Antonioni who was an explorer like few others in the territories of technology, immediately tries his hand at the new electronic filming technique in this feature film produced for the small screen by Rai2. In reality it is hard to recognize Antonioni because the bombast of Cocteau's novel, even if dried abundantly, is not in the ropes of an author of the essence like the Ferrara director.
I speak with difficulty about this film because there are two scenes of violence against animals that disturbed me. However available on RaiPlay. The return of Vitti is beautiful, one of the most complete actresses we have.
Stephen Reggiani
What do we mean by: here is a drama with strong colors? We want to suggest that it is a story where the passions are clear-cut, the psychological confrontations radical, the gestures definitive and emblematic. But, while we identify a genre, we also use a precise metaphor, based on colors.
Literature can make the metaphor explicit, it can describe the colors inside, the colors of the characters. Examples from feuilletons with strong hues: «The queen was happy that day, riding through the countryside she saw for the first time the colors of the flowers, red, blue, orange, with incredible clarity, with a mysterious flutter». Or: "The chief of police entered the room, emanating from his ambiguous person like a cold, violet light that spread over the light and serene colors of the walls." Or: "The unnatural green of the trees shaken by her stormy wind filled her eyes, she saw nothing else, she was disturbed by it."
How do you translate subjective "strong tints" into cinema? There are many suggestive traverse ways: black and white and color have taught us memorable variations with the best authors. But the direct way can also be tackled through exercise and meditation. Antonioni ne Il deserto rosso he had painted the objects so that they reflected without mediation the moods, the colors of the protagonist; now his Oberwald mystery it demonstrates that there is a good way to collect the colors from within, the way of electronic shooting, tape recording which allows innumerable variations of tone within the same shot.
The phrases we came up with earlier are ideally taken from the melodramatic scenes de The two-headed eagle by Cocteau, who provided the subject for Antonioni's «mystery». Cocteau had already put his drama in the cinema, Antonioni did not make a remake of it, but a genre pretext, a lucky opportunity for «strong colors», an attempt to reveal and study the metaphor.
The historical references to the character of the Empress Sissi of Austria, which were pale in Cocteau, have been set aside by Antonioni in favor of stylization, of the fable, as suggested by the stormy and somewhat ironic beginning.
On a stormy night, Queen Monica Vitti arrives at Oberwald Castle and dines alone in front of the portrait of her husband killed in an attack. She has never ceased to love him, she feels finished with him. The injured revolutionary anarchist Franco Branciaroli falls unconscious in her room from a secret passage; he had come to kill her. Vitti sees in Branciaroli the double of the king, Branciaroli in Vitti a woman prisoner of his power.
For a while, the opposition and order coexist in the castle, maybe they love each other, while the police chief, Paolo Bonacelli, plans a trap for both of them. But it is useless: Branciaroli, faced with the impossible dispute, will drink a slow poison, the queen will offend him only to get himself killed and die next to the man who has reminded her of a love.
Strong colors, very strong, that Cocteau had studied for Feuillière and for Marais. Antonioni dissects the genre pattern not with sarcasm but with a passionate curiosity about the mechanics. The strong colors can be seen, the colors inside fluctuate over nature, almost like in the phrases we have invented. The chromatic regeneration of the meadows is particularly moving, according to feelings; the aura that surrounds Bonacelli is naturally grotesque.
Between the shrill pop colors of television experimentation (as can already be seen on Rai and above all on private television) and the perfect colors of classic cinema on film, this film by Antonioni, or rather it would be better to say "for" Antonioni, is a kind of preamble to what can be obtained in the electronic metaphor of our inner colors. The transposition of the tape onto film, a delicate and difficult operation necessary for Oberwald, could become useless with the new technical means and cinema will be a little more everyone's heritage.
Da The print, 4 September 1980
Tullio Kezich
For the first film experiment shot entirely with cameras, Antonioni dusted off L'aigle a deux tétes by Jean Cocteau; written and staged for Jean Marais and Edwige Feullière in 1946, transferred to the screen with the same interpreters in 1948. Although Cocteau has stated that his drama «was as much opposed to speaking theater as to directed theater», in The Oberwald Mystery the words are abundantly pruned and the colored drawing of the director becomes the protagonist of the film (even beyond the favorable treatment of Monica Vitti).
