With "The Eclipse" (which is not seen in the film) Michelangelo Antonioni consolidates and develops the new cinematographic language introduced with "The Adventure". In some sequences, like the final one, he takes it to his peak. The images in their thingness, they scream. A formidable and powerful scene in its inanity. Shot in a Rome that doesn't even look like Rome. It takes some time before we realize that we are in Rome. If it weren't for the accent, it would seem to be in Milan. The magnificent scenes of the stock exchange, of a realism and excitement that are very un-Antonian, resemble those of Piazza Affari. The director from Ferrara knew the world of business and the people who did it well. In Bologna he had graduated in economics and commerce and he didn't mind his studies. Then there is the ghostly Rome of the EUR district just built for the 1960 Olympics. Images that remain etched in the mind for days in their bare minimalism. On the slow tracking of the deserted streets of the EUR, with still construction site residues, the word "End" stands out. It's a right-wing film, writes "Quaderni Piacentini": don't go see it. The PCI press ignores it and will continue like this. For them he is a bourgeois director, "Rinascita" takes the trouble only to have it criticized on two full pages by a Soviet director to whom Antonioni replies with his usual conciseness, education and intelligence. A very sad thing. Yet "L'eclisse" photographs a social change, perhaps even anthropological in Italian society, with an intelligent and original look at things and people. Pasolini realizes this and, while acknowledging his extraneousness to those contents, will have words of appreciation for Antonioni and his poetics. But we know, Pasolini was Pasolini.
Bravo but not perfect Alain Delon (excessively physical, athletic), a little over the top the nervous mobility, which Antonioni liked so much, of Vitti. The story and the dialogues are
John Grazzini
The eclipse by Michelangelo Antonioni concludes the critical trilogy opened by The adventure and continued with The night. He accomplishes it and sums it up by minimizing, to a fragile twist of fate, the margin of hope granted to men: at the end, when Vittoria's attempt to break her own isolation with an extreme illusion of voluntarism fails and the impassive face of the empty city responds to his anguish, a few couples, arm in arm, cross the scene in the semi-darkness; why they yes and Vittoria no? And is their happiness a fiction of the soul or is it only fate that has placed them next to each other, and have they been touched by the grace of continuing to understand each other, to love each other?
The eclipse it is once again a portrait of a woman, but of a woman belonging to Antonioni, by now destined to identify herself, in the memory of the spectators, with the changeable and perplexed personality of Monica Vitti. Her name is Vittoria, like her in Lady without camellias her name was Clara, Anna in The adventure, Lydia in The night. Abandoned a man she no longer loves, she finds herself alone, tired, dejected, disgusted, out of phase: these are her words. She is young, she is beautiful, she has enough to live on. But she is an intellectual and a sentimentalist: she seeks in others a warmth of life, a faculty of being passionate of which she herself is by now emptied. She attempts to fake them, and she ventures into a flirtation with a young stockbroker, who gives her "the feeling of being abroad", little more than a boy, the complete opposite of her: cynical, self-confident, womanizer, perfect example, let's say of a healthy young man normal (the excellent Alain Delon).
The mother (a well-balanced Lilla Brignone) is insensitive to her daughter's appeals; she too is restless and unhappy, but she finds her safety valve in the stock market game. It so happens that Vittoria gives herself to Piero, the stockbroker, in the aftermath of a stock market crash in which her mother has lost a large sum of which she remains owed to the young man. Regardless of Vittoria's intentions, her gesture seems to assume in Piero's eyes, and then in her own eyes, the meaning of an attempt to silence her mother's debt. This too is a collapsing love, a road that closes. Neither Piero nor Vittoria, ensnared by the misunderstanding, will go to the last appointment.
Ever since Antonioni upset the traditional formulas of the narrative plot, entrusting the film with the task of representing a moment of crisis of conscience rather than narrating a story, and making cinema ever more closely related to literature, his films have been taking on more and more clearly the character of psychological treatises. Now it seems to us that with The eclipseAntonioni gave substance to his theorization of the bitterness of contemporary life typical of overly sensitive souls. One more step, and he'd be paranoid.
This Vittoria is still saved: she is a girl who finds it hard to live, she is a loner who seeks in large spaces and in nature that peace and freedom from herself, which she lacks, she leans on her friends to convince herself that everyone he has his own anxieties, he has dissociated loving himself from understanding each other ("You don't have to know each other to love each other"), he can't answer any of his own questions: in short, he is a living and true creature, also a victim of modern culture. There are, and the film of
We liked Antonioni for the tension with which he identified it, for the desert landscape with which it coincides, a hot Roman summer, for those transitions of mood that give Monica Vitti's face the variety of a cloudy sky. But it is significant that Antonioni resorted to the world of the stock exchange, the most frantic and ruthless, moreover described with the care that the director always puts in his costume criticisms, to oppose Vittoria's character to it. The chiaroscuro is too accentuated not to make one suspect that Antonioni is now falling into the programmatic.
If indeed his next films will be of a comic-brilliant genre, as has been said, it means that Antonioni has noticed this, and considers his work of introspection of contemporary consciousness closed with the defeat of happiness. It is true, however, that he has conducted her on borderline subjects who redeem themselves from resignation by struggling before self-destructing but who have in their blood the condemnation of the tedium of living: an eclipse of balance before feelings.
Da Corriere della Sera, 13 April 1962
Gian Luigi Rondi
In today's world, so external and brutal, so hedonistic and opaque, men no longer know how to communicate with each other, they no longer have time to get to know each other, they have lost any possibility of understanding each other: and therefore they no longer love. Of all the crises of our time, therefore, that of love-feeling is perhaps the most serious because it has destroyed the only bridge that had so far succeeded in uniting the most disparate creatures and has reduced men to things and their social relationships to a desolate meeting of windowless walls.
Michelangelo Antonioni had already arrived at this observation, with the accents of the mournful poet, two other times, ne The adventure and it The night, but he had never shown such profound inspiration and such a noble and lofty language as in today's film which will certainly remain among the most intelligent and decisive works of post-war Italian cinema.
Again the crisis of love, therefore, a consequence of the more general crisis that undermines the men of our time, and a very clear mirror of the evils that destroy them. She is no longer able to love a man to whom she has been linked for years and leaves him having understood that he will never understand what she is asking of love and also having understood that she herself would never be able to make him understand. A few days later she meets a young man who is the opposite of him (and also of her): concrete, decisive, dynamic, thirsty for life, he works as a stock broker and money is her only idol; she realizes that he likes her, as a young and beautiful woman likes a young and lively man, and despite feeling him so different she relies, albeit reluctantly, on the hope of a new attempt, on the possibility of an encounter in which she can explain herself, to explain, to ask, to have.
But she is too walled up alive to be able to speak and he is too much a child of her time to intuit what she is unable to discover in herself, in her soul suffocated by too many "I don't know", "I don't understand", "I don't see" and since for him love is only sex, he plays only that note with her. It is a note, however, that is not enough for her and that he, distracted by the whirlwind of her too active life, has to subject to continuous variations, to perpetual, rapid changes: so after an afternoon of passion, they make an appointment where none of the two thinks about going because they both know it's useless.
The awareness of this uselessness is the poetic key of the film, as is the painful sensation of this transformation of men into things, of this subjection of the individual to the overbearing matter that surrounds him everywhere, preventing him from making any gestures, stifling every voice, obscuring his view: Antonioni described this transformation - in the heart of three perfect characters - with a style that lucidly managed to adapt to the meaning of the drama, a style that isolated the characters in the midst of things to better show us the weight that things gradually exerted on them and which, both when he wrote the splendid pages of the Stock Exchange (hallucinated x-ray of the myth of gold), and when he recalled around the story the extremely modern Roman frame of the EUR (architectural anticipation of a still unfinished tomorrow) always made sure to lyrically point out at every step the moods of the protagonists, their fear of the void, their search and above all the terrible vanity of that search.
Giving life to an action that, despite the austerity of ways and tell me always so congenial to him, knows how to perfectly adapt to the more intelligent needs of the cinematographic story (albeit deliberately understood, as regards psychological developments and clarifications of moods, as a literary text). Among the moments in which the encounter between the sense of cinema and this new literary dimension is happiest is the initial sequence - the silent, withered detachment of the two lovers at dawn - and the final one which, having annulled the characters in things, asks only to things to "tell" the drama of today's crises. A drama, however, which will not become a tragedy if, as Antonioni warns in the title, it will only temporarily darken the souls of modern men: like the eclipse, in fact. And the pace?
