La counterculturera according to Antonioni
In July 1968, 50 years ago, filming began on Zabriskie Point, one of the most iconic films in the history of cinema, manifesto of an era and a culture, properly of a counterculture from whose magma that community of free spirits materialized who, with their impossible challenges, eventually pollinated modernity.
At the time, few understood the ethical and artistic value of the film, diverted by sociological, political or ideological analyzes absolutely outside Antonioni's field of vision. The film was not understood in all its revolutionary scope, even formally and so Zabriskie Point it even ended up on the list of the 50 worst films of all time. Antonioni's lack of communication with a certain, even greater, criticism has something extraordinary. Roger Elbert, perhaps the dean of film critics, after attending the Cannes screening of the beautiful The Brown Bunny (2003), disrespectfully labeled it "the worst film in the history of the festival". Something analogous happened for the equally admirable Promises Written in Water (2010), presented at the 67th Venice Film Festival and then denied and withdrawn from distribution by the author, who said he was embittered by the misunderstandings that the film aroused.
Like Steve Jobs' NeXT, favorite son of that counterculture, Zabriskie Point it was too far ahead of its time and the seminal value of those creations was to be grasped only later. Just as the NeXT was called "the most successful failure in the history of the computer" so Antonioni's visionary film was rehabilitated as "one of the most extraordinary disasters in the history of modern cinema".
Antonioni is a divisive director: audiences and critics split in front of his works. The polarizations that these originated were forerunners of today's ones that now extend far beyond works of art to involve all aspects of public conversation. Antonioni has always reserved an Olympian detachment in the face of agitation around his works, thus representing very well his poetics of absence, of emptiness.
Antonioni is the only major director I have nothing good to say about. He bores me; he is so serious and without irony.
François Truffaut
Orson welles
He made two masterpieces Blow up and La Notte, but it's not worth getting bored with the rest.
Ingmar Bergman
The art di divisive di Michelangelo
The bitterness that Michelangelo Antonioni's films aroused in many spectators and some of his fellow directors is compensated (in the final assessment of his figure as an artist) perhaps only by the prestige of the awards he has achieved (Lions and Palme d'oro and an Oscar for his career in 1995, plus countless other minor awards), but may even be converted by her output as a photographer and visual artist that punctuates her filmmaking career. This production was also the subject of an exhibition Michelangelo's gaze. Antonioni and the artsheld in Ferrara in 2013 and subsequently in 2015 in Rome with an exhibition entitled Michelangelo Antonioni, painter, curated by the director's wife and partner, Enrica Fico Antonioni. The first thing to observe is the coherence between the photographer and visual artist Antonioni and Antonioni cinematographic Antonioni.
The exhibition in Ferrara, in particular, he also established a profound connection between Antonioni's cinematography and the artistic world of his time, with which he often entered into relations, sharing, transposing and - sometimes - anticipating themes and poetics. For example, the juxtaposition of some works (collected by Antonioni and often donated to him by the authors with many of whom he maintained a long correspondence) by masters of abstract expressionism such as Morandi, Rothko, Burri, Vedova is certainly stimulating and revealing. , Pollock to the images of Antonioni's filmography. The impenetrability and the "mystery" of the director from Ferrara are thus, without a doubt, less difficult and that certain aura of intellectual snobbery that surrounded the figure also decays, an impression completely disavowed, if that were not enough moreover, by the biographical testimonies of those they met and frequented him, all agreeing in returning an extremely humble, jovial, passionate and cheerful person.
The unbridled ego of the three "gigantic" directors mentioned above could actually be ill in tune with the poetics of an author who in all his work (narrative, pictorial and cinematographic) has tried to represent the void, the disappearance, the absence, the estrangement, silence which are also the themes of the cinema Zabriskie Point.
About the speech in his films Antonioni was quite clear in an interview with journalist and biographer Charles T. Samuels: " I think people talk too much, if anything that's the problem. Really. I don't believe in words. People use too many words; in general he misuses them. I'm sure there will come a time when people will talk less and more essentially. If people talk less, they will be happier. Don't ask me why".
Is Antonioni talking about viral bullshit on social networks?
An unattaous artist?
It makes you smile to think of the reaction of the young digital audience in the face of the exhausting long shots and the deathly silences of Antonioni's scenes. A verified reaction was: “But what is a silent film?”. It is significant that the "digital natives", accustomed to an iconic imagery that has reduced almost to zero the need for a text, and to contracted written communication (SMS and tweets), made up of acronyms and acronyms, required greater dialogue, more articulated and explanatory, from the entertainment they have chosen.
The fact will be that the media, through their more informative programs, have now persuaded us that we live in the "society of images", a formula now institutionalized to such an extent that it also falls within the ministerial tracks for maturity issues. A more careful verification would confirm the opposite: that an image that is not adequately commented or not paraphrased enough is not sufficient by itself to satisfy our need for narrative formulations. Even the new generations are asking for words.
