Antonioni films are always difficult for me. They are in their wayso eravishing and yet there is something maddeningly obscure about them. The dialogue is not something that you can understand if you are expecting stuff that echoes regular speech. If you watch the European auteurs of that era and Antonioni in particular, you’re probably used to these poetic declamations, which hide more than they reveal. Rather than being some nugget of information issuing from someone’s mouth, taking the place of silence as lack of information, you get something which makes you realize that you knew less than you thought about the characters and their situation.
The logical ligature is missing, and the words and the occlusions of meaning, the innuendo and the intimations—they apiece with the lush cinematography, especially in La Notte—they are like the shadows that the characters drift in and out of. I wonder if Antonioni would just begin with a feeling and let that take him where it would. That sounds like what an artist would do.
I think to really understand Antonioni, not only will I have to continue to watch his films (even though they sometimes make me drowsy) and perhaps read some books. Casual browsing revealed a book called Antonioni: The Poet of Images by William Arrowsmith. I don’t know who William Arrowsmith is, but he seems to have died an untimely death and also been a very “creative critic”—and that phrase, just by itself, rings nicely in my mind because I suppose that would be something the naive believing that I still have some chance in life to do what I want me would want to do. I just read a nice introduction to Antonioni for the relatively uninitiated by Ryan Vu, on the occasion of a BAM retrospective of the director’s works. It goes through, quite succinctly, the major periods and films of the director’s career.
I have to say that I have always been in love with Antonioni’s visual sense. I remember reading about the “planimetric image” and so I googled it and found (surprise, surprise) that David Bordwell’s blog had a post on it it was probably in one of his books on film art that I read in university or not long thereafter where I first encountered this term.
There are many fabulous images of this sort in La Notte, and one of them is when Marcello is in another hospital room, having been lured there by some half-crazed nympho patient. His black suit and her black dress against the white wall—these images are so simple and yet so compelling. I sometimes wonder what it is that makes them so compelling since you can’t really deduce what it is from a purely rational standpoint.
A last note on Jeanne Moreau. She really does look ravishing in this movie. The contrast between her and Monica Vitti—who becomes, as it were, her competitor—is quite interesting. Vitti is younger, but Moreau is not old. She’s merely a bit more middle-aged, she shows her age. There are two long lines under her eyes, making her look sleep-deprived perhaps even world-weary. And yet there’s just something about her that sets her apart from Vitti—Vitti is more of a straight-up sex symbol, where as Moreau is more a thinking man’s muse. That doesn’t make her any less sexually attractive. It just means that her complexity makes other women seem two-dimensional by comparison.