The story unfolds with a breath initially held and collected, to indicate the silence that descends to entangle the relationships between the characters, then excited, tense, breathless, when it analyses, with the impetuous description of the Stock Exchange, one of the most obvious reasons for this silence, then trembling and hesitant when the protagonist's new amorous attempt follows, and finally solemn, sustained by almost fatal cadences, when things take the place of men and the images, which seem like a documentary, instead echo a shouted and heartbroken humanity , painful and hurt.
Defects? Some hesitation in certain psychological aspects, some narrative detail that is not entirely justified (the plane trip to Verona, perhaps even her dance disguised as a black woman), but they are shadows that do not detract from the importance of a work made even more solid and accomplished by a photograph of intense vividness and by a music full of all the echoes of today's disturbances.
The interpreters are Monica Vitti, a protagonist of severe sensitivity and exquisite wisdom, a painful face traversed by deep shadows, mysterious lights, contradictory references; Alain Delon, in the decisive character of the young man who is all outwardly energetic, Francisco Rabal, the gray mask of an intellectual in decay, and Lilla Brignone in the guise of the mother of the protagonist, a character, too, who is too absorbed by his interests, his anxieties, his his earthly selfishness, he doesn't see, he doesn't hear, he doesn't even know how to listen anymore.
Da Il Tempo, 22 April 1962
Philip Sacchi
Antonioni is undoubtedly the most cultured, refined, sensitive, literary genius of our cinema. It is natural that this leads him to be also the most restless and most problematic. His new film is also a fine essay on problematicism, The eclipse. Problematicism does not mean problem. The problematic, as an artistic emotion, precedes the problem. When the problem is, I don't say solved, but already only announced, it is no longer problematic, because the simple statement, suggesting a hypothesis, is already a form of solution. Antonioni's characters, here even more than in the previous films (or at least the previous two, The adventure e The night, from which he started for the new research), are constitutionally without solution.
Therefore they, by definition, “do not know”. "I don't know, I don't know," Vittoria keeps repeating indolently to Riccardo, the lover she is about to leave, and who begs in vain for an explanation, a why. «I don't know, Piero», she replies to her new lover when he says to her: «I think we'll get along». She continues: "I don't know why so many questions are asked... You don't need to know each other to love each other...". Naturally, alongside these, there are also other non-problematic characters, the characters who they believe to know or who want to know, like Vittoria's pathetic and out of step mother (happily characterized by Lilla Brignone), who sa that the drop in the stock market is all the work of the socialists, or that client of Piero's, a young assistant to a stockbroker, who would like to know whose pocket exactly will end up with the millions that he will disburse for the swaps: but they belong to a category of simple, uninteresting, with which others, i holders of the problematic, they coexist without participating.
Problems par excellence, in Antonioni, are women. Remember the women of the The adventure, the women of La night. They are absolutely unanchored women, oppressed by a mad but indistinct nostalgia for something concrete and true, and at the same time by an organic impatience and inability to seek it. Typical of Antonioni's narrative tactic is to introduce these timeless beings in time, i.e. to make them pass through external cases and events in such a way that their existence is registered only through the ephemeral trace left on them by their passage: a little, if we can say so, as the existence of electrons is revealed only by the condensate trail that they produce crossing the gaseous molecules of Wilson's chamber.
It is a peculiar faculty of Antonioni's style that of linking dimensionless states of mind to real dimensions, a faculty that seems to me to arrive here, in the eclipse, to its expressive completeness. From this point of view, I found the grandiose and, in its epileptic and grotesque drama, powerful episode of the collective storm on the Stock Exchange, and the way in which the figure of Vittoria isolates it, her impossibility to understand it and participate in it, with the delicious, sardonic one boutade final: the idyllic drawing of the unfortunate player and crackpot. Thus, the nocturnal trio of the three roommate friends who get together to pass the time, and the whimsical little exotic interlude, and the run out into the deserted avenues to look for the dogs, and at the last, the silence broken by that musical, arcane vibration of metal rods in the wind. I don't completely love the film: it seems to me that it falls a little into the amorous encounter.
However, for me, the way in which Antonioni managed to give body and presence to a completely absent character like that of Vittoria is extraordinary, while at the same time maintaining all its unreality and indeterminacy. At one point, he even deletes it. The last hundred and fifty meters of the film are completely empty stage. Once the characters have faded, the lens returns to the places: the crossroads of the first kiss, the house under construction, the water can, the zebra crossing. Before and after have become the same thing.
Monica Vitti withstood the very difficult test of carrying the character of Vittoria. Extremely difficult because it was a question of remaining uninterrupted, one can say from beginning to end, under the eye of the lens, stubbornly refusing his questioning, and at the same time giving in, expressing without expressing, disappointing without disappointing, in a dose of apparent insensitivity and unconscious despair. Extremely difficult because they had to withstand the test of those interminable deambulations to which Antonioni subjects his characters (it's a mania): sometimes without a sense of the ridiculous, as when, after we have seen Vittoria and Piero go through half of Rome, just at the moment when they finally decide to go home, he makes the girl say: «Let's walk a bit», Well, Monica Vitti has carried her character very well. She won.
29 April 1962
Guido Aristarchus
"The same things come back," announces Musil in the second part of The man without qualities; and further on that title also returns, with the question «or why doesn't history be invented?». Things of the same kind happen: very trivial, but often very important. So we can say de The eclipse. In it, in the flow of consciousness rather than of events, phenomena similar to those of the The adventure e The night. First of all, the three films - which are the "times", the only apparently detached moments of a single work - begin with three farewells or fractures, each of which takes place at dawn. A farewell is that of Anna, who says goodbye for the last time to her father, the elderly and conformist diplomat at rest; that of the novelist Tommaso to Lidia and Giovanni in the luxurious and cold Milanese clinic; the one, here, of Vittoria who abandons Riccardo, an intellectual of the "left" forever. Little or nothing, according to Antonioni's descriptive style, from avant-garde literature, we know about the past of these "characters", and of the others.
However, it is possible to trace an ideal continuity in these "characters" no longer understood in the sense of tradition. We can say that at the beginning of de The eclipse we find the Pontano spouses again, a few years after we had left them in the last shot of The night. Lidia who tries to bring Giovanni back to reality, and Giovanni who tries to escape from it once again resorting to physical embrace, there, on the sandy clearing of the park in the villa in Brianza, now deserted at dawn. Likewise we can say, in this ideal research of the past, that the Pontano spouses were only Claudia and Sandro married, after the former had understood, in the conclusion of the The adventure, the drama of the second: the impossibility of living away from any vital contact with reality, in "boredom", without suffering from it (in the few moments of lucidity, of becoming aware).
Similar things happen. The eclipse it really is the third and final stage, episode of the adventure”. The chronicle of the crisis of feelings, of "human excess" continues. The themes are the same: incommunicability, boredom, loneliness and despair. Riccardo (i.e. Giovanni de The night) does not understand Vittoria's (i.e. Lidia's) now definitive abandonment: he believes that she is leaving to go with someone else, and is incapable of offering a gesture that can give the woman a meaning back to the years spent with him. After a night of nightmare and useless discussions («All the time to discuss, what then?»), Vittoria leaves Riccardo's house tired, dejected, disgusted, out of phase: "internally" lost weight. "There are days - she says to Anita, who she doesn't understand - when holding a fabric, a needle, a book, a man, is the same thing". Everything around her is empty, petrified, like the small fossil that hangs on her bedroom wall. She feels and is alone. She over and over again tries to communicate with her mother, but her barrier is insurmountable.
Even Vittoria's friends are alone, foreigners, in exile: they are not transparent to themselves and to others. Vittoria feels closed as if in a trap. Is an escape possible? In Marta's house, her gaze rests on a photograph that portrays an immense expanse of grass, a sky dotted with majestic clouds; and she caresses that grass, that sky feeling a sense of greatness, freedom, nobility.
Vittoria believes that in Kenya people think less about happiness and are therefore happy. The plane ride seems to give her some peace. The landscape, as in the photograph, is beautiful: rivers, villages, fields, clouds, approaching mountains. Vittoria feels free from worries, at the mercy of new sensations; she lays her head down, and is almost forgetful; even that little bit of fear (the wind shaking the device), that discomfort has disappeared.