In a scenographically austere context (having a television budget, Mischa Scandella certainly does not think of competing with the sumptuousness of Christian Bérard), the film also renounces some of the most conspicuous "signs" of the text the queen's walk with the dagger planted in the back, the spectacular fall backwards of the anarchist from the top of the staircase. The director explores the colors of the electronic keyboard with a skilful and cautious touch, he gives us the joy of making the colors of reality more varied and expressive.
Authentic turning point of the research that began with Il deserto rosso (1964) Oberwald will perhaps be remembered as a technical-expressive turning point in cinema. But, despite the director's declared skepticism towards a text that is dismissed as a pretext, Antonino's poetics of incommunicability proves to be a legitimate interpretation of Cocteau's romanticism.
From Tullio Kezich, The brand new Thousand Movies. Five years in the cinema 1977–1982Oscar Mondadori
John Grazzini
Arrived late on city screens due to the difficulties that even a highly prestigious author now encounters with distributors (the film was presented at the Venice exhibition last year, from where we anticipated its judgment), The Oberwald Mystery it is interesting for two orders of reasons.
Because it was filmed with television cameras rather than with a movie camera, and therefore heralds the developments in cinematographic technology, and because innovation allowed Antonioni to make some experiments with colour, seen as the instrument of a new expressiveness. It goes without saying that the critic's opinion is to be referred to this double circumstance.
Otherwise, one would not understand why Antonioni, together with Tonino Guerra, chose to bring to the screen, albeit stripping it to the bone, a text so swollen with effects, so far from his most absorbed vein, like the drama by Jean Cocteau The two-headed eagle.
Drama of love and death, in which - inspired by Elisabeth of Austria and the anarchist who attempted against her in 1898 - a queen who has been widowed for ten years and a young conspirator, Sebastian, who sneaked into her castle to kill her are involved . Yesterday Cocteau and today Antonioni suppose that the two fall madly in love at first sight, and that in the space of two days a baleful romantic storm is unleashed.
While the woman, who has left the world to adore her husband's ghost, is on the verge of madness, Sebastian, who bears an extraordinary resemblance to the deceased sovereign, would in fact flee with her, without raising the dagger, if the police chief did not blackmail him . Seeing himself lost, the man poisons himself, and she, pretending to despise him, induces him to shoot her.
So an appendix novel, with some topical references to terrorism, but also just what Antonioni wanted to escape the convoluted themes that would have distracted him from the pleasure of playing and trying to give a color to feelings. It is also a melodrama which, against the backdrop of the maneuvers and traps of a court, enhances the value of fiction by rejecting any relationship with reality both in the narrative framework and in the figurative framework.
So leaving aside the structure of the story and the interpretation of Monica Vitti, Franco Branciaroli and the others, functional as it could not be better, it must be said that Antonioni's research is a first step worthy of attention. Many more will have to be done before the definition of the image is satisfactory in a film shot with cameras, and the memory of the crude "sovietcolor" does not appear.
However, we can already glimpse what resources electronics can offer to authors who want to give a scene and characters the color with which they imagine them, that is, paint them according to moods and situations. Let's take two examples: that of the police chief and that of the love duet. In the first case Paolo Bonacelli moves in a purplish light so that he feels better how false and hateful he is.
To signify that the couple reaches the peak of happiness, white and light blue triumph in the second. Other times it happens that the flowers of a meadow stand out separate from each other, that a field of wheat rings yellow, that a wall is a livid green and a rose emerges from the gray becoming flame. And it often happens that even in the same shot the protagonists and things have different colors, according to the emotion that Antonioni wants to convey to us.
Not to mention silent films, in which certain sequences were colored by hand, something similar was seen in Czechoslovakia Once upon a time there was a cat, where the characters assumed the colors of their moral qualities. Here, however, the proceedings are too different for comparisons.
Although the relationship between the chromatic choices and the narrative material is not always clear, and in exteriors the ordeal is often very difficult, when all is said and done, the effect is the desired one: of a ghostly unreality, which even ironically suits that impossible story. Produced by the second Rai-TV network, the film refers, in our opinion, to the happy marriage between technique and poetry celebrated by electronics but in the meantime it is already, as Antonioni hoped, a "popular fairy tale" which intrigues and excites in its own way.
