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| Cultural Neurosis? Monica Vitti in 'Red Desert' |
If there was a ‘Marmite’ filmmaker in the history of cinema,
that must be the great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni – like the
sauce, you either love him or hate him to the high end – there is simply no
middle ground.
To his admirers, Antonioni’s work has offered ‘a cinema of
possibilities’. However, it is not ‘possible’ to make everyone love his films.
To get the audience high, I will fire with both barrels. Many of his films have
been labeled ‘boring’, ‘pretentious’, ‘empty’, ‘soulless’, ‘meaningless’, and
many more negative adjectives one can think of. Those who hated him or could
not identify with his style included Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Francois
Truffaut, Pauline Kael, and many other notable filmmakers or critics. That was
an impressive list, wasn’t it?
If this director is considered so boring and second-rate,
why do I bother to write about him? Well, that is because I am on the opposite
side – I am among the many others who love his films. Indeed, there were
directors who loved his films when he was hated and being booed at film
festivals around the world. One of them was Alfred Hitchcock, who was highly
impressed by this young director and has adopted Antonioni’s style in some of
his later films. The other was Stanley Kubrick, who also saw Antonioni as one
of his favorite filmmakers. Indeed, it is evident that most of the Kubrick
films since ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ are very similar to Antonioni’s style,
being visual rather than narrative-driven, having a detached perspective, and
the style is at odds with the contemporary mainstream cinema. Antonioni’s style
has continued to influence other great directors, including Wim Wenders, Miklós
Jancsó, Francis Ford Coppola, Wong Kar-Wai and many more.
In the 1960s, Antonioni, along with a number of other
European filmmakers, made films that completely changed the way people would
look at cinema ever since. With films like L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclipse, Red Desert
What has Antonioni done to change the audience’s perception
of cinema? The first thing he did, which was exemplified by the monumental
L’Avventura, was his abandonment of the traditional assumptions of narrative in
favor of visual story-telling. When a group of rich Italians joined a cruise
trip and explored an island, a lady in the group suddenly disappeared. In most
cases, this would likely be the plot-driven element, and most audience’s
attention would likely be focusing on the fate of the lady. Not for Antonioni -
as the film progressed , the story gradually diverted the focus on Monica Vitti’s
character and her new-found love interest, and it was as if Antonioni has obliviously
forgotten the lost lady. At the end, her fate remained ambiguous. No wonder the
audience booed when the film was first shown in film festivals at the 1960s.
Because the film totally shattered their expectations, and the audience did not
know how to respond to it. Look, even if it was a dark ending and the lady
died, it was still a final, conclusive answer, yet Antonioni did not even give
us a straight answer to fulfill our wishes. Maybe Antonioni was mocking how
self-important we were (which, ironically, was a founding assumption of traditional
narrative cinema - who would like a film with no human or anthropomorphic characters
inside?), and how small and insignificant we were in the face of fate and the
universe. Indeed for Antonioni’s narrative, if there was any, was often
elliptical and many issues in Antonioni’s films were often ambiguous or
remained unexplained at the end of the film.
Antonioni was also a master in cinematic style. He was a
master of long take, and has shot some of the greatest long take sequences in
cinema, such as those in ‘L’Eclipse’ and ‘The Passenger’. However, not everyone
could identify with this, an example being another master of the long take,
Orson Welles. Antonioni’s long takes were often unsettling because they seemed
to dwell on very long and mundane activities, and like many of Kubrick’s
sequences, they were often protracted and slow. These long takes, which were
unconventional in the traditional cinema – which strove for as many dramatic
actions as possible - signified a realistic passage of time.
From the black-and-white to the color era, color became
another of Antonioni’s signature weapon. His use of color was so bold and
evocative that it has led to a heightened and hypnotic feeling on the audience,
and it was fair to say that color was often one of the most memorable aspects
of some of Antonioni’s films. For example, one will likely remember the red –
really red – drums prevalent in the film ‘Red Desert
Yet what is most fascinating or iconic about this Italian
master’s work was his approach to his characters. Audience tended to develop a
general impression that, in Antonioni’s films, the characters’ actions were
random and purposeless. Antonioni’s characters were not psychologically motivated
in the sense of mainstream cinema, and it was an issue often criticized by some
critics alike. Like Stanley Kubrick’s and Terence Malick’s characters,
Antonioni’s characters were enigmatic – they were ambiguous, and that required
an active imagination from the audience to make sense of them. And this was
exactly what Antonioni wanted. He wanted his audience to engage with his film
in an intuitive way, and to generate their own meanings from the often
ambiguous images.
Why did Antonioni do all these, especially in terms of his
unconventional approach to character development? Well, the motivation behind
these was that he wanted to ask his audience to explore new perspectives in a
rigid and stereotyped world. In his acceptance speech of the Jury Prize in
Cannes Festival for his film ‘L'Avventura’, Antonioni has stated that we have
understood our world so thoroughly through reason, science, and objectivity that
we have taken for granted the established values in our worlds. Yet, most of us
are never willing to step out of our comfort zones to challenge new ideas, and
we have the false impression to a ‘good’ and ‘fulfilling’ life through sensual
pleasures, material wealth and some short-term gratifications. Unfortunately, our
lives have not really been enriched by these ways – we are faced with an
existential crisis of spiritual emptiness. Many people will fall victim to
these issues – those who are able to cover their problems up with these shallow-minded
pleasures will have to confront nihilism, and who we cannot fit into the
alienating world will suffer only disillusionments.
Antonioni’s characters were really bored with their lives.
That was because they could not find true purposes in a seemingly meaningless
and absurd world. They might have the ability to fight against this, but they chose
to retreat from it, and diverted their focuses to other short-term gratifications
– so that they could hide their loneliness and alienation. They might be
‘happy’ and thought they had a fulfilling existence – but did they really
understand themselves?
Was the environment surrounding Antonioni's characters
boring for them? Yes and no. The reason why these characters were spiritually empty had
to be coming from both sides, yet I have to say the characters could be more
active to counteract the apparent meaninglessness of their existences. The
universe, being unsentimental and indifferent, is just being as it is, showing
the potential wonder to the inhabitants within its boundary. It was the
interaction, or lack of interaction, of the characters to their environment
that led to their personal problems. Antonioni’s characters were so submitted
to the traditional systems and values that men have created, that they were not
able to imagine new ideas and perspectives to look at their world. Their diversions
to ephemeral pleasures as a short-term alleviation to their loneliness and
alienation only further signified that they could not, or did not really know
how to interact authentically with the world.
They might think they were happy, but deep down they were so empty in a
world they simply could not appreciate. These ideas are prevalent in all of
Antonioni’s films, and I suppose the human-environment interaction issue is in
particular important for ‘Red
Desert
If you are really passionate about cinema, you have to
confront Antonioni. Love him or loathe him, you have to give his films a real
shot!
by Ed Law
29/3/2017
Film Analysis