There is a lot of Rousseau in the idea with which Victoria characterizes the freedom of the wild man, all instinct, in questioning whether man has become much better or happier by being civilized. There is something negatively intellectual about her, the archaic myth of a happy time lost forever, of the noble savage. But even that myth, that symbol, appears dissolved, contaminated by recorded reproductions of sweetened songs and music, by the same black dance that Vittoria improvises in Marta's house, where folklore, understood as a curious and bizarre thing, leads to something equivocal, in a lesbianism that transpires in connection with too long repressed instincts (in Marta, for example). An untraceable unit of lost time, of an intact, wild nature. In reality, as we will see, for Antonioni the past and the present now coincide, just as they coincide with the future. We have said that this Victory is a Lydia who would like to "start over"; even if she is tired, she has lost weight internally, she is still available, she tries to insert her personal concerns about her in the closed world of her mother, her friends, others, Riccardo himself.
With regard to the latter, she is neither faithful nor unfaithful: things have changed, that's all, she no longer loves him. And she tries to love Piero. But Piero too is a man without qualities, made up of qualities without the man. Like the architect Sandro, the writer Giovanni, and perhaps Riccardo himself (it is easy to identify in this intellectual of the "left" a crisis that is not only sentimental), he has lost contact with living reality, he has prostituted himself, surrendered to the neo-capitalist structures . Young, with hasty manners, a mischievous and alert face, he is of a disconcerting cynicism in his work and in his private life.
After the embrace, in Piero's house, Vittoria has the feeling that the man, this man too, is a stranger to her. Their love, if there was love (that is, full, effective possession), was already born dead, has no concrete possibilities in a world that Antonioni summarizes in the sequences of the Stock Exchange. It is clear that these are meant to be, in the context of the film, nodal, decisive, the crucial point to which all the other parts refer and are directly or indirectly connected.
The picture takes on a great naturalistic force, and in some respects even realistic. Noise of voices and calls, negotiations proceeding at a rapid pace, prosecutors, agents, remissors, customers screaming and ranting. More than the shouted and broken words, the gestures stand out, hands raised, reaching out, altered faces. Numbers and then numbers. Buying and selling of securities. In this chilling spectacle, in this hubbub, a minute's silence in memory of a stockbroker who died of a heart attack is observed almost with annoyance, as a waste of time; and suddenly, when that minute was up, with eager impatience, the noises resumed, and the shouts, the cries of the audience. The paroxysm reaches its peak when stocks collapse.
Antonioni effectively underlines the anti-human action of money, such as to alter and deform the very essence of man: already that voice that speaks of death while the telephones continue to ring, is a "detail" that dismays. Marx emphasized on the basis of Shakespeare and Goethe:
"The inversion and exchange of all human and natural qualities, the brotherhood of the irreconcilable (the power divine of money) come from his essence of being generic to man estranged and induced to appropriate and alienate himself in it. Money is power alienated from humanity. What I cannot do as a man, what my individual essential forces therefore cannot do, I can do through the money. Money thus transforms each of these essential forces into something it is not, that is, into its opposite.
Loneliness, the incommunicability, becomes more and more - in the itinerary of this "adventure", of this search for another condition - "boredom" in the meaning recently reproposed by Moravia, and closely connected with a prostitution before the "visible deity", money, to this powerful and fascinating "pimp".
The same things come back. But do such things really happen? These things really go ne The eclipse how ne The adventure e The night, and only like this? Can history be invented, so much does it repeat itself in the single events of time? Marx said:
«Each of your relationships with man and nature must be a precise expression of your life real e individual that corresponds to the object of your will. If you love without giving birth to love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if through a expression of life you, loving person do not make yourself one person beloved, then your love is impotent, it is a disgrace."
This is Vittoria's dramatic, tremendous and definitive observation. What is the difference between her and Claudia, Valentina, Lidia herself?
Vittoria now realizes that her possibility - of loving and of producing love in the loved one - is definitively not real, abstract. It is impossible to fill that large hole now empty which is called the soul: the ways of the spirit start from it, but none can return to it; since the sense of reality no longer exists, there is no sense of possibility either.
And Antonioni rightly points out that The eclipse it is not a story of characters; it is the story of a feeling, or of a "non-feeling". Vittoria's "qualities", so different from those of Piero, her mother, and the others, now appear indifferent to Vittoria herself, and like Musil's Ulrico, in the face of this infinite indeterminacy of the world of the soul, to these " impossibilities” impossible, ends up dissolving every decision and feeling in lucid irony. The irony that - already present in the protagonist's name - underlies Vittoria and Piero's second embrace, no longer in the latter's patrician apartment, but in Ercoli's offices.
"See you tomorrow?" Piero asks. Vittoria nods yes. "See you tomorrow and the day after," adds Piero. And Vittoria: «…and the next day and the next day… and tonight». But like her attempt, her promise is without conviction, without hope. Even Piero, now, appears thoughtful, dismayed, while with a mechanical gesture he hangs up the telephones, which start ringing again.
Vittoria pauses in front of the lift being repaired, slowly goes down the stairs, goes out, walks in a street that seems to open onto the void; the trees, against the sky and with their twisted and intertwined branches, take the form of a grating. We will never see Vittoria again: she enters, to dissolve, in an anonymous crowd of sleepwalkers, who recall the "monsters", the "obsessed" in the Stock Exchange sequences.
And here, at this moment, yet something different happens than at The adventure e The night, not in the sense that we postulated, of some dialectical advance on Antonioni's part. The two previous films, in presenting the liquidation of a present, beyond which nothing was offered, contradicted the author's intimate convictions: they described not the world but a world, not all men but a particular group of men, individuals , in a precise and particular environment, truly marked by the denial of any development, history, perspective.
Not so we can say de The eclipse. Here Antonioni reveals, in the wake of personalities such as Wolfe, his firm conviction that solitude - and therefore incommunicability, anguish, etc. — is by no means something rare or singular, something peculiar only to a few individuals, to a class, but the inescapable, central fact of all human existence.
The final sequence, stylistically perfect in its adherence to the content, is the most convincing proof of this. For Antonioni it constitutes a moment, a chapter just as crucial as that of the Stock Exchange, with which it is closely connected; indeed even an artistic manifesto, the expression in rigorously cinematic terms of his vision of the world. Never until now had he known how to express his thoughts with such power of images, placing his work in balance, as here, between the essay and the film, the anti-film.
Antonioni's honesty is beyond question, and so is his will as a moralizer, or rather as a moralist. It is his “romantic” anti-neocapitalism, and precisely as such, which leads him here, in connection with the leveling of contents and rejection of any perspective, to an inability to derive something truly alive from reality, to make The eclipse so “rigid”, “definitive” and total, disheartening.
This is in turn connected, of course, with his artistic method. Antonioni would be wronged - as was said for example for certain avant-garde writers -, his artistic intentions and the results achieved in his latest film, if one interpreted his remaining in this flight of thoughts and feelings, in this miserable landing place of his characters and the world he describes to us, as a failure, a failure to achieve what he wanted and how he wanted to achieve it. He aimed at his film and made it by adhering to a precise cultural tendency, to the ideological structures of the anti-novel, of the avant-garde (the most advanced, the most "reflexive", even if the charm of a Robbe-Grillet, to whom he concedes, in many respects of no small importance).
It is no coincidence that the static nature and leveling of The eclipse it is expressed, as we have seen, in allegorical-symmetrical images, in allegories and allegorizations bordering on the symbol. Lukacs recognized very clearly that it is allegory in the modern (avant-garde) sense:
«It is that aesthetic category (albeit extremely problematic in itself), in which conceptions of the world can assert themselves artistically which constitute a split in it, following the transcendence of its essence and ultimate foundation, following the abyss between man and reality."
The abstract peculiarity of each object represented - man, thing, fact - aesthetic consequence of the allegory, reaches its climax in the finale of the The eclipse, compared to the director's previous work. However, all these literary references must not lead to misunderstandings. Never, for example, as here Antonioni destroys in the word - in dialogue - what it can preserve (and in him it preserves up to The Scream inclusive) of literary suggestion, to “fix it”, as Tonino Guerra observes, in its value of cinematographic suggestion. By now a mature artist of the image, Antonioni realizes his philosophy of the absolute inadequacy of reality through a personal conception of language and a particular linguistic technique: while referring to a neo-experimental taste, to modern avant-garde literature, he creates organic forms - semantic and sound - completely new, and in any case filmic.
As for example a Broch in the anti-novel, so Antonioni in the cinema, and with the specific means to it, it almost seems that he wanted to experiment not so much the reality to be represented, but the possibilities inherent in the anti-film to make the structure of the his latest work with the structure of the soul in its reification, as he understands it, observes it and describes it. The unlimited possibility of his images, in this sense, of interior monologues, often absorbs the reality of the individual themes, and in him the technique of free play, the course of associations, is not a simple technique of cinematographic "writing", but the internal form of the representation and therefore - as a constitutive principle de The eclipse — something artistically ultimate.