Da The Corriere della Sera, 9 September 1981
Aldo Tassone
The action takes place in an unspecified Central European state, in the year of grace 1903. A young queen left prematurely widowed on her wedding day has been living in segregation for about ten years, buried alive, far from the capital, her isolation as a widower, her independence [...], worry the Archduchess and her faithful collaborator, the count of Fohn, head of the police, who would be very happy if some anarchist made her end up like her husband Federico.
One stormy night in Oberwald, while the virgin queen is celebrating alone the anniversary of her husband's death (her gigantic portrait towers over a wall), an anarchist poet breaks into her apartment who has sworn to kill the one who eyes of his group embodies the negativity of the story.
He is wounded, hunted down by the police (who actually want to use him and secretly pilot him towards a crime that would be convenient for both of them). Struck by Sebastiano's strange resemblance to Federico (the fugitive enters the apartment coming out from behind the portrait of the deceased), the queen sees in him the instrument of destiny and hides the longed-for assassin by passing him off as her new reader.
«You are my death» he says to him «I give you three days to render me the service I expect from you; if you spare me, I will not spare you."
Bewildered by the unexpected relationship, by the courage, by the fatalism of his victim, seduced by her grace, the "royal spirit" anarchist falls in love with the "anarchist spirit" queen: in just one day the young man manages to obtain a radical change in the soul of the queen (this change will frighten the count of Fohn who will try to run for cover immediately).
The angel of death is transfigured into an angel of light, he advises the queen to return to court, to take power. Informed by the Queen's lady-in-waiting, the Count of Fohn runs for cover: he summons Sebastian, tries to induce him to go over to his side, offers him to act as ambassador between the Queen and the Archduchess, and when he refuses him, he blackmails him.
Faced with the prospect of a trial that would not benefit the queen's cause, Sebastian decides to end it all: he poisons himself (the capsule that the queen kept locked in a locket for herself). Desperate, mad, the betrayed queen (she is about to leave at the head of the guard towards the capital) takes her revenge with a “frightening experiment”: by pretending never to have loved him, to have made use of him, reproaching him for his betrayal of the anarchist cause, she induces the dying man to kill her.
When he reveals the deception it is too late. Death catches them in the same instant while their hands, in vain outstretched, try desperately to reach each other.
Da The films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Rome, Gremese, 1990, pp. 169–170
Nicola Ranieri
Antonioni demonstrates extreme lucidity when, in the by now famous preface of 1964, he clearly sees in People of the Po his starting point, and not just because it was his first film.
«Everything I've done since, whether good or bad, starts from there», as a poetics and as a structural attitude towards the medium. From that "background knowledge” from which everything follows, in turn linked to the programmatic article of 1939: the landscape and its transformation, the discovery of how men are linked to it and how one and the other change under the pressure of industry — of his devastating work of feelings and identities - with which the new geography coincides.
From this poetic-cognitive assumption moves the entire research: the reconnaissance, the "journeys" to verify it, the experiments therefore and the artificial conditions organized by the experimenter, the narrative lines, the configuration of the individual works and their progress towards deepening and complexity.
Technological inventions, innovative procedures, logical models, axiomatic method, metalinguistic and metacritical awareness build a system, starting from and with that “background knowledge” to verify its consistency and the referent, the resulting image and the process as a whole. The use of innovations is however the arrival point of each turning point, the testing of the means - photography, cinema, television – of their possibilities and therefore of consolidated practices, of rigid theories.
The testing of the very way of understanding cinema, its theoretical practice, an integral part, from the beginning, of the poetics and of the cognitive project: adhering to the object with "detachment" and relationship so that it becomes visible, "document" for “understand the world through the image”. Which is to build, reflecting, without adding narrative parts, without reworking the facts in terms of fiction, according to a finalism functional to dramatic writing.
In this sense, the «presumption of having taken the path of neorealism alone» is justified; to have chosen — in the documentary period and also since Chronicle of a love(1959) — not the "commitment" of content, but to use the cinema to see and interpret, which already meant a potential overcoming of the "chronicle", one of the neorealistic motifs. From this initial “background knowledge” the composition is born a-dramatic.
