autumn. All things considered, the film should be finished by the end of January and the exteriors even sooner. After the beginnings in Occhiobello, the filming of Porto Tolle came, where the flood created difficulties and at the same time offered very precious opportunities, then again he shot around Ferrara; soon he will go to Ravenna, then to the Roman countryside.
The protagonist of the film is a worker: a mechanic who works in a sugar factory, therefore specialized. He was chosen to play Steve Cochran, and not only because it is a co-production with the United States, but also because he has the perfect physique, and a very expressive face. It's not easy to guide him, Antonioni confesses to us, however: American actors are used to different methods. The Italian director is used to often using actors as raw material; American actors, on the other hand, have to realize the part, what the director wants from them, otherwise they can't express it.
We try, with the most disinterested air in the world, to return to the subject's discourse, to extract some confidence from him. But there's nothing to be done. It repeats what we already know: it is the story of a man who loves a woman, his wife, with whom he, however, can no longer live. And he has encounters, experiences with other women, with whom he forms different relationships. He wrote the subject with De Concini, whose ability to build he especially appreciated, and with Bartolini, scholar and professor, son of peasants, in his first cinematic experience, in which he gave an excellent performance.
It's a difficult film, concludes Antonioni. A film with which he thinks he is proceeding on the same line of psychological investigation of feelings that he followed in the previous films: only that he has changed environment: this time it is the world of workers. The work is similar to that done in the other films, centered on the bourgeoisie. But here we need to get to the bottom of things: «The workers go to the heart of the matter, to the origin of feelings. Everything is more true. But in terms of quality of work it is the same as my previous films». In the face of a world that Antonioni did not know, he placed himself with great humility and seriousness. He sent stenographers to the taverns and factories to collect the workers' speeches, phrases and ways of expressing themselves. With the workers themselves he discussed the form of the dialogues. Certainly he tackled an apparently somewhat complicated theme, which could appear more suitable for characters from the bourgeoisie. But one should not be afraid of certain conventions. «The world we live in - he says - has changed considerably in recent years and if we want our films to be current, we must make an effort to recognize the new reality, to discover unexpected ways and situations. In the factories, for example, there are a lot of women in irregular positions, with incredible stories. One must not believe that certain problems are specific to the bourgeoisie. And in simple people there is an incredible richness of profound intuitions: some time ago at Ca' Tiepolo I met an old man, who would not have been given much credit, who at a certain point made this poetic and dramatic observation: «look how beautiful this world is: living in it should be a real pleasure!».
The speech now returns to the actors. Even Alida Valli will recite in English with Cochran, as we could see the next morning. On the bank of the Po, near Ravalle - this time the fog clears and we can easily find the crew — dressed like a country woman, with a bag of vegetables, Alida Valli meets Steve Cochran in the presence of an attentive group of people that the organizers have to keep calm and silent while the operator and forklift drivers get busy repeating a rather complicated movement : one of those camera movements which form an essential part of Antonioni's style. Steve approaches Alida and asks how he could have forgotten. And the woman replies «it is just because I haven't forgotten» («It is precisely because I have not forgotten that I cannot stay with you»). And after that angry kiss she walks away along the embankment.
There is an atmosphere of disquiet which is dispersed in a cold and foggy nature where the sun's rays enter as if filtered and where the Po flows in the background, disinterested, without passion. If Antonioni succeeds in rendering it, especially if the subject helps him to recreate the world of the Po Valley, the result will undoubtedly be an interesting and important film. But it is necessary that the Po is truly the Po, that the Bassa and the Ferrarese and the Valli di Comacchio correspond to a very specific geography, including a social one, so that the story of the worker who cannot forget his wife acquires an authentic, Italian (also if Cochran recites in English). In short, it must be a story that can only take place in this environment, in this nature, which is unthinkable in Texas; thus once again the Po will be able to give its precious contribution to our cinema.
Da Cinema New, n. 98, 15 June 1957, pp. 16–17
Guido Aristarchus
Michelangelo Antonioni is perhaps the most "literate" of our directors for his taste and his ambitions: a scholar who [...] fits into the crisis of our contemporary novel. He himself, in constructing the stories, the tales for his films, seems to find, in this work, the obstacles that many of our young and no longer young writers face. The Scream, still from one of his subjects, is another defeat of the subjectist Antonioni [...], a magnificent defeat in some ways [...] The proof given by The Scream, in this sense, sorry to have to register it after the results achieved with Le amiche and at a time when, observing the values pursued by Italian directors in the immediate post-war period up to the 50s, it would be legitimate to expect them to go deeper, to «go beyond the surface of phenomena, to find with clear awareness the ways and contradictions of a reality". (But the reasons for the crisis are many and complex, of an internal and external nature; and then have we ever asked ourselves the reasons for analogous phenomena in literature, because, for example, the renaissance of the American novel lasted the short space of five years, almost as long as space of our cinematic renaissance?)