That the one de The eclipse it is therefore a critical realism, as many would like, we would not say, even if in the context realistic details are not lacking; nor would we say with Lane that Antonioni is a Marxist director. Artistically "interesting", indeed stylistically the director's most mature, this work is decadent and therefore irrationalistic, of an exquisitely secular irrationalism: for the decadent everything is like an abyss here, everything pervaded by insecurity, by a spectral and mortal anguish, albeit now rarefied. There is therefore a lacerating contradiction: Antonioni is indeed a moralist who fights against current, conventional morality, bourgeois prejudices, but in the name of a freedom which he himself, in The eclipseperhaps no longer believes. Like Ibsen, he is a "revolutionary" without social ideals; and the reformer runs the risk of transforming himself, indeed he has already transformed himself, into a disconsolate fatalist.
Da Cinema New, n. 157, May-June 1962, pp. 190–198
Peter Bianchi
In the movie the eclipse, Vittoria, an independent girl, who lives in an elegant neighborhood working as a translator, abandons her lover Riccardo without plausible reasons, after a long relationship: he is a political journalist, an "engagé" journalist. The young man fails to understand Vittoria's attitude, and tries in vain to overcome her reluctance, to win back her spirit. In the meantime, Vittoria goes in search of her mother, a little woman who belongs to that social class of the petty bourgeoisie who is always scared of the future, always waiting for a favorable change in her life.
She plays the stock market with the little money she has at her disposal, and we catch her right in a moment of crisis, when the stock market has fallen and the poor woman sees all her savings swallowed up. She does not listen to her daughter, who invites her to go home; Thus Vittoria has the opportunity to meet a stock broker, Piero, a young man with a pleasant appearance, active, full of self-confidence, perhaps not bad, but whom life has forced to compromise with his own conscience.
He cannot have pity on poor people who, in search of fabulous profits, risk their money in operations that are too unscrupulous, too narrow; indeed he has a very cynical joke when a drunk stole his Giulietta and ended up at the bottom of an artificial lake with it. The Giulietta is fished out, the man is dead. He does not think of the dead man, but turning to Vittoria about her he says:
«With a few thousand lire I can put the bodywork back in place.» A limit of inhumanity and Vittoria is struck by it: is Piero the strong man, the one who she awaits in her soul, disoriented and lost in her? Vittoria attempts love with Piero. At one point their romance seems perfect. One asks the other: "Will we see you tomorrow?" "No, this evening at eight." In the evening, at the place of their rendezvous, nobody is seen. There are things, palaces, bamboo curtains shot through by a slight quiver, because there is a wind which from beginning to end seems to indicate the restlessness of the protagonists.
A baby carriage, a bus that squeaks on the brakes at street corners; but the two lovers do not appear: the adventure is over for them. And yet in that expectation of things it seems to perceive a participation of things, precisely, trees, houses, wind, in the melancholy of men, almost as if the physical world had acquired a soul close to that of humans.
One can speak of a kind of Buddhism, of the hope of a different life. Antonioni often invites these formulations. He is a problematic director, a director who looks for new things; he is a director, if you will, literary. But his film takes with a sort of painful participation. He no longer has certain flaws in balance and inaccurate sociological observation which disturbed us The adventure and also ne The night.
This time Antonioni has congealed his material in a unitary style without imbalances. With great spectacular intelligence he has been able to contrast the loneliness of souls, the melancholy of Vittoria, with the frenetic, agitated, neurotic world of the stock exchange, where a minute's silence appears more definitive than the mortuary inscription on a tomb. They look like men completely alienated from the thirst for money. And in cinema, this perfect page by Antonioni is even stronger than literature.
The images render with a unique alacrity, with an extraordinary representative force, the fever, the agitation, the general sense of frustration that the work of the bags gives. A few years ago, visiting a very important Unesco exhibition in Rome, in which they were represented from the figurative point of view of the great artists of the era of the great European crisis, in other words the '600, we were admired by the beauty of a Caravaggio, which is in Malta and which has been restored in Rome, and by a Vermeer, the painter Proust liked. Shortly afterwards we met a famous art critic, a friend of ours, who we tried to share in our enthusiasm.
The art critic smiled and said to us: "But you, who are so interested in the history of culture, in the course of ideas, haven't you seen that small picture where the moon appears?" We had seen it but we had not given it too much importance. And the critic resumed: "It is the first time that a realistic moon has been seen in a painting, observed from life, not a decorative moon, a mythological moon." It was the seventeenth century eager for new things, the scientific seventeenth century, the seventeenth century that ushered in the modern age. A dramatic century, one of the most problematic centuries, a century that seems gloomy yet is like a forge flame in the dark cave of an old blacksmith. With Bruno and with Campanella we glimpse the thought of tomorrow; with scientists we free ourselves from the shackles of the past and with music we try to express those ideas that the Counter-Reformation detested.
Well, even now, as in the seventeenth century, we are witnessing, in our opinion, a phenomenon of spiritual revolution. We don't know what awaits us but we know it's there. Making a down-to-earth comparison, a comparison of individual experiences, it is like when, on certain spring days, one is restless, lovingly restless, and then a woman appears who, for a little or a long time, satisfies our desires and our dreams. But without that wait, we wouldn't have recognized her on the way.
Now humanity awaits, awaits something, and it is right that art and artistic cinema should precede with analogy, with intuition, a truth that perhaps is not yet very far from its full appearance. Neither The eclipse this curious world, this waiting world, exists. The protagonist's incommunicability is only towards two men and a woman with whom he is unable to organize a coherent and profound sentimental relationship; but on the other hand he seems to agree with things. His moments of peace are in the meadow where the airplanes take off and arrive, or in the people of the Roman suburbs where the houses of the well-to-do are, where carriages with children go by, where there are always people waiting, strangers and even men like we.
We express our consent to the eclipse, remains a general observation. Hollywood cinema established itself in the XNUMXs, overcoming the European competition, because it offered quick, juicy stories that left no time for reflection. Everything was sudden, allusive: in short, it was an action cinema. Now people preferred that kind of film, with the exceptions of the films of Carné and Renoir, to our slowness, our aesthetic complacency.
Rossellini himself, starting the neorealistic polemic with Rome city open e Paisa, never forgot to be short and concise. With Antonioni the long times contrast the speed of Hollywood works. We go against the tide, so much so that a part of the public is no longer able to orient itself. It is typical in this sense the beginning, moreover very beautiful, de The eclipse. Vittoria no longer wants to know about Riccardo. But before taking leave, she loses a certain amount of time: she goes around the room, looks outside, makes some gestures. Nothing more fair, mind you. Because, by the way, decent people behave like this when they leave someone.
The point is elsewhere. Not in Antonioni who is an original director, with his own style. The point is in those who say: this is the cinema of tomorrow, dad's cinema, he is dead.
Da The day, June 1962 (day unavailable)
Tullio Kezich
Facing The eclipse Antonioni has not lost the new sense of the relationship between nature and the characters established in the finale of The night. In the character of Monica Vitti there is a continuous tendency to seek a relationship with the reality that surrounds her, perhaps determined by the occasional presence of a window. The very setting of the story, the garden city of EUR, introduces us to the final surprise, when the characters even sink into things and disappear.
What does the final sequence of The eclipse? The story of the film is simple. Monica Vitti leaves Francisco Rabal, a leftist intellectual, and takes a fancy to a young stockbroker, Alain Delon. The two young men experience a brief moment of happiness, but at a certain appointment neither of them shows up and the eye of the director ( which probably coincides with that of the protagonist) tries to excuse the images of reality beyond a feeling perhaps incinerated, perhaps in the process of maturing and transformation.
The eclipse it has the merit of overriding the perspective of a man-woman sentimental relationship as the only representation of existence, of attempting a multiple relationship between a character and the infinite aspects of reality. It is no coincidence, in fact, that the episodes of amorous happiness, the long and sometimes questionable skirmishes between Vitti and Delon, maintain an overly insistent, almost unpleasant note, while true happiness, which is given by feeling in perfect harmony with things and in magical scene at the airport where Monica moves and smiles to a blues tune, two blacks sit in the sun, an American drinks his beer, and we enjoy a moment of that "weak peace" alluded to in a newspaper headline in the last sequence
Antonioni's itinerary, which was born neorealist and became abstract, is repeated in each of his films L'idea di The eclipse it was linked to an astronomical fact but it is significant that the director did not edit the sequence shot with Vitti during last year's total solar eclipse. Along the way, the realistic datum has been transformed into a multipurpose symbolic element. We can say with Antonioni's film: the whole world is continually on the threshold of an eclipse, which manifests itself individually and psychologically but could become a phenomenon involving all of humanity the relationship between the individual and the destiny of the world and in fact always present in Antonioni's films, who supervises that his abstract vicissitudes take place here and today.