A cinematographic practice and theory are born tending to discover the visible, the not immediately visible and together the eye and all the possible points of observation of the act of seeing understood as an interweaving of relationships. Aimed at verifying the procedure and the theoretical framework within which it develops, the the very root of “background knowledge”: the first, intuitive vision-interpretation of the world, felt and problematic, for this very reason susceptible of investigation.
To ascertain whether that disposition of sensitivity and intelligence has a referent or is a misleading way, without grasping the meaning and value of the transformations that, as early as 1939, Antonioni intuits and declares he wants to grasp in depth; which leave him suspended between a world seen - imagined and a real one to know: the primary source of research, the results of which are far from obvious and never definitive, as they imply one's own existence in relation to the outside world.
A-dramatic composition therefore: neither subordinated to the action, to the conflict of the characters or to the plot, nor more or less logically progressive to reach an epilogue, nor made up of emotional moments, their accelerations towards the climax or slowdowns. Anti "pathetic" by definition, but not merely descriptive for this; its vectorial nature towards the depths and the complex indicates the tendentious, inexhaustible progress of research, without the emotional content explode” ecstatically".
Instead, it freezes inimplosion, in the lucid awareness that nothing can be achieved and that the next step is more complex than the previous one; but without stopping: an ostentatious discovery is equivalent to death, one becomes cadaverized.
A moral revolt “in nuce” underlies the poetic and linguistic-expressive project: the rejection of fiction, of cinema as a lie; agent rejection, along with de-dramatization, in all films until he visualizes himself. Up to constituting, not only the compositional method and the constancy of style, but the very object of the analysis, without hypostatizing itself in a metaphysical scheme.
Electronic technology, practice and theory intertwined, in the awareness of the design framework within which it is used, ne The Oberwald Mystery (1980) instead of enhancing the dramatic material, he erodes it from within as if it were its natural reagent.
Thus, within the sphere of a scientific conception of the experiment, Antonioni, preceding the others in the making of a film with electronic means, laid the foundations for a heuristic use of technology, in line with the theoretical reflections of 64 on the and with how much Blow-Upit demonstrated.
Before a predictable "renewal" of fiction through technological developments takes place, it manifests a moral revolt, not expressing it with a "content" commitment or flaunting it in terms of external battle, but concentrating on research, language and experiment.
Basically and with all the epistemological-metacritical awareness acquired in the meantime, he reaffirms his first attitude towards the image: that it is a "document" through which to try to understand the world and at the same time whoever tries to understand it and its own relativity and tools.
Before others mystify reality with recent innovations, with their fetishes, also discrediting the science of reference - through direct or indirect apology - making it consider it triumphant or harmful, when in fact it is a habit of mind yet to be conquered, Antonioni reiterates its cognitive function against trinkets, mirabilia, special effects, the commodified domain of technology. And without declamations or catastrophisms.
The last shot is taken from the angle opposite to that of the moment of the shot. The soldiers arrive, stiffen in the greeting position on the guide that has become black: the color of the drama has been transformed into that of death, its logical conclusion; black are the two bodies lying diagonally and the pistol dropped between them. Under the static surface, reaffirmed by the musical motif that melts into endless melody and from the fixity of the end credits, the lines of force of the composition inside the painting are revealed under the recomposed order. They refer to the hands regaining colour, in the previous shot.
The slight angle from above allows you to see, as if to better understand, what the apparent immobility hides. He is leaning towards the far right corner, the back where the soldiers are deployed; she towards the one close to the left in which a yellow-dominant light (her colour) replaced (greenish-blue which, from a certain point onwards, had reinforced the idea of prison enclosed in the castle of the drama.
If they appear to tend towards each other even after death, upon in-depth analysis they appear as screens of two irreconcilable searches. He of logic of power and strength, albeit with intentions opposed to royalty and recognizing its own abstraction.
she fromlove as knowledge, Possibility of go out from the circular closure, from the naturalistic return to calm; to break the prison of destiny by taking responsibility for one's actions, unlike Sebastian who sees a cause and effect relationship between the decisions of the group to which he belongs and the acts of those in power.
