The night Antonioni consolidates and develops the filmic language begun with The adventure, the previous film. This time we are in an urban environment, in the Milan of the economic boom. There is bourgeois Milan, popular Milan, there is Brianza. Memorable and melancholy are the filming of Sesto San Giovanni, where the protagonist, Giovanni, grew up, who is perceived to be of plebeian extraction, but now a successful writer. There in Sesto he also met his wife, Lydia. Both would go back but are now too emotionally distant.
The film received a lukewarm reception from the critics who liked it the most The adventure. He continues the sad incomprehension towards Antonioni, with the exception of some significant exceptions such as that of Pasolini.
Without flaws the fragile and petite interpretation of Jean Moreau but in the part at 120 percent. The more problems Mastroianni has in interpreting a somewhat absent-minded and erratic intellectual. Like Ferzetti ne The adventure, Mastroianni struggles to focus on the character and never reaches the levels of interpretation that he will express in Eight and a half with Fellini. We see that he suffers from the tight acting and emotional control to which Antonioni subjects him, from which he remains crushed. Fellini will no longer let him do it.
There is also a cameo by Valentino Bompiani as himself, Giovanni's editor. Already at that time Antonioni's networking was very broad and qualified.
Guido Aristarchus
That Flaubert and not Balzac (or Stendhal or Tolstoy) is for Antonioni the true culmination of the nineteenth century novel, that his preferences go, rather than Mann, to authors such as Gide, Proust, Joyce, to modern and avant-garde literature , there is no doubt. He too seems not to understand those who continue the tradition of critical realism; that is, he renounces (or seems to renounce) any declared thesis, any indirect intervention in events, and any direct interpretation of the facts: he observes and detachedly describes the daily life of that bourgeoisie to which he gravitates around like a satellite to his planet. His "novel" does not consist of a dramatic progression of facts in the traditional sense; to the "facts" he replaces the thoughts that torment, consume, annihilate, engulf the characters.
This gradual, almost imperceptible languor that silently undermines their life - life - without even a crash of the great, imposing catastrophes (Chaplin, Visconti) is the experience from which Antonioni starts to articulate his discourse: the "chronicles" of the crisis, the "new forms of the soul", as they emerge precisely in the writers of the literary avant-garde. His films are as hard to “read,” so to speak, as they are The sleepwalkersof Broch, for example, o The man without qualities of Musil, or The stranger by Camus. Symbols, allegories, characters, the titles themselves — The adventure e The night — must be interpreted: they force the spectator to think, they force him to work.
Meanwhile, it is not a pure coincidence that in The night one of the most emblematic characters is that of Valentina, and that Valentina is introduced intent on reading Broch's book; this is a precise reference for understanding Antonioni's vision, his attitude towards life and art. Neither The night, as in The adventure, there is indeed a gallery of "sleepwalkers", of figures who no longer live: they are puppets, automatons, the dead: beings without qualities, and their existence without qualities in Musil's sense. The many qualities of the protagonists do not correspond to any concrete ability to act. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that "man without qualities is a set of qualities without a man." Such is the architect Sandro, the novelist Giovanni, who are at the center of the two films.
We are not faced with "adventures" in the usual sense, with the usual more or less subtle "love game", which even the beginning and the very title of the work can make anyone unfamiliar with the vision of the world and the stylistic coherence of Antonioni. Seven people leave on a yacht for a cruise among the Aeolian Islands, and one of them, Anna, disappears. The author speaks of a "mystery upside down"; and this is already another precise reference to anxiety, to the insecurity of existence: to the anguish first, in Claudia, for the disappearance of her friend and then for the fear that she will return, that she will break in to destroy the new experience that she is living with Sandro. This means above all a precariousness of feelings, of their duration.
«Naturally the ambitions of the film - says Antonioni - are vaster than those of a common detective story. For example, it means that feelings, which are given a definitive weight today by sentimental rhetoric and narrative casuistry, are in reality fragile, undermined, reversible. The search by Anna's companions begins, especially by one, Sandro, the lover. And the search lasts for the entire film”. However halfway through the film Claudia wishes that Anna would never be found again. The girl's disappearance has left a void; the void is soon filled. Three days earlier, at the thought that her friend was dead, Claudia felt like dying; she now she doesn't even cry, she's afraid she's alive. Everything is becoming "damn easy, even depriving yourself of pain".
This underlining of the fragility of feelings falls within the paragraph, dear to Antonioni, of incommunicability, of "boredom" in the Moravian sense, or rather that Moravia has reanalysed in his latest novel: the impossibility of establishing an effective relationship with the individual and reality, the lack of authentic, profound relationships with Things, with oneself and with others. In every encounter, says Camus, we meet a "stranger", and each of us is also a "foreigner". The desperate search to know himself and the others has a different and common destination in Antonioni's last two films.
Sandro becomes aware that boredom - this lack of direct contact with reality - leads to the sterility of art, that his failure as an architect depends on his surrender to conformity. Consciousness follows self-loathing; but it is precisely this disgust that brings him back to the usual tracks; on the contrary, the more the crisis manifests itself in him, the more his irrepressible need for physical contact explodes. The intention to escape reality, to forget what she would have liked to be and isn't, determines the carnal desire for Claudia; to forget the promise she made to her, not to live like that anymore, she goes with a prostitute. The return to "boredom" serves him to veil the world around him, to "distract" from consciousness, to make it opaque again.