Therefore it happens that a narrative of a psychological type, perhaps closer by now to the objectivity of the "école du regard" for that dissociation of man from the things Moravia talks about in La noia, a great realistic allegory like the Stock Exchange sequences is effortlessly reconnected. In these scenes Antonioni has reached the maximum of his expressive strength, mirroring the brutal reality of alienation with almost documentary means. It is, of course, a filtered and reconstructed documentary, but the reliability of the images is absolute even in terms of a reading in the first instance.
And the bourgeois interior of Delon's house, with its old-fashioned furniture and picture frames, suggests in retrospect the crisis of a class that matures its dolphins for the business jungle. In short, the hero of a modern love story fights between the "ox park" and the quotation table, shouting himself out, a fraudulent and satisfied personification of a world that is progressively losing its sense of reality.
From Tullio Kezich, The Cinema of the Sixties, 1962–1966, Il Anteater Editions
Piacenza notebooks
"The Eclipse" by Antonioni
And so we also saw "The Eclipse", after "The Adventure" and "The Night", with gradually decreasing interest. Another film about "alienation", about "incommunicability". And unfortunately all of Italian culture, from right to left, to beat him the advertising drum.
Evidently the easy schemes on which our critics have gotten by for years are no longer of any use, not even to get to the bottom of a film like «L'eclisse». Even a well-prepared critic like Tommaso Chiaretti, in order to defend Antonioni, must resort to a comparison with «Divorzio all'italiana»! Let's keep silent about those who had already shot zero on «Marienbad» and now praise «L'eclisse»: Moravia decides that, while «Marienbad» was a «fairy tale», in «Eclisse» we are dealing with «critical realism»! Left-wing critics then attack the piece on the Stock Exchange (and perhaps the protagonist's liberal phrase about the Kenyan negroes) to conclude that it is an anti-bourgeois film! As if to say that "The Night" was an intellectual film because the protagonist was a writer (and the names of Adorno and Musil were mentioned awkwardly)!
In reality it is a gratuitous, evasive, right-wing film. Boring, often painful. Assuming that values (feelings in particular) are dead, we deem it preferable, instead of continuing like Antonioni to celebrate them ever more elegant funerals, without a doubt taking the plunge and dealing with the «emptiness», with «nothingness», as (albeit with bad results) some director of the nouvelle vague. Better, in the end, that Resnais had the tumble of «Marienbad» rather than save himself with a comfortable rerun of «Hiroshima».
Year I, Issue 1–2, July 1962, p. 31
Adelio Ferrero
The long sequence of the separation of the lovers at dawn, after a night of agonizing and vain questioning, with which it opens The eclipse, third and "definitive" time of the trilogy, comes to constitute the anticipation of the theme of the film, which is that of Vittoria's lack of love for men and things, and its stylistic transcription, characterized by a rigorous phenomenological descriptivism and consistent.
And in fact it is a masterly sequence on that descriptive level, and within the limits inherent to it, where the interruption of the sentimental relationship is resolved to the extent of an objectivity which by now implies the end of feelings.
See how Antonioni figuratively solves the motif of the "contiguity" of the two lovers (which makes us think of certain shots, but very different and very differently "motivated" by The friends), as it isolates and makes the relief absurd and the frozen contours of the objects, with which there is no longer any relationship. However, the severe emblematic coherence of the sequence has its limit in itself: Riccardo is a presence, a "shadow", to which certain external supports (the "magazines of the crisis" abandoned on the table) give an ambiguous prominence.
In Vittoria the awareness of the end of the sentimental relationship, and above all the desperation and impotence of objectively seeing, in a sequence of images now still and detached from themselves, the deception of the years spent with Riccardo is more vivid and painful than in the man, in which indifference is equivalent to a sort of defence. Vittoria therefore perceives the progressive loss of quality in the universe that surrounds her (to refer to a definition by Aristarchus), a universe that can be traced back to an "informal" dimension in which the presence of man is flattened and adequate at the level of things, inert and mute. Victory therefore becomes ne The eclipse the restless and unstable protagonist of a vain and nostalgic search for an authentic life condition that seems to have ended for a long time, even if in it one already feels, albeit in a different sense, the weight of aridity that generally suffocates the characters director's men.
Two sequences of the film, and the second not surprisingly among the most beautiful, are particularly revealing of the sentimental disposition of the character. We want to allude to the nocturnal meeting in Marta's apartment, whose husband is in Kenya among "60.000 whites... and 6 million blacks who want to throw them out", in which Antonioni rejects, as usual, the temptation of an impossible return to "nature".
The other is the sequence of the airplane flight, in which Antonioni describes with his usual heartfelt reserve Vittoria's illusion of rediscovering the meaning and weight of feelings - trepidation, apprehension, fear, serenity - in a circumstance exceptional. At the end of the flight, the curious and receptive gaze of the woman rests lovingly on the airport clearing, on a tuft of grass, on the face of a man; her ear tends to pick up the sound of a song from the bar's jukebox. Contact with things seems unexpectedly rediscovered and re-established, and the director follows the illusory happiness of the character with lucid awareness, tempered by a sort of modest participation. This pathetic presence of Antonioni denies, among other things, the recurring and widespread legend of the director's "coldness".
As is well known, someone believed they could identify the central and characterizing theme of the film in the Stock Exchange sequences and spoke of "critical" realism for this reason. This is the case of Alberto Moravia, who returning a second time, as had already happened to him not by chance for The night, writes about the film in "L'Espresso" of May 13, 1962:
«This intellectual is not a Marxist but a moralist, a psychologist and also a sociologist of the humanistic species. This intellectual does not accept alienation at all, on the contrary he suffers from it, as something profoundly abnormal. He indicates in the Stock Exchange, i.e. in money, the alienating element that indirectly creeps into all relationships, including the sexual one».
Undoubtedly the two stock exchange sequences reveal the world in which Antonioni's characters live, from which they are conditioned and alienated. And the invention, in the first, of the minute of recollection is masterful: the sudden intrusion of death into that absurd and exaggerated counterfeiting of life, the "excess", to use a term dear to Antonioni, of men with respect to this fact final and irrevocable.
And in the second the absence of feelings and reactions, indeed of the very ability to feel them, when by now the man's soul has been squeezed and crushed by the absurd vortex of money, finds a beautiful representation in the incisive and ingenious portrait of the The man who has lost hundreds of millions and whom Vittoria follows, incredulous and anxious, in the streets adjacent to the Stock Exchange. But nothing will happen this time either: the crumpled map of a sedative and some flowers drawn on a sheet of paper will remain on the coffee table at which the man sat. The mechanism that determines the passions of men seems to have definitively broken.
But even the Stock Exchange sequences, despite appearances, fit perfectly into the irrational perspective that the director assumes in the face of the events described. In fact, they are not the result of an attitude and a cognitive process of reality, dug up to the identification of the deep causes of what is happening, articulated on different levels, realistically circumscribed, but the hypostatization of a partial aspect of our arbitrarily universalized time . The money Antonioni describes is never money intended as profit, but money rejected as Moloch. Hence also the moralistic abstractness of the director's attitude, his impotent arrest in revealing and rejecting the "phenomenon" described.
The one-sidedness of this vision is also found in the drawing of Piero's figure, all resolved in a work now debased to pure mechanical skill, devoid of further determinations. Within the limits of the film, Piero therefore comes to be one of the director's most accomplished and persuasive figures. As Italo Calvino acutely observed in "Il giorno" of April 29, 1962:
«One who in the frenetic world… darts like a fish, one who doesn't even dream of being crushed by it, to whom only the love for this girl makes him understand that something is wrong, but he doesn't let himself be put in crisis ».
The cynical "pedagogy" of the stockbroker on whom he depends ("a good sifting every now and then is good. Only good customers remain... those who, God willing, don't have so many anxieties...") constitutes a lesson for Piero and a lifestyle in relationships with others. Think of this short dialogue, one of the most significant in the film, between Piero and Vittoria:
Pero: You don't like coming to the Stock Exchange, do you?
Vittoria: I still haven't figured out if it's an office, a transfer market or a ring.
Piero: You have to come often to understand. If one starts, then he gets into the game. He is passionate.
Vittoria: Passionate about what, Piero?
This is a dialogue in which all the implications, and limits, of the director's vision are undoubtedly found: on the one hand, a rejection of modern society seen as an inhuman reality and described in terms of irrationalistic and leveling immobility, static; on the other, a perceived and painful feminine sensibility, but substantially inert, incapable of conscious reactions and choices.