«In an age like ours, in which those who know how to write seem to have nothing left to say and those who begin to have something to say do not yet know how to write» - noted Pavese precisely in 50 - «the only position worthy of even those who feel alive and a man among men seem to have this: to impart to the future masses, who will need it, a lesson in how the chaotic and daily reality of ours and theirs can be transformed into thought and fantasy». To do this, added Pavese, it will be necessary to be deaf neither to the intellectual example of the past - the profession of the classics - nor to the revolutionary, formless, dialectical tumult of our days. Pavese is not cited in vain, but on purpose for more than one reason, if only for research, the study of Antonioni's literary "sources" (for the cinematographic ones the question is more striking, we could say almost easier: one could speak of Bresson , of the best Carné, and in general of the most evolved French cinema between the two wars; and it should be kept in mind that in both cases, sources mean analogies of interests, tastes, ideal affinities which often contradict each other). Among other things, these literary sources refer, albeit in a less direct, or even indirect way, to some attitudes à la Fitzgerald (so common, moreover, in some of our young cinematographic culture and not only cinematographic). In fact, it seems that Antonioni and his characters - among whom the woman always or almost always dominates - want to believe but cannot, that they, like the "beautiful and damned" of the American writer, ask: «How do you learn to believe, and what can one have faith in?” In short, it seems that he is the director of a certain category of young people of the sad generation, and that with Fitzgerald he has in common, very markedly, a sense of the environment, an awareness of his own technical possibilities, which also in him hold «the place of doctrine" (which is not also a reference to the Great producer the film about the cinematographic world The lady without camellias?)
We have seen in the previous films, since his first documentaries, how much language and technique have evolved in Antonioni. Once again, cinematographic expression does not present insurmountable difficulties for him; on the contrary it is aggravated here, in The Scream, the danger if not [...] of empty formalism, of exchanging the formal domain, of forms, with true poetry. [...] Antonioni's listening is not in fact for the "social" Pavese and the dialogues with his companion, but for the Pavese who, despite everything, despite his clear intuitions, and his conscience, withdraws into himself and from unresolved contradictions comes to suicide. The study of the variants, as well as of the sources, discovers how the first ones never coincide, in Antonioni, with "corrections", as indeed they tend, beyond the contradictions and Pavese's vision, to stop the attention - as well as on the technique understood as doctrine — on the Pavesian cult of the word, which is to say the cult of the director for the shot. «When Pavese begins a story, a fable, a book, it never happens that he has in mind a socially determined environment, a character or characters, a thesis. What he has in mind is almost always an indistinct rhythm, a play of events which, more than anything else, are sensations and atmospheres ». These are words easily transferable to Antonioni. It really feels like hearing the director, and especially the director of The Scream [...] Thus the passage from the world of the bourgeoisie - a world always present in his previous films - to that of the workers, is not due to an intimate necessity, even if along the lines of Pavese, the son of peasants, Antonioni knows that «in that layer which is called a people, laughter is more sincere, suffering is more lively, words are more sincere". (We need to get to the bottom of things, he declared to «Cinema Nuovo»; «the workers go to the heart of the matter, to the origin of feelings. Everything is more true»). One would think that the landscape - the Po delta, the Po, the muddy banks, the poor things and the poor houses, the shacks: the misty autumn and winter landscape of Ferrara by the Ferrarese Antonioni - obeys more so-to-speak photogenic reasons , and to figurative models, than to the human necessity of the characters, which here are occasional. (To certain characters corresponds a certain and "necessary" landscape in Obsession, with whom The Scream has many references, and not only geographical, which lead to a conspicuous, wide gap: we want and can call The Scream un Obsession anachronistic? Perhaps it is impossible, since despite the differences of time, Visconti's work is more rooted in reality, more current and alive and therefore different from The Scream).
In this new chronicle of a love affair - of the crisis of a love affair - Aldo's reactions are seen as equal to the reactions of any other person overwhelmed by an unhappy relationship; his story, the idea he keeps of Irma even in contact with other women, could be that of any man of any social strata: Aldo's proletarian dimension is accidental - Antonioni confesses. A universalized average as you can see, which involves more than one misunderstanding. There are different ways of reacting, linked to the characters of individuals and their various destinies. Antonioni chooses as protagonist a skilled worker, a mechanic who works in a sugar factory; and he does not show or is unable to show how Aldo is the man of his own class: referring to vulgar sociology, the individual and class constitute a "mechanical reality" for him. Therefore, we cannot know or intuit exactly where Aldo came from, how he could become what he is (thus the other man, the worker who takes Irma away from Aldo, is deliberately kept hidden; and we know something of her past, and of the other women, through some recurring parentheses of the dialogue). The whence and where of the characters - in addition to Aldo, the three portraits of women: the spinster, the "petrol lady", the worldly woman, who also intend to establish human conditions and a moral judgment - are replaced by a mere documentarism, from a simple description of states of mind: they do not reveal themselves, after all, above the episodic. (The music itself, the recurring piano, bears witness to the nature of moods).