She tends towards self-awareness, even if it is an infinite process, cut short by death for love; first desired for the deceased king, then effective for a person vowed to commit suicide. After the deaf-mute servant makes her understand by gestures that Sebastian has taken the poison, she asks Felix to "testify before the men that whatever happens", she willed it. You seem to repeat the Hegelian phrase quoted by Benjamin: "It is the pride of great characters to take the blame for their own acts." One might add, to get out of the fixity of the automatic mechanism of the character.
Loving to the point of death and acquiring the lucidity to dig under the idea of love, of knowledge, does not differ much from seeing to the point of eliminating oneself in order to see, like Locke's character in Reporter profession.
In the character of the queen - in her tendency towards yellow, overcoming its intermediate tones (lyrical naturalism) and opposing it, in its absolute value, to red (dramatic naturalism) which finds its presuppositions in the range of blue - the clear and participatory idea of the author.
Which, at the same time, distances itself from it, inviting the observer to do the same, with the use of technical and expressive means as reagents on the dramatic matter, already reduced to its essentiality of scheme by conquering all possible variations. On it, taking it to extremes to make it explode, electronic techniques converge - both as evocations of images, and as manufacturability and color correction — , strange acting.
The latter is made up of mutually contradictory facets and, precisely for this reason, effective. There Sebastian's gestures it constitutes in itself an internal opposition between two types of identification, therefore itself highlighted as such: in the role of the avenging sectarian with an intransigent and deterministic logic as a natural force, or, on the contrary, of the naive who gives in to weakness, to sleep.
That of the Count of Fohn expresses the dehumanization of lucidity, a pure form devoid of existence, it seems the estrangement taken at one's word. Stride, then strengthens it, against painful awareness gesture of the queen who tries to see clearly even in his abandonments, in the heartfelt tones, overcoming them in the synthesis. Which, together with the oppositions between gestures and characters, acts in depth, in the unveiling work, on the dramatic matter — "To summarize: if you don't kill me, I'll kill you" -; he takes it to extremes in the concept, against the dispersion of phenomena.
To the same end tend the electronic summons of images which, while supporting actions and thoughts, perform a contrapuntal function, visualize them to clarify them.
The examples are many.
The appearance of the queen, even before entering the scene for the first time, testifies to death rather than being a memory of Felix. Or: Edith's double appears on the wall as the Queen asks, "Are you under the orders of the Archduchess or mine?"; she stays a long time and does not make the curtsey in which the madam makes before leaving; she says what she can't. Finally, and one could go on: the big mask turns into a cloud, the wall into a glacier; they are doubles of thoughts that break the linearity of a context by highlighting it.
The new technologies seem to be able to summon «ghosts in the midst of reality and make them move in space, in the desert, in depth, without the embarrassment of the surface or the screen, which, now yes, one can not metaphorically pass behind without seeing anything other than the reversed image of the front… not simple plays of light, but by its own evocative virtues».
Antonioni's interest in holography, as a further technological possibility, is explained along this research axis; for the producibility of apparently three-dimensional images: based on the physical properties of light, to have information from different angles, instead of from a single focal point.
This is what by definition is called total writing, with interference figures - two superimposed laser waves in fact form a third figure - which on the hologram contain more visual information, compared to the photographic or cinematographic image, increasing the points of view.
The use of color is connected to the estranged gestures and the evocation of images, an extreme synthesis of the dramatic material. The love scene on the lawn, the lighting up of the flowers, or the polychrome hymn of the ride, together with the music, are exaggerated lyricism to the point of being visible in its uselessness as an illusory escape, compared to the opposite: the reiterated becoming vermilion of red, which refers to the concepts of strength, action, reaction, of dramatic naturalism.
The latter's continuous tending towards monochromatic saturation contrasts, making it stand out, with yellow's difficulty in freeing itself from intermediate tones, settling on a decisive one, as an authentic counterforce of red.
Compared to the consolidated clarity of the rules, to their logical death, a research finds it difficult to make headway, to overcome the resistance of polychromy, a veritable blunting symphony of nature.
It seems to correspond to the same difficulty of having coherent light, due to the presence of different wavelengths. Only compared to light monochrome it is possible to realize the amalgam indefinable of polychromy. Which is reinforced by our way of perceiving light.
While in acoustic perception, sounds of different frequencies maintain their identity, while creating effects of harmony and disharmony, without diluting in the intermediate tone, because the auditory mechanism is physical; in the visual one, which occurs instead through chemical processes, the luminous stimuli lose their individuality: one red and one yellow mix in an intermediate orange frequency.