It is from this uncertainty and lack of love of Vittoria for men and things that the relationship with Piero is born, the outcome of which is moreover obvious from the start, and the initial distrust of the woman towards Piero arises precisely from the lucid presentiment of a new defeat. In fact, the relationship between Piero and Vittoria is enclosed in a narrow and demeaning erotic measure. The environment in which their first love meeting takes place underlines the lack of warmth and footholds: think of the absurd fixity of those family portraits, the still and stagnant atmosphere of the square, the heavy backdrop of the Baroque church, to the solitude of the soldier in the street which seem to allude to a world in which life is extinguished, leaving behind a fossil landscape.
Between those walls and in that silence, the gestures and words of men have something archaic and absurd, typical of a world of survivors. After all, this motif had already appeared evident in the scenes that took place at the mother's house, a woman in whom the obsession with money has a history of mistakes behind her and a perspective of illusions ahead of her: in fact, in her insecurity petty-bourgeois society and the vain attempt to solve it through gambling on the Stock Exchange appear to be governed by a petty and ferocious determinism.
In front of her mother, as indeed in front of her old room as a child, Vittoria does not feel any feelings, she is unable to recognize herself and find herself in a non-existent family environment; even her past appears devoid of answers and possible revelations.
But in Piero, to whom she will say at a certain point in their affair «I would like not to love you. Or love you much better», Vittoria will naturally not be able to find an authentic possibility and measure of feelings. Piero's aridity, of which the director had shown all the unconscious measure in the sequence of the recovery of the car with her tragic load as well as in the scenes of the Stock Exchange, actually has the effect of drying up the feelings of the woman herself. In their last embrace, the awareness of the illusory nature of that relationship is ironic in the amorous game and is reflected in Vittoria's now resigned desperation.
It is the moment that immediately precedes the final sequence which results from a metaphorical suggestion, from an astonishing abstract evidence. Piero and Vittoria have not come to the appointment: the eye rests on a sort of abstract and petrified landscape, in which even men are by now only details of men, pure objectivity. Everything you see — innocent pipes and walls of houses under construction, rivulets of flowing water and ants crawling on the bark of a tree, menacing newspaper headlines and even far away, unreal balconies with figures of ex-men like suspended in the void - everything is the image of an absence.
From Sandro to Giovanni to Piero, along an ever clearer line of aridity and cynicism! from Anna to Claudia to Lidia to Valentina to Vittoria, through an increasingly conscious futility of attempts to react "to the sea of objectivity", Antonioni's discourse unfolds and closes with exemplary coherence. The renunciation of any form of "optimism of the will" has its presupposition in the progressive abandonment of the "pessimism of reason", which was also one of the most stimulating components of the director's secular and intransigent moralism.
With The eclipse in fact, his contribution to cinema becomes one of the most interesting and evocative chapters of a renewed "destruction of reason". Nor do we see how he can transform a radical rejection of today's organization of life into a different proposal of existence and relationships. What prevents the transformation is precisely the absence of what Moravia very generously calls Antonioni's "critical realism": that is, a knowledge rational of reality in view of one's own historical liberation.
Da film studio. Notebooks of the Monzese Cinema Club, n. 5, November 1962, p. 9–13
Joseph Marotta
God is my witness that I don't feel like hurting Michelangelo Antonioni; getting ready to see The eclipse I said mentally: «Lord, let every page, every line of this movie book both for me a Open sesame decisive, ineluctable; open wide to me, Lord, let it come and go in my sensitivity like the breeze in the wheat». Did the Almighty hear me? I'm trying here, most meekly, to clarify it both for you and for me… don't be fooled into thinking it's easy, or I'll hang myself. To the fact (which is then, in Antonioni's sequences, the dissolution in smoke, in arcane vapors, of every fact).
We begin with certain enlarged objects: left-wing newspapers and periodicals on a table (either you have here, like a bolt of lightning on the back of your neck, the intuition that we are in the apartment of a Piovene in sixty-fourth, or, patience, you won't have it); two lamps; a fan (it is therefore, figuratively, July if not August); an ashtray full of butts; an armchair in which young Riccardo sits stiffly, as if for a "third degree" at the police station.
Then the lens slowly frames the young, graceful, enigmatic Vittoria. Let's consider it. She is standing, various here and there, silent and a little grim as if she had already undergone the "third degree". For long minutes there is silence; no words, no music; everything is left to images and expressions, limitedly symptomatic: a nice tacer was never written, or even filmed for that matter. Antonioni realizes this and drafts a very condensed dialogue. Him: «Let's decide». She: "It's already decided." Better than nothing.
In the meantime, the girl goes to the window: the Olympic village appears, if I'm not mistaken; there is a clearing in which a strangely phallic water tank stands on a pillar; there the soft lights of dawn gather. Riccardo, on the counterpoint, I dare to note, of that ambiguous silhouette: «I wanted to make you happy». Vittoria: «When we met I was not yet twenty: I was happy». New silences; then Riccardo goes to shave and Vittoria says to him: «I brought you that translation... but I won't continue with it; entrust her to another".
This is a second thunderbolt on the back of the neck: if we don't realize now that Vittoria lives (luxuriously) on versions from or in foreign languages (which in reality, on the other hand, yield handfuls of beans) we won't realize it anymore. But for Antonioni the characters purposely do not have a registry office; to. he is pressed only by appearances and inner vicissitudes; an immense truth escapes him, valued even by a tripe: that without the animal, that is, there are no viscera; and that often the determining factor, in dramas as in farces, is precisely the condition, the place of the individual in the anonymous crowd. This specific negligence, this eschewing of any qualification of the protagonists, obliging them to define themselves with cut-off and rapid quips, is artistically a mistake, in my opinion.
Man and his feelings, man and certain joys, man and certain pains are, reflect, the house and its tenants: similar and inseparable. They have no flesh on them, the pleasures and anguishes exposed by Antonioni, here's the trouble: they are psychological theorems and equations, lined up on a prestigious blackboard, perhaps exact but dry; high math, if you will, but not poetry.
In Vittoria, Antonioni restored Anna (The adventure) and Lydia (The night). Women in crisis; neither love nor lack of love; emptiness, dissatisfaction, melancholy, sterility. Females who go to bed even too much, but who are infertile, a Sahara, mysteriously freed from the main greatness and slavery of their own sex: that of conception. Mind you: in the absence, in the alienation, which generally distinguishes Antonioni's protagonists, even the uterus is involved: woe to Anna or Lidia or Vittoria to become pregnant: such a natural fact would destroy every artifice, every sophistication in them, and goodbye.
But let's deal with Victory alone. Satisfied, for obscure reasons, with Riccardo, she leaves him. Here she is, uprooted and foggy, fiddling with the hours, with the season, with the «interiors» and with the «exteriors», in a sort of lazy waiting: come down what you want, from the witch's sack of Case, she is here , diligent student of the «school of the gaze», to see and (mechanically, sub-consciously) refer to one's senses, every detail.
It goes to the Stock Exchange, where the mother, an incurable player, nests; and she, while she soaks up the "atmosphere", she knows Piero. Handsome boy, brisk mannered, very active employee of a stockbroker, Piero, in the fury of her "quotations", has slight flickers of admiration for her. With her mother, Vittoria is cold, acrid; they live apart, on the other hand. How can she be a translator, perhaps she is also used only for the Nobel Prize; have such an elegant accommodation, I don't know.
Equally exceptional are, inevitably, its neighbors. The first, Anita, is the wife of an aviator; the second, Marta, comes from Kenya where her husband still stays, while she still has time, piling up lire. They talk. It is, or would be, for Antonioni, the time to illuminate the dark areas of Vittoria; but we have to settle for a «I'm dejected and out of phase. On days like these, having a needle or a piece of fabric, a book or a man in your hand is the same thing». Oh. Although a man is less sharp and prickly than a needle, less smooth than a cloth, less gloomy than the late Cassola, we guess that today's anxieties, i.e. the incommunicability in force, has caused irreparable damage to Vittoria.
Nor do her friends offer her soothing or bandages. Martha, swollen with an oleographic exoticism, à la Dekobra, chattering about hippos and baobabs, shows albums of photographs depicting savages, points to hunting trophies on the walls: in short, she flaunts jungle and primitivism to such an extent that Vittoria paints her face and arms, applies ferocious jewels to his ears and throat, and, to the sound of a phonograph tam-tam, improvises a barbaric dance. It is a fragment that, in Antonioni's shoes, I would suppress, clumsy and with a lesson that sets your teeth together; even Pietro Bianchi noticed it: in whose bad taste, as in the empire of Charles V, the sun never sets.