“Can one live without any relationship to anything real and not suffer from it?” wonders the protagonist of the Moravian novel. This is Sandro's real problem; hence the significance of his weeping at the end. And Claudia's gesture, which caresses the back of Sandro's neck, after some hesitation, shouldn't be confused with a simple forgiveness in the face of "betrayal" (the encounter with the prostitute), but it means that she has understood. Here is another new element in Antonioni. Does the communicability that comes about at the end of the film nevertheless conclude the “adventure”?
The answer comes from us The night. Stylistically and structurally, The night it accentuates the static character of the previous work: that is, after having given up on the plot, now the author gives up even more on the protagonist, he arrives at the de-eroicization of his narrative. He describes the fabric and motifs of a day in the life of two individuals, Lidia and Giovanni; this day is the real hero of the movie. The course of their thoughts replaces the succession of facts. A continuous, long interior monologue, a conversation with herself, is Lidia's interminable walk in the chaos of city life first, and then in the apparent tranquility of the suburbs.
Here, as in The adventure, Antonioni demonstrates his reached maturity in similar kinds of analyses; here the novelty of his language, the ability to reach analogous dignity of the modern writer, to match his complexity and subtleties, surpassing the results achieved, in the same field, by Bresson and by the best Bergman.
Continue the description of instability, of the fragility of feelings. Even Giovanni, this successful writer, is walled up alive inside the hermetic and suffocating prison of "boredom": he has lost contact with reality, he does not communicate with others. He sees Lidia, his wife, after years of apparently peaceful marriage, through a diaphragm. In the director's conception, women assume greater weight, a vitality denied to men. Without a doubt Lidia is more receptive, more "positive" than Giovanni (and Claudia di Sandro). “I discovered that I don't love you anymore, and I'm desperate”, she confesses and demands equal sincerity from her husband. Even John now understands that although they are still together, they are not united. Between them there is nothing, really nothing; and he resorts to physical embrace to stun himself, to estrange himself from that reality to which he is called, to "cross, cross over, and in short fill that void".
Extreme attempt destined to fail, already failed, because it cannot create a full state: the purely physical relationship - as the painter intuits in La noia of Moravia, the novelist Giovanni himself, the architect Sandro — it is a non-possession, it is not true love and even in art it brings and is equivalent to conformism.
Lidia and Giovanni, ideal continuation of Claudia and Sandro, are transparent to themselves and to each other. Nonetheless they remain desperately alone, with no way out of their loneliness. Two “dawns” seal the “night”. The "adventure" remains concluded for the protagonists; but at the same time suspended, open for Antonioni.
Da New Cinema, 1960
Gian Luigi Rondi
Antonioni becomes hostile to any convention, alien to even minimal concessions to the normal needs of the cinematographic narrative and increasingly attentive, however, to the cadences, allusions, secret second thoughts of literary language.
An Antonioni film, therefore, either rejects it en bloc, because it does not resemble what is commonly understood by cinematic entertainment or, if it is accepted, it is accepted knowing that one will be faced with modes of expression which cinema offers only the appearance, but filtered, in reality, through the most intellectual experiences of literature. And, often, more closed and hermetic literature.
As in today's film which, perhaps more linear and compact thanAdventure, however denounces the same limits in terms of "film cinema" and the director's own will not to worry about it. Here too there are characters in crisis, here too the characters struggle in a desolate ordeal that leads them to doubt others and themselves.
This time he is a writer, she, his wife, is a woman who loved him very much and who now, for no reason whatsoever, realizes that she no longer loves him: hence an exhausting despair that drags the woman, throughout a day and one night, up and down Milan (where the action takes place) in search of a distraction or a solution and leads him, unaware, but equally disaffected, to seek new sentimental situations in the same space of time.
Until a frank clarification does not seem, at least in appearance, to return everything to normal. To tell us about this crisis and to describe the society of intellectuals and the rich that surrounds the two protagonists, Antonioni has set aside any customary search for dramatic or, in any case, outwardly emotional climates and has proposed characters, frames and states of soul almost exclusively through inner references, capturing them in a deliberately casual, immediate and raw atmosphere as reality itself and entrusting them to a language with a precious calligraphic and symbolic effect.
The result is undoubtedly suggestive and in many moments fascinates those who manage to follow those characters in their wandering among the others, arriving to intuit their most secret torments and failures, but in some places it leaves us dumbfounded by its hermeticism, by the excess of literary intentions and for the complacency with which one lingers in narratively uncoordinated situations. Thus, in addition to probably not meeting the public's approval, the film will only partially welcome the approval of those who accept the search for new ways for the cinema: while acknowledging, in fact, the seriousness of Antonioni's intentions, they will not be able to fail to note which, however one accepts them, have taken him a little too far this time. Away from the cinema, at least. The performers, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni.