Seeing ends up being a hiding precisely by virtue of the iridescent polychromy, given by the intermediate tones.
It is understandable how for Antonioni poetry and technique must react on each other. On the one hand, the former applies her imagination to the latter, on the other, the latter reveals the former's unbridled lyricism.
In this sense, theabstraction monochromatic in the film: on the one hand it fixes the dramatic mechanism in its schematic nature, on the other it opposes it with the monochromatic yellow; which, however, is equivalent to overcoming the intermediate tones, both of one's own range and of that of the other primary colour, blue, above all in its point of conjunction with red, violet which is semantically its presupposition.
Chose a gender, the dramatic one, of a very vast constellation, one of the most traced by cinema and which apparently seems suitable for imitating conflicts and actions, at least according to current production; the film works on it by dismantling it together with what is normally opposite and complementary to it, lyricism. It erodes it from within without opposing an alternative: abstractionism would be its specular reverse, similar to the unrealistic assault on the castle of fiction, personified by Sebastian.
In fact, there are no alternative visions to those consolidated and functional to power - the work insists on the intertwining of dramatic fiction and royalty -, for the simple fact that the counter-power has the same logic, only reversed by intentions. It is a question of working on existing visions starting from a reference point, a limit point that denies them — such as, for example, monochrome. Not because a truth behind appearances emerges, but to visualize what prevents us from seeing.
The unveiling consists in constructing the vision through the eye, which anti-naturalistically deconstructs consolidated and often spurious models with respect to the possibilities of the medium.
One of the legacies that cinema carries with it is made up of genres, both theatrical and literary. Although they have long since decomposed, according to what Tynjanov stated already in 1929, the automation of the constructive principle still remains of them, which is one of the major obstacles to seeing because it reshapes the world with a schematism, as in the game of tarot.
The rupture of constructive automatism is one of the constants of Antonioni's cinema, its first neorealist root, which gives the sense of an ethical revolt. Without, however, falling into the immediacy, mechanical reverse of genres, another form of fiction, unaware moreover.
There is no virginity of seeing.
Already the perceptive act takes place through stereotypes that awareness never radically eliminates, but only seeks to know. The vision then, whether "immediate" or "intentional", is conditioned, in its constitution, by schemes, codified models from which one does not escape with the escape towards "pure" visuality, in turn subject to the "rules" of lyrical or geometrizing abstractionism. And the latter is the other "renewal" to which the electronic medium is applied; thought to be opposite, it is in fact similar to total naturalism.
From Amor vacui. The cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Chieti, Métis, 1990, pp. 147–150, 172–179
Claudio Camerini
Within the typology of the "author" Michelangelo Antonioni has always carved out a personal space for himself, characterized by the willingness to welcome a so-called "abstract" dimension in the dual thematic ramifications (the incommunicability, the alienation, the crisis of the character ) and expressive (pauses, silences, slowness, estrangement, monochrome).
To this research Antonioni managed to give the sign of a coherence and homogeneity that are at least singular in the panorama of Italian auteur cinema; however, this has not prevented some of his films, especially the more recent ones, from being remembered not so much because they can be fully inserted into this continuous line of poetics, but for the evidence of some technical-expressive “exploits” (which are however constituent elements of its semantic universe): starting from the apples covered with a layer of varnish in Deserto rosso, the prolonged are frequently cited idle of the final explosion of Zabriskie Point and the very long concluding piano-sequence of Profession. reporter.
It is therefore no coincidence that the greatest attention from critics, upon the release of The Oberwald Mystery have concentrated on the experiments that Antonioni conducted on the level of representation by making use of the wide possibilities of reworking the image allowed by electronic equipment instead of normal cameras.
«In no other field as in that of electronics, poetry and technique walk hand in hand» said Antonioni, and the coexistence between poetry and technology, between art and electronics became particularly evident at the most delicate moment of the process: the transfer of magnetic video tape on film to obtain a 35 mm copy.
An operation of a pioneering nature, undoubtedly, but made peculiar (in the sense already indicated) by the fact that it was carried out in one of the most sophisticated electronic laboratories currently in existence, L'Image Transform in Los Angeles.