Well, I have to summarize.
1) Riccardo insists but is definitively liquidated.
2) Vittoria takes a ride over Rome in an airplane, exclaims: «Let's pierce that cloud», she seems happy, but tough.
3) Back on the Stock Exchange, among the money-making fauna; gallant signs with Piero; a stock crash inflicts a large loss on Vittoria's mother, who remains in debt to the stockbroker.
4) Piero, at night, would like to go up to Vittoria; while, on the street, he is catechizing her, a drunken man who cannot stand himself steals his car.
5) The next day, thief and car are fished out of the Tiber; Piero doesn't mind the dead, the dents of the new "Giulietta" do; it is a cynicism that cannot fail to upset Vittoria.
6) This does not prevent her from slipping into Piero's house; do you give him or don't you give him?; she hesitates… she begins to undress but then goes to the window and looks out for a long time; she ignores the wisdom of everything in her time; she loves like cats, constantly losing and recapturing the idea.
7) The inevitable happens, but he doesn't leverage and he doesn't put; when Piero asks her: «Would we be happy, getting married?», she says, absorbed but loyal: «I don't know».
8) he removed it, as literary fashion prescribes daily; or does the debt that the mother owes to the young man's office hinder her?; or don't you like his positivism and selfishness?
9) In any case, they set up another conference for the following evening; but, at dusk in question, the dear place sees neither Vittoria nor Piero appear; alone, so to speak, and sadly, Antonioni's lens captures, in the unmistakable manner of Resnais, bricks, pedestrian crossings, shadows on the gravel, trunks invaded by ants, arriving buses, lurking female streetwalkers, wrinkles in the ground, strips of sky, gutters, a headline on a gravure (Peace is weak) and, all of a sudden, the word “End“.
And I? In what sense do I pronounce? There is no bargaining with Michelangelo Antonioni, any compromise is unfeasible, his motto is "take it or leave it". Instead, I am the man of the newborn's hair split lengthwise in four. The eclipse for me it is a very fine narrative wandering, an exquisite nomadism of the story, full of heterogeneous but suggestive occasions; for me The eclipse it's everything, hell and heaven, but not a movie.
I detest, I condemn this art incapable of any simplicity or innocence, and therefore vicious, corrupt, malignant like marsh flowers; yet I can deny the isolated and desolate beauty of many passages de The eclipse? Heck. How can we fail to say bravo to Antonioni for the "minute of silence" (and immobility) in the crackle of gestures and voices on the Stock Exchange? Or for the flashy portrait of the big man who lost fifty million? Or for the sequence of the car pulled out of the river with that corpse tied like a double knot? Or for the recurrence of boiling leaves in the background, a reminder that says: «You push, living, your hungry roots in death; the wind, on the contrary, travels… it carries your perennial bad smell to the oceans…»
Enough. You see The eclipse, enjoy it and suffer it, love it and hate it, it is undoubtedly worth it. Excellent acting by Alain Delon (Piero) and Lilla Brignone (the mother); questionable that of Monica Vitti who puts on sphinx airs (often remembering, it's funny, the archaic silent divas); moreover, she often has an imperceptible grimace (not far from Michelangelo's tic... how mimetic women are) which feminizes her. And thereby? Soon it will be May, with its fluid roofs of swallows.
From Giuseppe Marotta By hook or by crook, Milan, Bompiani, 1965
Victor Spinazzola
After The night the danger of de-eroicization of characters from a bourgeois environment worsens, with the loss of intellectual lucidity and the prevalence of a desire for understanding, which recommends the characters to the emotional solidarity of the public. Here is the couple of the protagonists of theEclipse, so tenderly young, so pathetically alone and defenseless - not only the girl but also him, Piero, the stockbroker, whose aridity is so clearly attributable to the environment, to the profession exercised.
And then here is Giuliana del Deserto rosso: a poor sick woman, who as such immediately demands all our pity. Thus the very attitude against which Antonioni had risen up at the beginning of his career reappears: the tearful and sterile sentimentality of beautiful souls who pour out their disturbance in the face of the harshness of reality. The protagonists no longer have any active relationship with existence: in their lost consciences only the melancholy nostalgia for a dreamed and lost world survives, where men and things retain a recognizable, consistent truth. Both disappointed in love, Vittoria and Giuliana renew before our eyes the expectation of a virile presence through which to participate in life, satisfying their frustrated hunger for eros, that is, for reality.
The femininity of Antonioni's new heroines is somewhat traditionalist. Correspondingly, the objective methods of the investigation of behavior give way to the forms of a lyrical psychologisation: the ecstatic close-ups of the human figures pressed against a freezingly immobile background, accompanied by a return to the shot and reverse shot technique. We are in the ambit of a crepuscularism which can still ignite with a throb of truth in the measuredly sketchy forms of theEclipse but it gives a false, emphatic sound when brought to the level of drama, in the Red desert.
Nor, on the other hand, will we grant credit to the elements of direct social controversy, which already emerge in the Night and subsequently inspire the sequences of the Stock Exchange, inEclipse, and the frequent references to the inhumanity of the factory, as such, in the Deserto rosso: also for this aspect the director's position appears essentially evasive, deriving from an anti-capitalism of a romantic mold - to use Marxist language.
However, those who, in the face of Antonioni's latest parable, paid attention exclusively to the narrative fact, would be wrong, without noticing that the figurations from the plot lose more and more weight in the economy of the work, which is on the way to definitively free itself from contact with reality. A significant fact: the prologue of the story, which previously represented the moment of certainty, now fades into the indefinite; in the'Eclipse is reduced to an almost silent farewell scene, in the Deserto rosso it is even excluded from the body of the narrative, of which it constitutes a necessary but deliberately obscure background. Atmospheric values dominate the scene: the presence of things, brought back to a "zero degree of significance", suspended in the motionless wait for men to return to take possession of them.
Just as he gets confused in portraying the characters, the director's hand acquires new confidence in painting the backgrounds, from which the lines of a non-anthropocentric cinema emerge, alive with an authentic modernity of objects. In this way, the work regains a dramatic visual significance: let us think above all of the abstract epilogue of the penultimate film, and in the last one of the plot of chromatic relationships making up the image of a civilization that not only rejects man but even inhibits his refuge in nature, now corrupted and putrescent. The approaches to the filmic informal represent the most interesting reason for debate in Antonioni's contradictory evolution.
George Spinazzola, Cinema and audience, goWare, 2018, pp. 300–301
Georges sadoul
A young woman (Monica Vitti) after breaking up with an intellectual lover (Francisco Rabal) finds herself free in Rome in a torrid July. She becomes the friend of the active secretary of a stockbroker (Alain Delon), but it will be a matter of a short meeting that will soon be worn out which will end in a missed appointment by both protagonists. It is the last part of the trilogy that includes The adventure e The night. Received with little enthusiasm, the film is, according to some, superior to the previous ones. Notable sequences: the scene of the breakup between the two lovers who “have nothing more to say to each other”; the evening at the house of a neighbor who has just returned from a trip to the colony; a stock market session in which she plays down; the rapid cruise by plane; a love encounter; the car found in the Tiber with the body of the person who stole it and with the young man solely concerned with the state of the bodywork; the missed appointment, in a neighborhood where the night comes and objects, trees, insects have life without there being men. The eclipse is - obviously - that of feelings. After this film, Antonioni will have to face new characters and discourses: the theme of incommunicability is in fact pushed to its maximum limit.
Da Movie dictionary, Florence, Sansoni, 1968
Michelangelo Antonioni, interview with Leonardo Autera
Autera: Thirteen years ago, L'eclisse appeared as the film that completed the existential discourse that began with The adventure and continued with The night. The common theme was that of alienation and the crisis of feelings in a bourgeois context. The eclipse it even ended with the total silence of the human voice and the man was reduced to a mere object. Now, how would you represent today's bourgeois? Like the one at the time or would a different fate reserve him?
Antonioni: I would say that the bourgeoisie of that time was a lily compared to that of today. As far as one can understand from what happens from time to time, especially in Italy, it seems to me in fact that the bourgeoisie pulls the strings of many events to defend certain of its privileges and also due to its internal corruption, which will lead it - I believe — in extinction. Society is proceeding along certain tracks along which no way out can be found. I am neither a sociologist nor a politician, but it seems to me that, not only in Italy but in the world, we are moving towards a certain type of society. The bourgeoisie is showing signs of its deterioration with the "angry" reaction to a certain leveling that is taking place in society. So if I had to do it today, The eclipse, I would be even harder, more violent.