Da Il Tempo, February 2, 1961
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Dear Pasolini, I follow your column closely and I agree with its approach. I would like to ask you, given that many literary and artistic works in general are dictated by the so-called "loneliness" of modern man or, more precisely, by the anti-human condition of man in today's society, the justification of these works, their validity and their importance and function. And the cultural reasons for this attitude. Best regards.
Giovanni Stefani - via S. Egidio 3, Florence
Your note, dear Stefani, is an invitation to write a book. In fact, you speak of «literary and artistic works» produced in this last period: and if I had to respond in kind, and with the analytical rage that is characteristic of me, I would have to write an entire chapter on the history of culture. But I want to take your request as a solicitation and deal with topical issues: the last "literary and artistic works" you refer to are probably the films of Antonioni and La noia of Moravia.
Both The night and La noia, express, as you say, the "loneliness" of modern man, or "more precisely the anti-human condition of man in today's society". Yet there is a substantial difference between the two works.
Meanwhile, The night it is written by the author, Antonioni, directly: Moreau is «she» and Mastroianni is «he»: despite this narrative objectivity, the work is extremely subjective and lyrical. The two characters «she» and «he» are nothing but «flatus vocis», charged with expressing that vague, irrational and almost inexpressible state of anguish which is typical of the author, and which in the characters almost becomes a reflected or referred feeling .
In Girl the opposite happens: it is written indirectly by the author: Bino, the protagonist, is the "I" himself who narrates: yet, despite this narrative subjectivity, the work is extremely objective, conscious. The character "I" is nothing but an expedient, used to express a very clear, historicised, rational state of anguish in the author, and given back to his vagueness, which is then poetic concreteness, in the character. Both works express the anguish of the modern bourgeois: but through two, so to speak, quite different poetic methodologies, which reveal a substantial diversity of ideological system.
For Antonioni, the world in which facts and feelings like those in his film occur is a fixed world, an unchangeable, absolute system, with something even sacred. Anxiety acts without knowing itself: as happens in all natural worlds: the bee doesn't know it's a bee, the rose doesn't know it's a rose, the savage doesn't know it's savage.
That of the bee, the rose, the savage are worlds outside history, eternal in themselves, with no prospects except in sensitive depth.
Thus Antonioni's characters do not know that they are anguished characters, they have not posed the problem of anguish, except through pure sensitivity: they suffer from an evil that they do not know what it is. They just suffer. She goes around peeling walls neurotically, he goes carrying his mortified face around the streets and living rooms, without beginning or end. After all, Antonioni does not make us understand, or suppose, or in any way intuit that he is different from his characters: just as his characters limit themselves to suffering anguish without knowing what it is, so Antonioni limits himself to describing anguish without knowing what it is.
Moravia, on the other hand, knows it very well: and so does his character, Dino, who lives and works at a cultural level only one step lower than that of Moravia. Throughout the novel, therefore, we do nothing but discuss, analyze, define anguish (called "boredom" in the novel). It derives from a complex born in the rich bourgeois boy: which complex involves a depressing impossibility of normal relationships with the world: neurosis, anguish. The only way to escape is to abandon oneself to eros: but even eros turns out to be nothing more than mechanism and obsession. This is what the character knows.
Moravia, of course, knows a little more. He knows that psychology is not only psychology: it is also sociology. He knows that the "complex" mentioned above, if it is a strictly personal fact, is also a social fact, deriving from an erroneous relationship between social classes, from an erroneous relationship, that is, between rich and poor, between intellectual and worker, between refined and uncultured, between moralistic and simple. In other words, Moravia knows Marx, its protagonist does not. That's why the much debate that the protagonist does about his evil goes a bit in circles, and has a purely mimetic and lyrical value.
The solution lacks that word that Moravia knows and its protagonist does not. La noia it is a splendid novel, the last page of which should have been a tragedy, and not a suspension. Moravia had to have the strength not to give any kind of hope to his protagonist: because the protagonist's disease is incurable. There are no third forces, nor ideals of humanistic syncretism capable of freeing him.
Unfortunately, the average bourgeois public, and even many intellectuals (although laughing at certain awkward jokes in the film) recognize themselves more in the Night in that Boredom: apart from the hypocrisy, for which they would never want to be taken by the erotic madness by which the Moravian protagonist is taken, they feel that the "pure-anguish" characters of the Night they better reflect their substantial desire not to face rational problems, their rejection of any form of criticism, and the intimate satisfaction of living in a world of anguish, yes, but saved, in their eyes, by the refinement of anguish.
Da New Ways, March 16, 1961
Giorgio Tinazzi
«The crisis: everyone is talking about it. But for me it is a secret thing that touches my whole life": the words of Giovanni Pontano, protagonist of The night they are perhaps a direct autobiographical reminder of Antonioni, a faithful mirror in any case of his intimate anguish, of his living inside the things he narrates, of being inside the crisis "like a conscious correo".
Se The adventure was perhaps the director's "hottest" film, The night it is more praised, more structured, more elaborate if you like, but without ever feeling the weight of the idea or of the construction, the abstraction of the symbol: one only feels the effort to bring a poetic testimony to maturity, making it more and more adherent stylistically ("at a certain moment - says Pontano - it doesn't matter what to write, but how to write") by filtering it and almost stylized it, without losing the sense of a "live" story, of a "chronicle from hell" we would be tempted of saying.