In fact, Antonioni's choice does not distinguish what is essential and superficial, decisive and episodic, important and unimportant (unimportant [...] is the episode of the "vespist", the motorboat race, or the walk of the "crazy" in a misty and rarefied atmosphere, etc.) Decadent film, The Scream has lost - from the subjective point of view: rejected, as Lukacs would say - the principle of selection or, which is the same, has replaced it with that of an eternal and unchangeable "human condition" in principle, «hence the stylistic tendency that derive cannot fail to be, in its essence, naturalistic». As many “elegant” directors as ever (and in a non-restrictive sense), who considers cinema and the history of cinema — art and the history of art — more as a simple expression than as an expression and history of society, which looks or thinks he looks in a so-called detached way, Antonioni places himself in the same ambit as a certain criticism which places stylistic and formalistic problems at the center of the analysis, «isolates the technical exteriorities of the way of writing from the poetic content, and overestimates them enormously, while remaining completely uncritical of the social and artistic essence of this content: thus, from these aesthetic considerations, the true demarcation between realism and naturalism disappears, the presence or absence of a hierarchy in human traits and situations represented".
In few authors as in Antonioni, and particularly in Antonioni di The Scream, the stylistic and linguistic critique is so inspiring, it offers revealing aspects and motifs; unfortunately it does not find an adequate balance with the criticism of the "inspiring feeling". The peculiarity of the recognized modes of expression of a writer is one thing - notes Fubini - another is the nature of those modes, which can be artistic and non-artistic: the coherence of a writer's modes can be the sign par excellence of a stylistic perfection ; and may be the result of a program, voluntarily pursued. And already at the beginning, in Antonioni's first films, the coherence of expressive modes was in fact a voluntarily pursued program: one could, and one can notice in him, for example, the tendency to replace the short or medium shot with the long one , the montage of the paintings with the montage within the painting, without cutting, the tendency to abolish, to decrease the breaks. In The Scream, and more still in Le amiche, does not move away from that program and in getting closer to the stylistic quality, the reasons for the use he makes of long shots become clearer, less dispersed, the reasons that led him to choose those shots and not others finally, the effects that through them he tries to achieve: a narration that wants to develop internally, psychologically; however the figurative taste, the figurative aims in their own right, have their large part. Take the final shots, those of the strike. Aldo returns to Goriano, his town; he has met other women; but the idea of Irma has not disappeared, and the long wandering ends with suicide, with Irma's cry (her death comes, and has her eyes). No one notices him, his return, except Irma who runs after him, foreseeing the tragedy. And it is interesting that this is the case: the others have different and no less complex problems to overcome: the expropriation of land, the solidarity of the workers with the peasants: but these are problems that appear episodic and occasional, almost external to the economy of the story: even the links between the private, personal and public life of Aldo and the other characters or figures have an accidental, and therefore abstract and schematic nature; "what establishes the link between the two spheres - the public and the private - is any character, chosen at random". At most that indifference, that lack of function of individual and social necessity, reaffirm Aldo's nature, his solitude (which, however, is given, not explained). Thus, the reference to the flood in Porto Tolle, and the old man singing with the little girl, are devoid of authentic meaning, added from the outside. Stab the bourgeois coward, or Andreina exclaiming, “I can't understand why things are so bad around here. In the summer there is also work for women, there is beet growing, work for hemp»; or the engineer who says: "What do you care about the peasants, they are better off than you"; and the worker who replies: «You may be right, engineer, but there is solidarity».
Free is only he who inserts himself into reality and transforms it, Pavese wrote; it is the working moral learned from Melville and Anderson which, Calvino notes, brings the writer close to Marx: "near, not farther": just as happened in the best Italian cinema. It was said at the beginning that The Scream it is another defeat of the subjectist Antonioni; this film takes on a wider dimension in the current situation, we might say symbolic: and perhaps it is not by chance that it comes out in the same year as Le notti bianche need Dreams in the drawer. Both in Antonioni and in Visconti - in the later Visconti and in the later Antonioni - the return to man, the going towards man is only apparent or unilateral: the theme of destiny and solitude returns to the fore; in both films, which break the balance between the individual and the collective, there is no longer any hope of escaping solitude, indeed this door as seen by the protagonist of The Scream to suicide. is it a sign of the times? A changed influence of events? (however remember Antonioni's episode of Love in the City: Attempted Suicide). Of course the euphoric optimism” of the immediate post-war period has passed, and Italian cinema today no longer knows in which direction it has to work; it seems that he has lost the certainty he once had: that "the obstacle, the crust to be broken" is "the solitude of man, of us and of others".