In my film from thirteen years ago there are signs of a violence linked to money. Today it would be linked to money even more. Perhaps it would no longer be linked to the Stock Exchange, because the Stock Exchange - if it still exists - already shows signs of its uselessness. The society of tomorrow will probably - I'm not sure - no longer need the stock exchange.
The gold, the dollar, the lira, the "currency snake" and all these hard-to-follow things (I studied finance when I was in college and it was so abstruse I had to work hard to pass my exams) they are manifestations of mechanisms that are proving increasingly “rusty”. I may be wrong, mind you. But on the outside, to a non-expert like me, it seems to me that this is the case. Yet the survival of the bourgeoisie is linked to these mechanisms. And I'm not making a political speech, I'm not speaking as a leftist economist would speak; I speak as a director, as one who is used to looking at reality, to drawing certain conclusions from events, facts, feelings. So I would say that The eclipse it remains a current film to the extent that its protagonists are people who don't believe in feelings, that is, they limit themselves to certain aspects.
Autera: The eclipse contains some sequences commonly referred to as "anthology pieces". There is that ending which is a veritable essay of pure and almost abstract cinema; but there is also the passage from the Stock Exchange: a hallucinatory synthesis of the madness produced by the greed for money. Do you remember how the idea for this sequence was born?
Antonioni: I had come across environments where there were women who played on the Stock Exchange, like the mother of the protagonist and they seemed to me such curious characters that I felt a certain interest in them. So I began to dig a little deeper: I asked for permission to go to the stock market and it was granted. For fifteen, twenty days I frequented the Stock Exchange (I also played a few tricks, bought something and resold it, miraculously earning a little money: very little to tell the truth) and I understood that it was an environment, also from the point of visual view, extraordinary. A bit like the signs that the men in white gloves make in the dog races in the English episode of The vanquished. On the Stock Exchange I don't know how they understand each other, to carry out operations with such rapid, swift signs. It's just a very special language. Which is based - this is the curious thing that interested me - on honesty. Stock traders must be honest with each other. «I bought 3.000 Montedisons with this sign and you owe them to me. At that amount." There's nothing to do. If one cheats, he no longer operates on the stock exchange.
A bit like the honesty of the mafia…
Yes. Well, I have tried to reconstruct that environment by employing all the people who worked on the Stock Exchange: traders, agents, stock market attorneys, or bankers, those who go to the Borsino, etc. Very few extras. All people who knew their way around. I gave Delon himself a model who, coincidentally, was that Paolo Vassallo who was later involved in a kidnapping. He worked in the Stock Exchange as his father's assistant. Delon was on the stock exchange studying this Paolo Vassallo: what he did, how he moved.
Da Corriere della Sera, October 15, 1975
Nicola Ranieri
Already in the tetralogy, from The adventure (1959) to Il deserto rosso (1964), the connection between history and seeing is present. The thematic node, the "sickness of feelings", is immediately exhausted; shortly after the start of each film there is almost nothing left that is not known. Reconnaissance dominates the thematic node, the itinerary through impossibility, not to arrive at composing it, to overcome it, to calm an order; far from it. Impossibility increases, without crescendo, it is confirmed by extension from feeling to action.
But by what process?
The night (1961) and especially The eclipse (1962) almost exemplify this. The latter, due to its internal rigor, is the most compact, systematic of the four films, it constitutes an exemplary organicity that has been sought after for a long time from the beginning; but which in the previous works was affected by some imbalance, moments of fall, relationships not entirely resolved with the narrative modules, both "traditional" and established with the "anti-novel" and its followers. The title itself contains the structural cipher of the procedure. Eclipse is in fact the time of darkness, the fading, the abandonment of the light. The lack of action corresponds to it, not in favor of contemplative, melancholic, mystical inactivity, of transcendental meditation; but how to rarefy in the scientific sense, create a vacuum so that the dark reveals the dazzling light, the silence the indistinct shouting. Space organizes itself, is abstracted into experimental spatiality and so is time, eliminating speed, noise, daily evidence, dullness from habit, what cannot be seen because it has always been there. Laboratory conditions are -created in reality, without building them into the fictional set.
Antonioni empties the "full" and shows its emptiness, removes it from the evidence, recites the tentacularity that seemed to give it meaning. He assumes inaction as the opposite "force" of action, silence as a reagent for chatting, for wandering around.
Ne The eclipse the inner circle of depth, which visualizes the outer ones of the surface, is the minute of silence in the Stock Exchange scene, the "counterforce" of the deafening, frenetic, absurd, incomprehensible shouting, to which, once taken by the mechanism, one becomes "passionate" ”, according to Piero. «To what?», Vittoria asks him freezing him, the character in which intentional observation is enclosed, the “strength” of inaction. Her gestures are as if emptied from within, turned off from every vital impulse: the moments of "ignition", rare, caused by unexpected events, go out, fall on deaf ears. You are the reagent to nonsense, revealed as such in these conditions, without which emptiness would make sense: how can you not get passionate about the Stock Exchange! How to see under the sentimental appearance non-love, which has become mere gestural effort!
In the minute of silence the telephones continue to ring, the objects to exist, the men to be present, restored to their object value; they refer only to themselves. So in Piero's house, with the telephones momentarily disconnected, in the confines of that foreign place for both: of the relationship with Vittoria only the tensing for a moment of the gesture remains which immediately ends; its useless recurrence remains, shown, made visible by the surrounding "void".
She opens the shutters, as if feeling suffocated, looks outside. The lack of "air", the sense of closedness extend to the "outside", which has become suspended, "floating" in the same "medium". She lingers for a moment before crossing the door - the silence continues -, then she goes out, immerses herself in the noise, highlighted by contrast, therefore known as deafening.
In the end, the entire urban landscape becomes geometric and human figures, trees, wind, voices, mechanical screeching; each element, split and interchangeable, exists unrelated because the ties that gave it an apparent meaning have been severed.
Space as a set of “natural” places, occupied by signifying bodies by virtue of cohesion and contiguity, has been replaced by an empty medium whose points are only positions; there is no qualitative difference between one position and the other. In this uniform geometric continuum, in which only a given reference can allow a position to be verified, the elements are objects decontextualized from what seemed to be a "natural" framework, removed from full daily life and suspended, arranged as if in the infinite expectation of a composition for now not even potential. The dazzling white light of a street lamp marks its evidence, which refers only to itself and is discovered as such starting from the darkness: the eclipse.
The links of such an attitude with Heideggerian philosophy are undoubted, but they are implications that are accompanied, and not necessarily, by a certain absolutization of the conceptual nodes and of the scientific-experimental procedures of a physical-chemical-mathematical type, which Antonioni tends to essentialize bringing out the philosophy rather than the history of a method that has become style.
Da Vacuous love. The cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Chieti, Métis, 1990, pp. 226–232
Walter Veltroni
The sunlight goes out, with the eclipse, on a summery and bad Rome, empty and lonely. There they meet the opposite hearts of the shy, introverted Vittoria and the safe, aggressive Piero. They are far away and pay for their diversity in a geometry of silence, of stingy and rarefied places like Eur or the Stock Exchange. Why The eclipse he saw, thirty years ago, the tadpole of an infernal creature whose monstrosity we only see today.
Piero is a stockbroker, quick and daring, immersed in the world of a stock exchange that looks more like a racing hall than a market for wealth. There the Pirellis, the Fiats, the Stets are dealt with and one day something breaks down, the mirage of wealth becomes the horror of debts. There a voice, that of Vittoria's mother, says: «Those are thinking about Frankfurt. Instead I know them. I always know them. I know the socialists who ruined everything in here.'
It is 1962, a crucial year, the beginning of a story that is already over. Antonioni is enraptured by the idea of the eclipse, when, he said, "probably even feelings stop". The idea of the eclipse as a suspension, as an apnea of time runs through the whole film, making it as cold and fascinating as the other two in the trilogy, The night e L'adventure. Seen again today, those films seem like a glimpse cast from afar, binoculars on the future time, with their silences, their alienation, their gaps in communication, their icy perfection.
Antonioni said that he should have put a phrase by Dylan Thomas in the opening credits that goes like this: "Some certainty must exist, if not that you love well, at least that you don't love." And Piero seems full of certainties, small and hard, who in front of his car, taken to the bottom of a lake by a thief who ended up dead, is concerned with verifying the extent of the damage to the bodywork. The Pieros, the men of our discontent, are today in a partial but inexorable eclipse.
Da Some little loves. Sentimental Dictionary of Movies, Sperling & Kupfer Editori, Milan, 1994