«Making a film is living for me» wrote Antonioni: and precisely because of this sincerity of his, for that «pouring all (his) wine into the barrel of the film», his work does not arrive at solutions that he does not have; witness of the events of our day, it is enough for him to record them (think of the English episode de The vanquished). There is no coldness, no detachment, only the lucid analysis of the absurdity, of the intimate contradictions of an era made up of someone who, it can be said, is up to his neck in it. His is the novel of the "anti-hero": Sadoul rightly spoke of a constant "de-dramatization" that takes place in Antonioni's characters: his apparent detachment is only modesty, a desire to "show" without ever "demonstrating": not even the facts and the psychologies and the plots must force the reader to dramatize the story: the drama is all within, in the long "figurative monologues", in the slow, inexorable "undressing" of the characters, in the returns, in the necessary delays, in the allusions, in the internal rhythms, in the cadences (think of Fusco's music, photography, in short, the "form", always full and significant). This is Antonioni's true modernity, his style, his equal star with today's poetry and fiction; and in fact they recall Proust and Joyce, Musil and Gide, or even the New Novel French.
There is in him the anxiety to find a new way of looking at things, that is an effort to look at the essence, at the anti-decorative, beneath the "crust", to give back to the gestures, the facts, the rhythms the their weight and their meaning: "history" is no longer needed, a useless construction; the "history" and in the details, in the unbuilt, in the facts and in the things. Hence Antonioni's stylistic unity, the sense that each work has of a continuous block; hence her way of narrating (Proust's "slowed down" story comes to mind. What comes to us is a rediscovered sense of time; Lidia is "in search of lost time", tries to make sense of her "adventure ” presentifying the past, things and facts appear to us therefore “filtered” by his conscience.
We would be tempted to take up Husserl's motto «return to things themselves», and try to start a discourse on the influences of phenomenology on certain cinema and certain literature. "In films - wrote Robbe-Grillet - things exist only as apparitions, that is, as phenomena". "The contemporary novel - he continues - of which it is willingly said that it wants to exclude man from the universe, in reality gives him the first place, that of the observer".
Antonioni however looks at his characters "here and now"; it is useless to look in him for the mystical openings of a Fellini. The dawn of Antonioni (and not surprisingly The adventure e The night come on Dolce vita end at dawn), it is not the rethinking after the night of sin, the immanent call to the lost sense of nature, but a lucid and bitter looking at oneself as one is, in one's own inability to understand and love one another, continually dissatisfied, sick of boredom, overcome by habit, animated by unstable feelings that escape. For a while longer we pretend to believe that physical contact gives us the possibility of communicating, of having a relationship with others and therefore with things, with reality.
Perhaps we have touched the central point of the complex problematic de The night. Detachment from reality. The coincidence with the release of de is certainly not accidental La noia of Moravia, a work also of considerable weight, whose points of contact with Antonioni's film could not escape. The Moravian essay-novel is in fact the minute analysis of the feeling of boredom, a form of detachment from the objective world, the incapacity to communicate with reality (Marxistically we speak of «alienation», and for Il grido we spoke of «alienation sentimental").
"Boredom for me - we read in the acute Moravian prologue - is properly a kind of insufficiency or inadequacy or scarcity of reality". «…an obscure awareness that between me and things there (is) no relationship». It is no coincidence that Dino di Moravia and Giovanni di Antonioni are intellectuals, or more precisely artists. Because even artistic expression is a form of attempt to contact reality, and the crisis arises, in Dino and Giovanni, from the awareness of the insufficiency of this attempt as well, so they wonder if they ever need to write again ("this work craftsman to put word after word» says Giovanni) or paint. Boredom and dissatisfaction remain, as with physical contact, the illusion of a more authentic and profound relationship.
The recurrence of the motif of sex is certainly not accidental, and even less gratuitous. Throughout the film we have before our eyes the image of the sick girl from the clinic, almost a symbol of a sort of obsession of our time: and again the night-club scenes and the ending return to the motif.
It is in the insufficiency of feelings, in their fragility, in the chaos and desolation of solitude that the desire to find a relationship with things and with others, to communicate, is manifested with force, almost a physical need. Lidia's walk through the streets and suburbs of Milan (one of Antonioni's loftiest things), is none other than the need to sensations, like a thirst for encounters, for faces and for words, to feel alive. For Lidia, we have seen, it is a sort of search for lost time, a retracing of wasted opportunities looking for new ones: the crust that she detaches from the wall almost seems like a lump of memories, the sense of difficulty and dissatisfaction: in something she goes looking for the past and the present to merge, and give her the image of her solitude, the heavy sense of the static nature of things (the long silences), of tiredness, and on the other hand the inexorable flow of time.