If this consideration could be generalized (but no assumption is), Antonioni would be a very outdated author, given that his poetics tend to trust almost solely in the power of the image, even avoiding the suggestions that an even less denotative expressive code can make such as the music. And speaking of the music in his films, Antonioni himself has declared"I personally am very reluctant to put music in films, precisely because I feel the need to be dry, to say things as little as possible, to use the simplest means and the least number of means. And music is an extra means. I have too much faith in the strength and suggestiveness of the image to believe that the image can't do without music".
Perhaps this explains Antonioni's problematic relationship with the music prepared by Pink Floyd called by Antonioni himself to compose the sound accompaniment for the explosive final scene of Zabriskie Point. Despite the flood of music produced by the English group, Antonioni never seemed satisfied and finally, from that copious material, he selected only a small portion to be included in the film. The story is reconstructed in a book Stories and secrets (ed. Giunti) of which there is a extract also on the net.
Il empty è il full
But even the image is never reliable and all of Antonioni's work is configured as a reflection on the impossibility of the image to represent reality and the inability of the gaze to adhere to it and the Antonioni phenomenal is expressed in the representation of a emptiness that declines in the misty landscapes of the Po valley (People of the Po, The Scream), up to the essential horizons of the African deserts (Professione: reporter) and Californians (Zabriskie Point), passing through the isolation also deserted and deserted by the human presence of the Aeolian Islands (The adventure). And yet the city is nothing but a non-place, a mere concrete labyrinth, uninhabitable and repulsive, a symbol of the loss of all meaning, all reference and identity (The night, The eclipse).
The most important series of Antonioni's pictorial work is undoubtedly that of Enchanted Mountains which is configured in two forms, born at different times and then combined by the author starting from 1983, when he began to exhibit. On the one hand there are the watercolors and collages in a reduced format (initially 21 × 30 cm) and further cut and reduced; on the other there are the photographic enlargements of details of the paintings which considerably increase their dimensions, revealing in detail a "material consistency" which was not visible in the original.
The void therefore represents the continuity of Antonion's cinema. And that Antonioni's "emptiness" is often a "full" is confirmed by his obsession with micrology and photographic enlargement, the attempt to get to the "grain" of the images (as the investigator-photographer played by David Hemmings in Blow-Up, in English "magnification", in fact), the enthusiasm of the last period for the digital image which is really made up of "grains" (pixel), “points” (OUT) and “lines” (raster), the pictorial and cinematographic obsession with the formless, the ephemeral boundaries, the barriers that are only apparently insurmountable.
From the white fur by Lucia Bosè in Chronicle of a love, to the stormy sea of Lisca Bianca ne The adventure; from street lightingEclipse, to the polluted atmosphere of Deserto rosso; from the sand clouds of ZAbriskie Point e Professione: reporter to the Ferrara mists of Identification of a woman e Beyond the cloudsAntonioni has always preferred to immerse the bodies of his characters in a light that melts their outlines, blurs the points of reference and delimits the vision until it hides the horizon line.
A recurring tropostilema of Antonioni's aesthetics is that of the zoom in, very evident in Blow-Up, but above all in the famous final long sequence of Professione: reporter, in which the camera very slowly advances towards a barred window and "magically" passes it to exit the room in which the body of Jack Nicholson lies.
The prejudicial "resentment" against Antonioni has, after all, the same stigma that the Western public (in particular the Italian one, little accustomed to film festivals, the only enclave in which instead they collect acclaim and recognition) reserves for Asian films. There are not a few oriental authors who can be said to be indebted to Antonioni's cinema: in particular I would say Wong Kar-Wai, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The same complaints about lengthiness, the same accusations of hermetic intellectualism have hit the aforementioned and other directors, from different backgrounds, but with the same training, such as Wenders, Gus Van Sant, Tarkovsky. Emblematic is the case of Vincent Gallo towards whom the criticisms have often taken on an almost hysterical virulence, such as to even compromise his career as a director. The wandering of the protagonist of his own The Brown Bunny on the dazzling surfaces of Utah's salt lakes they cannot fail to recall Antonioni's desert imagery.
I believe that our eye would really need to be re-educated to the vision of this invisibility, almost as if we had to get used to picking up infrared and ultraviolet again in the range of perceptible light frequencies; perhaps, only then, could we truly call ourselves a civilization of images and dispense (almost) with words.
Policeman: Name and surname, please
Mark: Karl Marx
Policeman: What?… How to spell it, tell me letter by letter
Mark: carlomarx
Policeman: with an x?
Mark: Yes with an x
Policeman: what the hell name!!