Perhaps no one more than us has felt at its birth a personality as important as that of Antonioni (since Chronicle of a love and from the documentary People of the Po). Nor do we want and can today deny the great talent, the possibilities achieved by this director and which in Il grido still appear clear and unequivocal, despite the limits mentioned, the lack of integration of the individual with the social. But on this talent, on this personality — and the talent and personality of Visconti di Le notti bianche — a grave danger hangs over, to which another of the internal reasons for the crisis of our cinema is connected. That is, that the maturity that Antonioni and Visconti are looking for is a mortal maturity, in a certain sense the same one identified by Muscetta in the maturity that Pavese was looking for: «the rarefaction of the content in an expertise of formal solutions, of speed of language, of "stylistic situations ” ». moreover, it is symptomatic that for the first time in Visconti the content and form do not arise from the author's constant experimentation with the great problems of his time. It really seems that Italian cinema, even in its greatest exponents, has lost the «fresh reception capacity for the new that stretches into the future» […]
Da New Cinema, to. VI, no. 116, October 15, 1957
Gian Luigi Rondi
We are on the Po, in one of those villages drowned in fog in winter and always under the nightmare of floods in autumn. We meet a man who has been living with a woman with whom he has had a daughter for some time. They cannot be married because the woman has a husband who left many years ago. One day, however, the news arrives that this husband is dead. Now everything could be settled, but the woman has another lover, she no longer loves the first one and despite having lied up to that moment she doesn't have the courage now to lie in front of marriage and she says everything. The man is shocked, suddenly loses all raison d'être and runs away, with his daughter, through towns and cities, along the river, unable to adapt, unable to accept life. He meets other women: in each one he looks for her, he cheats on her, and each one therefore sooner or later disappoints him. So after so much wandering, here he is back in town, supported by an absurd hope. But it's the last one: the lover got married and she also has another child. He then kills himself.
So much desperation, so much blind pain, so much thirst for total annihilation were expressed by Michelangelo Antonioni more with the sense of the frame and the environment than with the investigation of the individual characters. Thus, the most lively and poetic pages of his film are those in which the atrocious tedium of the protagonist springs from those gloomy river landscapes, from that snow, from that mud, from those gray and desolate countryside; or when it is found, in other forms, in secondary figures, met by chance, in side situations, in men and women seen almost in passing, but all more or less torn apart by the same heavy loneliness, by the identical climate of livid distrust. On the foreground figures, on the other hand, the drama loses clarity and rarely convinces the emotion. In a certain sense, thus, the film should be said to be "failed" because the least valid design is precisely that of the main characters, but what makes it considered with dutiful interest is always his lofty if desperate lyrical effusion, his intentions dramatic so naked, so shiny, so unadorned and those flashes of concluded poetry in the environmental evocation. It is not very much, but it is always concrete testimony of an author with uncommon aspirations, often perhaps too ambitious, but certainly never conventional or petty. The interpreters are also worthy of esteem, from Alida Valli to Betsy Blair. The least effective, perhaps, is Steve Cochran, the protagonist.
Da Il Tempo, November 30, 1957
Joseph Marotta
Michelangelo Antonioni's Po is gloomy, gloomy, icy to the point that one would shout to every boatman surfacing from those mists: "Hey, Charon!". But let's stick to the facts. Irma, called by I don't know which official, learns that her husband has died in Sydney. She cries and comes home. She is a widow, but she is left with Aldo and Rosina, or rather a lover and the little girl that she had from him five or six years earlier. Mah. It seems that in the Bassa Ferrarese good morning really means good morning. In fact, to Aldo, who immediately proposes marriage, the woman objects: "No, because I've had another man for four months". Damn. Holding a match or a mechanical calculator to Irma's veins must be equally dangerous.
In vain Aldo tries to raise it, buying her a belt (made of gossipy leather, not of inflexible medieval steel): Irma doesn't give in and the man, after finally reducing her to a basket of slaps, takes Rosina and runs away. This little girl is a robot; she doesn't ask, she doesn't protest, she doesn't say a word… she walks and thinks: “When I'm sixteen or seventeen, dad, you'll see who I go with”. Will it be hemp? Here women, second The Scream, ignore half terms: bed wide open and always the last one is right. Body and soul they don't spend them like we do, they squander them.
Listen. Aldo's first stop is in Pontelagoscuro, where two sisters host him: Elvia about thirty, Edera about eighteen. With the eldest he had already been tender, and that's fine; the younger girl comes back tipsy from a village beauty contest, she mumbles to him (textual): "An idiot told me I'm fresh and perfumed", she spills it on the cot. Aldo and Rosina flee.
Wanderings, on trucks and on foot. They meet traffic policemen, they meet banks of fog, cyclists, bollards, chickens, tankers, custom-built ladies, even madmen whom the guardians take for a walk saying: "Don't be afraid, they are peaceful". Aldo is finally attracted by a thriving gas station. What like, is this Virginia. If they ask her for high-octane petrol, she replies: "Eh... I'll have enough fuel". For 1400 lire he fills up a large-engined car. A motorist, in exchange, pays her with an unspeakable gesture and disappears. A ganzo is therefore needed; Virginia gives Aldo a closet, exclaiming: “Did he want to come to my room? Clever, she".