Valentina is also a restless woman and her dissatisfaction is, in a certain sense, directed towards the future; she unsatisfied by the feelings of which she feels the fleeting consistency, the fragility, the fainting as soon as touched ("when I find a way to communicate it seems to me that love vanishes"). Her strange isolation from that world of "sleepwalkers" (the title of the book by Broch that she reads is indicative) as if to contemplate the abstract and cold geometries of the floors, her escape from Giovanni's insistence, are like an indication of the insecurity that she feels within herself, of finding herself deprived of strength ("I am a rag"). Before her Giovanni and her sentimental laziness: such is Valentina available, so much is he by now closed within the schemes of acquiescence, of the cold scheme.
Even the world that surrounds these characters is devoid of openings: our crystallized way of life, definitively sterile relationships, our mechanized and standardized civilization, conformity have closed the circle. Money and industry are, underneath their appearance, nothing but a vehicle for boredom.
John and Lydia carry this boredom and spiritual tiredness with them, wandering in that world of "dead souls". In their people the memory of their dying friend is always present, like a warning shadow that dominates the whole film, an anguished sense, a continuous presence: «this death that accompanies us / from morning to night, sleepless / deaf, like a old remorse / or an absurd vice».
"To begin with, one dies": is a phrase by Antonioni; and in fact, it has rightly been noted that there is an analogy of situations with The adventure: there the disappearance of Anna which weighs on the whole film, here the death of Tommaso, there the mystery, here the death, two sides of the same identical problem of the reason for our existence. They are the doubts and anxieties that Antonioni carries in his blood, unresolved questions that he poses without being able to suggest that a bitter look at oneself, at one's limits: neither The adventure a finding oneself equally ill, ne The night a close approach which will be followed by boredom, the stagnant indifference of before: it is that same enchanted immobility, the sense of unfillable emptiness of the couples at dawn in the villa; one can find calm, a momentary point of understanding, one can lie again, there is a long embrace; but it is the Victorian "quiet of hopelessness": a title, if you like, for an essay on the director.
Reproach Antonioni for not knowing how to "get out", find a way that leads him to others? Of course, he feels the need to break the "crust", but you have no means. The same desolate testimony of Camus, his feeling of being a "foreigner", the Sartrean «l'enfer c'est les autres». For this reason the reference made to Fellini (la festa de Dolce vita) is rather easy but completely inconvenient. To the director's baroque mysticism and religious sense of nature de La strada Antonioni's lucidity and "terrestrialness" correspond here. Which, however, is perhaps further than Camus, at least than that of The stranger; because Antonioni is with the vanquished, with his characters. He could not say that he "never managed to feel real displeasure about anything"; loneliness is instead a disease that the director would like to cure, he would like to be able to "leap out of the implacable ritual" of unstable feelings.
The insufficiency, the emptiness of the characters are his own doubts, his anxieties; the long, sometimes exasperating succession of characters is never (an accusation that is all too often repeated) a useless calligraphy, but an insistence on the "stripping" of their spirits, a dramatic "denudation". The long silences (almost a film of silences), the digging into their faces, into the environment (which, as always in Antonioni is one with the characters), is nothing but the analysis of their souls, the discovery of the folds recondite, obscure points: putting the soul in the open, which is then confessing, with modesty and sincerity.
Aldo, Sandro, Giovanni: the three protagonists of that broad "novel of the crisis" initiated and continued by Antonioni. And the last chapter is perhaps the most representative; the very structure of the film (rather than facts, atmospheres and moods), the attention to style have led to talk of a "Flaubert novel". As always, Antonioni's literary ancestry is complex and decipherable with effort, because many of the voices of those who, in one way or another, have been interpreters of the contemporary crisis seem to converge in him; and precisely the ability to "tune in" to our crisis, to be, like Camus, sensitive to "the dissonances, the disorder" we are full of, make Antonioni a man of today.
Da Michelangelo Antonioni, Notebook of the Film Center of the students of the University of Padua, Padua, 1961, pp. 27–31
Adelio Ferrero
Giovanni Pontano, a successful Milanese writer, is going through a period of marital crisis: any possibility of dialogue with his wife seems lost. The two, shaken by the visit to a dying friend and after a literary party for the presentation of Giovanni's latest book, wander around the city completely empty. In the evening, they find themselves at a party in the sumptuous country villa of a great industrialist and both throw themselves into sentimental adventures, from which they come out even more disappointed than before. But at dawn they finally manage to talk to each other openly and perhaps see a possibility of salvation and maturation for their relationship.
The film, one of the most significant of the Italian cinema of the sixties, is part, with The adventure e The eclipse, of the so-called cycle of incommunicability: also in this case, none of the characters manages to establish sincere and constructive relationships with the environment that surrounds him, neither the intellectual Pontano, nor his wife, nor the young daughter of the industrialist , played by a very good Vitti: only the death of his friend seems to scratch the passivity of the two protagonists. Excellent screenplay by Antonioni, Flaiano and Guerra and splendid cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo.
If what happens ne The adventure, is always filtered through Claudia's gaze and feeling, The night it resolves itself entirely in the suffered and inexorable interior monologue of Lidia, one of Antonioni's most exemplary autobiographical characters. In this work, perhaps the highest and most rigorous point of the director's creative parable, themes and motifs return The adventure, but without the intellectualist forcing of the "yellow inside out" and without irritating polemical emphasis.