It can then be said that the meaning and importance of The Oberwald Mystery are mainly of a linguistic nature, both as regards the definition of a new form of show, and as regards the evolution of the director's poetics. In Antonioni's previous films both the level of expression and that of content contributed to the formation of a poetic universe in which the needs of sentiment, of humanity, of passions collided with the reasons of a social system that produces alienation; In the Oberwald mystery this alienating, mechanized, "modern" dimension is excluded from story and narrative development - which is based on a screenplay relatively faithful to Cocteau's text - and is destined to compose the lines of the entire technical-expressive level thanks to the use of extremely advanced technology.
Thus electronics receives a consecration that goes far beyond the simple visual impact that is obtained by witnessing the change in color of the actors' faces in a fraction of a second or Monica Vitti's escape on horseback under a sky of lemon-yellow clouds.
Da The Film Magazine, n.11, November 1981, pp. 598–599
michelangelo antonioni
After years of thinking about it, I finally made a film with cameras. Is titled The Oberwald Mystery and is based on a play by Jean Cocteau, itself based, distantly, on the story of Louis II of Bavaria and that of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Cocteau mixed them together by inventing a third story out of whole cloth. Why this choice? It's not a choice, it's a coincidence. One can even be ironic about this and say that the "mystery" lies in why I made this film. In fact, it's the first time I've tried my hand at a dark drama and the impact was far from soft. Let's just say I did my best to cushion the blow.
First of all, I freed the story from any historical link by moving it over time. The costumes prove it. We are in 1903, in an unidentified kingdom. Second, I've made some changes to the dialogue. With the help of Tonino Guerra I shortened it and eliminated the emphasis with which Cocteau had stuffed it.
In short, I kept myself in a position of detached respect when faced with this matter, while trying at the same time to prevent my nature as a director from being annihilated. I hope some echoes of this nature here and there make themselves felt. I don't want to defend Cocteau, whom I consider a brilliant writer, whimsical, but limited and distant from modern literary taste. Yet a certain air of actuality runs through all of his drama.
Obviously I tried to clarify it, above all by adopting a terminology that vaguely evoked the sad chronicles of our days. He words like anarchist, opposition, power, police chief, comrade, group, belong to our daily vocabulary. It is true that the resolution of the story is the most romantic one could imagine, but this is part of the stylization and formalization of the melodramatic genre to which Cocteau wanted to remain faithful.
My detachment, therefore, was fully justified. But this justification carries with it - now, as I write - a confession. What a sense of lightness I felt in the face of those events devoid of the complexity of reality to which we are accustomed. What a relief to escape the difficulty of a moral and aesthetic commitment, the haunting desire to express oneself. It was like rediscovering a forgotten childhood.
But there's more. Precisely this position has allowed me to devote greater attention to problems relating to the technical medium. The electronic system is very inspiring. At first it looks like a game.
They put you one console full of knobs by maneuvering which you can add or remove color, intervene on its quality and on the relationship between the various shades. Effects that are forbidden in normal cinema can also be achieved. In short, you soon realize that it's not a game, but a new way of finally using color as a narrative, poetic means.
The color problem in cinema does not exist in itself. There is, as always, cinema which includes the problem of color. It happens too often, unaccustomed as we are to look at color as an integral part of a film, that we consider it as something additional or even marginal. Producers are used to reading scripts in black and white, the same screenwriters most of the time to write them regardless of color. A script can therefore be made indifferently, according to a common opinion, in black and white or in colour.
With cameras, the question doesn't even arise. The television is in color. In front of a small black and white screen, the viewer knows, or subconsciously feels, that he is at fault. Having the cameras in hand, one starts from the assumption that being instruments that reproduce color with absolute fidelity, or if desired with absolute falsehood, this is what we need to think about in order to put together the images relating to the story we want to tell.
As far as I'm concerned, I think I've just begun to scratch the very rich range of possibilities that electronics offer. Others will be able to do more. One thing I can say is that magnetic tape has all the potential to replace traditional film. It won't be a decade and that's it. To the great advantage of everyone, economically and artistically. In no other field as in that of electronic poetry and technique walk hand in hand.
Da Michelangelo Antonioni. Making a film is living for me, Venice, Marsilio, 1994, pp. 115–117