It's as vulgar as it is silly. Here she is, Aldo's lover, who however doesn't stop frying in Irma's oil. This forces him to leave. He walks, gets work on a dredge and meets the prostitute Andreina, sick in a hut. From the street, the doctor, stopping the small car for a moment, shouts: "Andreina, do you have diarrhea?" and he runs away. Aldo, who forces him to visit Andreina, will answer to the carabinieri! God of the sky. Aldo tells of his tenacious passion, how much he loves Irma, Rosina; and the bitch says: “Holy shit. As soon as I'm free I want to have a baby too. I got pregnant once, but she went wrong for me ”. And so on. Then Aldo, who can't stand it anymore, returns to Goriano. But Irma already has a third blood brat; Aldo kills himself and a scream escapes her: hence the (until now enigmatic) title of the film.
Dear Antonioni. I swear I have nothing against you, on the contrary. The Scream it is, visually, perfect; but it is also the kindergarten of every narrative. Threads of story scattered in the bora of a disconcerting, unheard-of incompetence, they look in vain for the thin eye of organicity, clarity, verisimilitude. Lots of meat on the fire and half an onion on the plate. The beauty, the evidence, the feeling, nothing but backgrounds, stained, frozen by the inconsistency and ingenuity of the facts and characters. Trust me, Antonioni… indulgent critics and government awards kill you, while I am your friend and I heal you by saying: like De Sica, find a Zavattini and cling to him. There is no health, Michelangelo, without the order and clarity of The Bicycle Thief need Umberto D. Either man continues and sums up time and things, in films, or films are empty of things, time and men. They interpreted The Scream, neither for the better nor for the worse, Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Dorian Gray, Betsy Blair and Lyn Shaw.
From Giuseppe Marotta Marotta Ciak, Milan, Bompiani, 1958
Philip Sacchi
The Locarno Festival is a good little one. Reluctantly involved in the complicated commercial conflict that has been going on for years between Swiss charterers and European producers, and therefore exposed to vetoes and sabotage by official organisations, it is a bit of an undercover Festival, disliked by ministers and general directorates, and therefore instinctively sympathetic to those who regard the present dictatorship of government film bureaucracies in all countries as the plague that will eventually kill the cinema. It is precisely because it is a mischievous Festival that it has been able to afford something that seems extraordinary and which instead should be perfectly normal, if freedom of opinion and expression in the cinema weren't a fairy tale, that is to present a cinematographically important work without censorship cuts .
The film was The Scream of Antonioni, around which it was known that very lively controversies had arisen in the censorship. Once again the spectators rushed to the call of the forbidden price had to ask themselves if it was worth creating (after the Nights of Cabiria) this new case of heavy “imprimatur”. Because let's also grant that a couple of prolonged amorous approaches have to be shortened, a little too much, almost up to the limit beyond which the embrace begins, and perhaps even cut (how much pettiness!) the curious little scene of the itinerant seller of Madonnas , where is all this matter of scandal? We were told that one of the offending passages is the one in which Resina, the little girl, discovers her father behind an embankment lying next to her lover, whose disorder, while resting, reveals the signs of a past intimacy. But this means not understanding anything. But if just in this episode and in this shock is the real deep bitter morality of the film. Rosina, the fruit of one of the hundred thousand illegitimate unions that cheer up our highly moral country, Aldo, a worker in a sugar refinery in the Polesine area, and Irma, the wife of an emigrant to Australia, have been living together for seven years when the news reaches Irma that her husband has died. . And now, just at the longed-for moment of legalizing their union and giving Rosina a regular position, Aldo finds himself faced with a tremendous revelation: Irma will not marry him because she loves someone else. Begging and beatings are useless. Aldo takes the baby and leaves. He goes to find the honest and kind girl he loved before meeting Irma: but some things don't recover. He leaves again in search of work, and one day the case unloads him in a service station, held by a bold and provocative petrol station attendant who takes a fancy to him and takes him as help and as a lover.
But there is Rosina. Every day something comes to make him feel that he will never be able to raise Rosina alone. Then comes the terrible discovery. When, getting up confused and upset, he sees Rosina fleeing, he understands that she has lost everything. So he sends the child back to her mother. He sends the girl back, but he breaks off with Virginia and goes away. This extreme leap of shame and remorse for which, only because that sad passion has mortified his little girl, and as if to belatedly purify himself in her eyes, he abandons the only woman who, in the rage of the senses, could make him forget Irma, losing only safe work, it's a great, beautiful movement of the soul, a desperate act of honesty. Well, all of that is irreparably erased and destroyed if you suppress that scene. I go so far as to say that, from this point of view, even the critical boldness of certain passages becomes justifiable: yes, because it makes the poor animal lust of grown-ups more miserable, after his shame, in front of those two clear pupils of a child.