Antonioni seems to return to the "chronicle of a love story", but he returns after ten years of experiences, attempts, surveys; he returns to it, above all, after the de turn The Scream, in the light of the most pessimistic developments and the most bitter conclusions of his vision. His language has become more mature, his style confident and recognizable, indeed unmistakable: his vocation for analysis, the non-fiction disposition of his narrative method aim to prove themselves with the highest expressions of contemporary literature. Here, through the chronicle of a day all resolved in moods, in anxieties, in the discouraged and tormented dragging of the characters, he pursues and achieves, in the cinema, the dissolution of every traditional narrative fabric, burns without hesitation any residue of cinema from "entertainment".
The analysis of the disintegration of the connective tissue of society and of relationships between men, an analysis conquered and suffered through the discoveries and reactions of a female character, corresponds to the rupture and rejection of an organic and ascending narrative method (see conversely the Visconti di Rocco) and the choice of extended and unfinished forms. Antonioni celebrates, with Hauser, the pinnacles of the anti-naturalistic essence of cinema.
This is the sense of the opening of the film, with that masterful audiovisual montage of profiles of skyscrapers, of streets framed from above, of sounds, of noises, of excruciating screeching and of metal structures, of visual and sound gaps, the symphony founds and uninterrupted flow of the city, a nightmare of images and sounds that detaches itself on Tommaso's sweaty and panting face. Tommaso dies in a modern, comfortable clinic where everything is wonderfully functional and efficient. Tommaso dies, and the impending death is perceived in every moment of the day of Lidia and Giovanni, above all of Lidia.
Thomas's death is for Lidia the death of a real man, one of the few who have remained such: a fellow student, a friend, tender, passionate, even uncomfortable in his ability to believe. If Giovanni, leaving his friend's room, runs into the nymphomaniac (an Anna gone wrong, the image of an exasperated, soulless eroticism, not entirely dissimilar from the one with which Giovanni will try to stun Lidia and himself, in order not to see, not to go to the depths of things and feelings and find aridity and emptiness), Lidia instead finds herself in front of herself.
Tommaso's death triggers the spring of a long latent crisis, it lays bare the dissatisfaction, the bitterness, the wear and tear of feelings, all that is alienated in everyday habits and relationships, the voids that they fill with ferocious eagerness. Once again the initiative and the courage of the examination of conscience is entrusted by Antonioni to the female character. Indeed, to Lidia Antonioni transmits that commitment and that will to understand each other and to understand, that tenacious work of demystification and excavation that he carries out on feelings and ideas. And this is the most secret meaning of Lidia's long walk, of her wandering through the meadows and streets of Sesto San Giovanni.
In the course of that solitary wandering, which is a continuous loss and finding of consciousness, Lidia sees herself, her hopes of the past and her disappointments of today, "as in a mirror" while the images pass before her eyes extraneous and very remote, even if physically present, of a reality devoid of openings, closed to any virtuality of dialogue and relationships: the gratuitous violence of a quarrel between thugs, the "fabulous" spectacle of a rocket launched towards the sky, the cadence drawl of a dialectal speech. The landscape, broken into a sequence of still and detached images, here acquires the subjective dimension of the character's internal meditation.
The search for Lidia will continue in the Gherardini villa and will not end in that vain attempt at stunning with an occasional companion. Refusing her embrace with a sort of violent rancor, the character does not fall into the convention of feelings, as she might appear to a superficial reader, but she "sees" once again herself in the mirror of her awareness.
It's for Lidia during the enigmatic figure of Valentina: if Anna had disappeared leaving behind an ephemeral memory and a book by Fitzgerald, Valentina reads Broch, secluded from love and the fictitious euphoria of the party. This recurrence in the last Antonioni of figures, motifs, emblematic images that are renewed from film to film through a series of connections and insights, moments and passages of a discourse that is increasingly monotonous as stylistically more rigorous is significant.
Just as it is very significant that the description of certain memorable female characters corresponds to an increasingly approximate vision of the male one and its reasons. The figure of Giovanni Pontano, a successful writer already integrated into an order of compromises and yielding and on the eve of a complete abdication of his own human and intellectual "quality", is particularly indicative in this sense.
How not to agree with the acute analysis of Vittorio Spinazzola when he observes (in Michelangelo Antonioni director, Film 1961. Feltrinelli) that «the most immediate polemical objective of The night is evidently represented by Giovanni, the self-centred, weak and cowardly intellectual, rich only in haughtiness and contempt for common humanity, from which he feels separated, like a member of a superior caste?».
But how can we fail to point out on the other hand, and Spinazzola himself partially admits it, that if Giovanni wanted to be the image of a certain type of contemporary intellectual inserted into the existing order, who has lost the reasons and the conscience of his own work and in which the profession of writer no longer receives nourishment and meaning from the "profession of living" and from an active relationship with society and the problems of others, has Antonioni substantially missed the target?
Too many absences, gaps, silences on the relationship between Giovanni and society, the environment in which he lives and which have deteriorated his "quality" as a man and as a writer; and too many, on the other hand, the external schematizations and even the caricatures (see the figure of Gherardini, really not very credible as the typical incarnation of a certain neo-capitalist class and of an advancing "consumer society"): we want to allude to the sequences of reception in the publishing house and again in that of the party, where the relations between Giovanni and the "others" do not even approach a persuasive identification.
What is it The night, more than that The adventure and to already anticipate the ways that will be proper de The eclipse, Antonioni's tends more and more to become a cinema of "backgrounds", admirable in describing the conscience and regret of a life in which everything has already happened, significantly poor and elusive on "reasons" as attentive and very sensitive to "feelings" .
Da cinema studio. Notebooks of the Monza cinema club, n. 5, November 1962, p. 7–17
Victor Spinazzola
A few months away from The adventure, here is Antonioni signing a new work, The night. This time the welcome from the former is decidedly warm: 158.878.000 and eighth place in the standings (albeit at a safe distance from the leading group), close to Adua and her companions, prima di I love, you love, The truth, The hunchback.
Antonioni will no longer find the happiness of narrative movement of theAdventure. In Night the story starts from an all in all extrinsic cue: a visit to the dying Tommaso, a friend of the writer Giovanni and already shy, in love with his wife, Lidia. This facilitates the subsequent internalization of the story, which gravitates above all to the female protagonist, drawn from the circumstance to rethink the past, establishing a tacit comparison between the two men in her life, and finally realizing, with astonished lucidity, that her marriage is failed. The character certainly belongs to the rank of Antonioni's best creations. The crisis that increasingly grows and becomes clearer in Lidia is followed with finesse, so as to give prominence to every look, voice, silence. Never perhaps as in the Night the director has achieved such firm results in the visualization of moods, in the translation into images of attitudes and feelings removed from any form of romantic intuitionism with rigorous objectivity. We think of certain excerpts of "pure cinema" such as Lidia's solitary walk through the streets of Milan, between the asphalt and concrete, then on the avenues of the suburbs; or the car ride, in the rain; and conversely to the levity of conjugal talks, during the bath and later at the tabarin.
At the same time Antonioni coherently continued his program of reductive subjectivization of reality, from which every aspect not referable - by allusion, analogy or contrast - to the inner life of the character was eliminated. Loud, dazzling, ostentatiously self-satisfied, the Milan of Night it asks to be judged through the eyes of the protagonist: a foreign city, where one can work well but live badly. This pushes her to adhere with more immediacy to Lidia's pain, to her cordial, gentle humanity. However, and this is the strength of the film, it is the woman who represents the director's true polemical objective: she, with her regret of not having been able to prolong her love for her husband indefinitely, of not having been able to devote all her life, that I didn't die for him. She wanted to isolate herself from the world, to place her own weakness in the shelter of conjugal love: the world took its revenge, destroying her feeling for her and preventing her, now that she is trying to get back in touch with reality, from recognizing itself in it. So Lidia, like Claudia, understands that that love was a form of selfishness: the selfishness of someone who feels the need to be possessed by someone and prefers to entrust the reasons for her life to others, unable to find them independently within himself.
Less successful is the portrayal of the male protagonist, inadequately represented in his intellectual qualification and pursued with too easy moralism in his ostentatious arrogance, cynicism and intimate cowardice. From this derives a serious imbalance in the story, recognizable in all the scenes intended to highlight the personality of the writer. Let's keep silent about the expedient constituted by the reading of an old letter of his to his wife, in the concluding episode, which is resolved immediately, with the strong conciseness of the animal-like embrace imposed by the man on the woman who repeats desolately that she does not love him, on a desert meadow, in a dull dawn. But the episode of the editorial reception does not go beyond the annotations of an anecdotal descriptiveness. And even the long party in the industrialist's villa indulges in caricature, even if it provides an adequate background to the torments of Lidia and Giovanni, pathetic ghosts desperately attached to life, who meet and separate, stop and resume their journey, wandering through the halls as in the labyrinth of their conscience: until the meeting with Valentina, who with her freshness and the inhibitions of her disillusioned youth will be for both the mirror in which to see their defeat.
Certainly, the concessions to color and to the folklore of urban modernity facilitated the outcome of the film, compensating for the nullification of the plot in the eyes of the spectator. more thanAdventure, The night it is a work linked to the moment of the "economic miracle", to the image of a society that believes it has reached opulence and has by now given itself a stable structure: and therefore it decides to listen to the voices of a profound disquiet that they come from her own bosom. Antonioni too, like Fellini, brings the upper classes to the screen, towards whom the public feels a growing desire for information, to the extent that it no longer considers them an inaccessible model but continues to be fascinated by them. Both directors proceed to a work of demystification, showing how the elites intellectuals and artists have lost, together with the interest in public affairs and general ideas, also every norm of private behavior. And their position of condemnation acquires an all the easier resonance as it appears to be marked by a neo-bourgeois need for order and normality no less than by a strong sense of individual values. But Antonioni goes deeper: he aims at the essentials, focusing on the most naked of intersubjective relationships, that between men and women. The refusal of sentimental flues, of consoling loopholes allows him to enter the heart of the matter: which concerns the impossibility of any individual solution to the crisis.