And then, by suppressing that scene, the character of Rosina would be killed. Now, this little girl whom we see for three-quarters of the film, with her two blond toilet brushes, her intelligent pale muzzle, scampering next to her pope against the background of that desolate alluvial landscape, is the true protagonist of the film. She is a creation by herself: to find another child character so absolute and poetic one must go back to Brigitte Fossey of Forbidden Games (this is from Polesine and her name is Mima Girardi). And in fact when Rosina comes out, the film falls immediately. The episode of the fourth woman, Andreina, deliberately introduced and exacerbated to push Aldo to the final collapse, albeit full of very acute documentary observations, instead of accelerating the drama, diverts him into the arduous paths of an overly implied social protest. And the catastrophe comes melodramatic and obvious.
It doesn't matter, even so The Scream at least half borders on the masterpiece. There are pieces worthy of a classic. There is the whole world of the lower Polesine, transferred entirely to the screen with its towns, its horizons, its people. There is a crowd of unique and unforgettable characters, such as Steve Cochran's tragic Aldo so simple and predestined, Dorian Gray's formidable Virginia (a real revelation), Betsy Blair's proud, sorrowful and very delicate Elvia; and finally that extraordinary fellow who is old Campanili, a villager from Polesine taken as such, with his hat and everything, who is a true monument of nature: his conversations with Rosina are unique pieces. In short, if art has any rights, this is art.
Da At the cinema with pencil, Milan, Mondadori, 1958
Victor Spinazzola
We could say that Antonioni, on the other hand, metaphorically tackled the theme of male impotence, understood in a double sense: failure of the desire to impose himself lovingly on women and refusal to accept defeat, recognizing the legitimacy of her reaction.
The same reason is taken up and expanded in the best film ever directed by Antonioni, The Scream. Above all, he is exalted by the provocative choice of the social qualification to be attributed to the protagonist. Having made Aldo a worker implied a recognition, a tribute: «The workers go to the heart of the matter, to the origin of feelings. Everything is more true (in them)», the director declared to an interviewer, during the making of the film, in 1957. Coming out of the confines of the theaters where the bourgeois world trains itself in hypocrisy, ambiguity, compromise, Antonioni set out for the villages, along country roads and river banks, in dance halls and hospices, among meadows and reeds, where people know how to courageously be themselves to the end. The sociological datum aims to give maximum prominence to the existential discourse; hence the scandalous value of the popular setting, brought to its climax in the last sequences: Aldo, returning to Gordiano, finds his fellow villagers engaged in a protest demonstration, and remains indifferent and offers no solidarity, taken as he is by the anxiety of see his woman again; when he finally finds her, but now lost to him, she runs away and kills herself, throwing herself from the very top of the factory where she worked in vain. This epilogue can be read in a moral key: here is the punishment due to those who allow themselves to be dominated by a private passion to the point of estranging themselves from the community and imprisoning themselves in a solitude which cannot but mark the condemnation of the ego. But the human event is documented, as an event of nature, with a refusal of conscientious motivations, and without any research into why.
Two facts stand before us, the end of love in the soul of a woman and its permanence in the heart of a man: there is no need for causal explanations. The prologue of the story actually underlines paradoxically exaggerates these elements of certainty, unverified and unverifiable but entirely sufficient: Irma suddenly abandons her lover with whom she lived for eight years and with whom she had a daughter; she dismisses him just when their union can be legalized, only by telling him that another affection occupies her. For her part, Aldo tries to win her back only by citing the feeling that he continues to have for her: therefore he refuses to accept the woman's different decision for what it is, a term of reality, a thing. Thus the clash of characters immediately acquires an incandescence, precisely, what, which moreover sublimates the human quality of the characters: one of her could not humiliate her dignity by continuing to live with a man she no longer loved; for the same reason, the other will not be able to join other women, far from the one who still embodies her love for her.
From these premises, the story of Aldo's internal maceration develops entirely on the level of objective evidence. The protagonist leaves the country and tries to forget himself among the others, in a fruitless wandering; then the flash of an illusory hope, the return to the country, the last disappointment, death, and the cry of Irma, an impotent spectator. The long interior monologue is completely transposed into the chronicle of the journey, on the seemingly random occasions of the episodes of daily life that the character goes through. As Aldo's despondency wears off, expressed in his approaches to three women who symbolize equally less and less safe human conditions, the decline of his geographical itinerary is matched more and more down towards the mouths of the Po, where the maximum openness of the landscape contrasts with the closure definition of man in his solitude.
Perhaps the last stretches of the parable make the desire for a structural completeness that exhausts all the possibilities of escape from one's own feelings inherent in Aldo's soul too obvious: in fact, the schematic nature of the narrative axis responds to a flowering of picturesque anecdotes in which the drama, instead of concentrating, it disperses; the catastrophe would risk becoming emotionally obvious if the return to Gordian did not suddenly renew the situation, restoring speed to the rhythm and precipitating it in a few sequences at the epilogue. The Scream it represents a fixed point in a career that had hitherto been carried out collectedly, on the sidelines. Aware of the clarity achieved on the meaning of his research, Antonioni wanted to give the film a rigorous exemplary value. But the public reception could not have been more glacial. On the other hand, the director's discourse had reached a degree of absoluteness that aspired to be definitive: the crisis of individualism as a crisis of the individual, condemned to suffer existence as an exile from an unknown homeland. Antonioni will try to settle on this lofty but precarious balance; and, in the changed climate of the sixties, his work will finally obtain a wide audience: but enriching and complicating itself with effectual resonances, in which the purity of lines of the first films will undergo an indulgently pleased softening.