In the modern world everyone lives alone. But for man loneliness is equivalent to death: the tension towards society is a given of nature. On the other hand, the more painful the need to communicate with others is, the harder the disappointment will be. Moving between the opposite terms of this insoluble dilemma, Antonioni's characters define a typical condition of our time. Therefore, the accusation leveled against the director of dealing only with the pseudo-problems of those who have no material worries, do not know the concrete worries of a life of work, seems unjust. Rather, it is true that even in Antonioni's case the costume picture, although painted in colors that are so much more neutral and opaque compared to the sweet life, retains its positive charm: the de-eroicisation of the characters does not exclude the viewer tending to project himself into the environment, with its objective characteristics of luxury and elegance.
From: Giorgio Spinazzola, Cinema and audience, goWare, 2018, pp. 297–300
Georges Sadul
After visiting a friend in his death throes (Bernard Wicki), a husband (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife spend a dull "dolce vita" evening in the homes of certain billionaires, they realize (the woman in particular) that the their love is over, and in the morning they hold each other in a desperate and useless embrace.
The film almost forms a trilogy with The adventure e The eclipse. Famous sequences: the visit to the sick man, the woman's walk through Milan and the suburbs, the boring evening spent in a night club, the guests at the reception who throw themselves into the swimming pool, the meeting with a sad rich girl (Monica Vitti), the bitter and desperate embrace at dawn on the lawn after the party.
«A couple in which the woman is more lucid than the man because female sensitivity is the finest filter that exists and the man, in the realm of feelings, is almost always unable to perceive reality, but tends to dominate it. The weight of female selfishness supposes, to its advantage, a total abstraction of the woman's personality. (Antonioni).
Sadder than The adventure, The night it's a further dig into similar environments and characters. Antonioni refines his language and clarifies, perhaps limiting them, his basic themes.
G. Sadoul, Cinema dictionarySansoni, 1968
Charles of Charles
Giovanni, a successful novelist, and Lidia go to the hospital to see Tommaso, a friend who is dying of cancer. And while Lidia is still in her room listening to the words of Tommaso, who has always been in love with her, Giovanni passively undergoes the attentions of a young nymphomaniac. Then husband and wife go to a cocktail party offered by Giovanni's publisher for the release of the writer's latest novel.
Lidia, bored, leaves and begins a long wandering through the streets of Milan, then in the suburbs, until, having reached the place where her husband had begun to court her, she calls him on the phone and tells him to come and get her. In the evening, after a visit to a night club, they go to a reception in the villa of a big industrialist. Giovanni is surrounded by attention. Lidia phones the hospital and learns that Tommaso is dead. Desperate, alone, she accepts a ride in the car from a stranger who would like to seduce her, but she doesn't feel like betraying her husband, who in the meantime is attracted to Valentina, daughter of the landlord, who still resists the attentions of the writer, even if he confides his difficulty in living. In the meantime, Lidia has returned, finds Giovanni with Valentina, and a tacit understanding seems to be established between the two women. Then out in the park, the woman tells her husband that Tommaso is dead. Their love is also dead: they find out when she reads him an old love letter that he doesn't recognize. At dawn, on the lawn, the two embrace in despair.
Da Dear Antonioni, catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition and retrospective dedicated to Antonioni, Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 2–17 December 1992, pp. 69–70
Stefano Lo Verme
Giovanni Pontano is an established writer who lives in Milan with his wife Lidia, but their marriage is slipping into a cold mutual indifference. One Saturday, after visiting a friend of theirs, Tommaso Garani, hospitalized, Giovanni and Lidia prepare to go to a social party in the villa of the wealthy industrialist Gherardini, who is interested in Giovanni's work.
Second chapter, after The adventure (1960), from the "existential trilogy" by Michelangelo Antonioni, The night it was awarded the Golden Bear as best film at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961, and represents one of the most popular films in the career of the famous Italian director.
Scripted by Antonioni with Ennio Flaiano and Tonino Guerra, The night focuses on the complicated ménage between the two characters played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau: Giovanni Pontano, a brilliant intellectual grappling with an underground sense of frustration, and his wife Lidia, at odds with her husband and unable to feel at ease in the middle of the "beautiful world" of the Milanese salons.
The action takes place over half a day, from a Saturday afternoon until dawn on Sunday: the central part thus corresponds to the "night" of the title, which Giovanni and Lidia spend at a high society party in a villa just outside Milan. Taking up the themes of the previous one The adventure, Antonioni lingers in the description of the sentimental crisis of the protagonists: a now irreversible crisis, underlined by the coldness and lack of communication that distinguish the relationship between the two spouses. The film thus flows between Lidia's boredom, who ends up in voluntary solitude, and Giovanni's discomfort, a symptom of the more general condition of malaise of the intellectual grappling with the conformism of contemporary Italy.
With The night, Antonioni goes back to deepening the peculiar concepts of his cinema: in particular that ineffable sense of alienation which, in modern industrial civilization, seems to suffocate the individual and leave no room for feelings. Emblematic, from this point of view, the apparent indifference with which Lidia goes through all the events of her day, including the discovery of her attraction between her husband and the young Valentina (Monica Vitti), daughter of her landlord .u