George Spinazzola, Cinema and audience, goWare. 2018, p. 172–174
Georges sadoul
A worker, Aldo (Steve Cochran) abandoned by his lover (Alida Valli), goes away taking away their little girl. Wandering in the Po valley, he searches for an old love (Betsy Blair), then goes to live with a gas station (Dorian Gray). But they break up, and the man, having returned to his lover whom he cannot forget, kills himself.
A harrowing quest in a desolate landscape. In the end, the protagonist's death coincides with a workers' demonstration against the construction of a military airport in the area. This is how the author defined his film: “In The Scream, in which the theme dear to me is found, I pose the problem of feelings in a different way. Before, my characters often enjoyed their sentimental crises. Here instead we find ourselves in front of a man who reacts, who tries to break the misfortune that persecutes him. I treated this character with much more mercy. I wanted the landscape in which he moves, used to better define a state of mind, to be the landscape of my childhood, seen through the eyes of someone returning home after an intense cultural and sentimental experience”. A certain adherence to the character of Aldo, and a gloomy pessimism characterized this film, which irritated the Italian critics for having treated a working-class environment outside the box. It is nonetheless one of his greatest films, now widely re-evaluated.
Da Movie dictionary, Florence, Sansoni, 1968
Vito Zagarrio
The Scream is a mobile film, a film in voyage: towards the 60s, towards the definition of a poetics, towards a redefinition of the modern condition and culture, towards the society of advanced technology and the boom. Traveling through the history, history of the 50s and of the new Italian mass society, history of the strong constants of ideology, of collective representations, of emerging cultural and economic myths.
But I also travel through microcosm of the Po delta, on all roads and with all possible means, a tanker truck of the new Italian oil, or the bus that goes to Adria and Goriano. A road movie, therefore, in many senses: made of passages, hitchhiking, pursuits of motorcycles and sidecars, long journeys in buses and carts, motorboat races, pilgrimages on foot, the same river that is there, motionless like a great asphalt road . But also a film on the go, traveling on a road that began years, or perhaps ages, before, but not far away, the Ferrara-Padua state road on which Gino and Giovanna consummated love and death in Obsession. The Scream, therefore, traveling to the 60s and beyond, from Obsession a Professione: reporter, in English significantly The Passenger. Road movies, he calls him tout court Withcombe in The New Italian Cinema, one of the already numerous American books devoted to Italian cinema.
Not by chance, The Scream it was Antonioni's first film to be released in America. Chronicle of a love e The lady without camellias they only arrived at the end of the XNUMXs. Not by chance, I say, because The Scream it is a film that, today, may appear "American", beyond the stereotype of genres. Americano as Wenders is American, American as is the protagonist of Alice in the city, also a perplexed traveller, with a little girl, fresh eyes on a strange planet awaiting a nova.
American as he is American Obsession, that The Scream expressly mentions, mother scene with which Antonioni's film measures itself and questions itself almost in the manner of an essay film.
Retracing the cultural journeys, the geographical and ideological maps of the project Obsession, Antonioni reconnects the European novel to American fiction; the new régard to the old myth that Antonioni practiced in his writings on «Cinema».
The impression one gets when reviewing The Scream today it is that Antonioni is able to anticipate the critical debate by twenty years, that he is able to read Obsession in a non-neorealistic key, which brings out, perhaps unconsciously, all sides - the cultural tradition, the milieu social, the background mythological, the intervention on the historical reality - which are less part of the notion of neorealism as it took body and mythic form after Rossellini and De Sica-Zavattini. In this sense, the journey de The Scream to Obsession it is also a journey away from neorealism made school, model, standard. All the more because it comes from afar, it comes from the elaborations and suggestions of '43-'48 by People of the Po, film shot "on the other side of the Po", but converging and complementary, with respect to Obsession, on the same poetic shore, on the same watershed. It comes from '54, before the creation of de Le amichefirst, if one wants to accept a conventional date, of the "crisis" of neorealism. And it is realized in the midst of the crisis of the movement and of the school, in an extremely intense historical moment, the mid-fifties, the re-foundation of the parties as mass parties and the new awareness of the changed social fabric of the country, the signs of the boom, the 'Hungary, the ideological tensions de Gramsci's ashes. Da Obsession a The Scream there is the whole story, implementation of the premises, rise and crisis of neorealism, or rather of fifteen years of Italian cinema. And Antonioni takes note of it, records birth and death - of the genre as well as of mankind - as one of the silent catastrophes with which his films are populated. Catastrophes or epiphanies, ne The Scream, are the accident or suicide as liberation, as a leap into the void of a hyperspace, a new space of knowledge and sensitivity; the street demonstration against the new military airstrip - which contains and counterpoints the return of Aldo -, Goriano like Comiso, in a post-modern atmosphere populated by survivors, in a post-World War II (second or third?) climate full of Po valley mists and of catastrophic fumes; the internal tension of the sequences, always anxious, always waiting for a turning point, for a single shot or for the entire sequence.
But Aldò - and Antonioni - witness the catastrophes with a detached, absent, automatic eye; like an automaton, like a zombie is Aldo's expression and gesture just before letting himself fall from the tower, before letting himself die. And the camera is the cold spectator, the distant observer, not ironic though, but attentive and involved, with respect if not with affection.
The mdp de The Scream in fact it is not mobile to excess like the characters, the situations, the chapters of the film's multi-plot. In a travel film — an extraordinary journey inside a handkerchief, inside a manuscript and a glass bottle, a journey between small stations where time and space dilate, however — in a travel film, I said, there are few traveling shots, the American mobilities of trolleys, cranes and dollys are limited and sober. In their place, an observation from afar, but accurate, determined. Not a shadow on man, not a peek through a keyhole à la Zavattini, but a noble contemplation that brings everything back to the mathematical rationality of a Renaissance classicism. The rhythm and harmony of the daily drama.
Let's take the opening sequences, from the opening credits to the first interior of Irma's house; real beginning of the story.
In the shooting form and in the editing of the shots there is a precise rhythm, like music theory: C1., camera fixed, pause, panning to the right; C1., fixed camera, pause, pan left; C1., fixed range, overview. The characters appear, the camera seems to notice them a moment late, then follows them in an almost ruthless way, but only turning on its axis, only turning its head. The plane of the camera and the viewer does not move, does not move, does not approach. The characters determine the field with their movement and it is not, conversely, the car. Except in a few cases the camera is a cold eye that registers reality. A reality, however, deliberately artificial, intentionally staged.
«The subject of The Scream it occurred to me looking at a wall» — writes Antonioni succinctly… - «London 1952. A dead end. Blackened brick houses. A pair of white painted shutters. A lantern. A gutter pipe painted red, very shiny. A motorcycle covered by a tarp, because it's raining. I want to see who will pass by this street that recalls Charlot. The first passerby is enough for me. I want an English character for this English street. I wait three and a half hours. Darkness begins to draw the traditional cone of light from the headlight when I leave without having seen anyone. I believe that these small failures, these voids, these abortions of observation, are all in all fruitful. When we have put together quite a few, we don't know how, we don't know why, a story emerges. The subject of The cry - precisely - came to my mind looking at a wall».
In the opening sequence there is the same form of observation, or a miscarriage of observation, characters on a street in the Polesine, under vacuum and in the fog as if it were that bourgeois London, waiting for an event, a catastrophe. Which can be a woman leaving a man for another man; Or a big flood. But catastrophes are also positive, like deaths. "Let's hope - says an old man who appears at Irma's door - that this flood too will become pretty big, like the other one, which took away a little of the old and brought a little of the new".
It is the apocalyptic moral of the old man at the door, also recorded as a daily fact, in a candid and enlightened way. With the naïvete enchanted by Rosina's eyes, or by the old child, and also by the disenchanted cynicism of the bourgeois, of the Enlightenment, of the late Renaissance.
“Think of a number, double it, triple it, square it. And delete it. I'm sure they could become the nucleus, or at least the symbol, of a curious humorous film, they already indicate a style »-writes Antonioni, when he says he thought of writing the scriptIntroduction to mathematical philosophy by Bertand Russel, a very serious book, but full of comic ideas. "The number two is a metaphysical entity that we would never be sure that it really exists and if we have identified it". Hallucinating statement, from the point of view of the number two. Of a number two protagonist.
Well, Aldo and the number two in the history of de The Scream. Doubled, tripled, squared. And then deleted. One of the possible numbers, the worker of the Goriano sugar factory, one of the missed protagonists of Attempted suicide, let's say. An ordinary man, taken from the street, as in the canons of neorealism, but placed in a condition on the edge of reality, as in the masterpieces of Road Serling or Richard Matheson.
This any number two is snatched from his happy new Eden (the Babel sugar mill tower) and expelled from the earthly paradise. A new biblical or mythological cycle opens (seven years, seven years with symbolic insistence, the relationship with Irma lasted) a pilgrimage dotted with stages of suffering and knowledge, stations of a via crucis populated by Magdalene, Irma, Virginia , Elvia, Ivy, Andreina, Rosina. And then it disappears, erased. Erased by his own malaise, erased by the malaise of the postmodern condition.
The final cry remains, a cry that also comes from afar, Munch and the avant-garde, and will return in the culture of the 60s. Even suffocated as a lament, in the gloomy ship that lands, in the roadstead of Deserto rosso.
Da Staged, Ragusa, Libroitaliano, 1996.
