Learning on ScreenAntonioni, Centenary Essays
Angelo Restivo takes issue with the negative reception of Zabriskie Point (1970), which he argues that is in partly due to the intense confrontation between Antonioni’s formal style and the American desert landscape used in the film. In Zabriskie Point, Restivo recognises a revolutionary potential echoing Walter Benjamin’s notion of the outmoded, as well as an investment in the image-simulacrum as the new core of energy in late-capitalist societies. Finally, Robert Gordon looks at The Passenger (1975) through the filter of genre, arguing that, by drawing from the archetypes of the journalist, the soldier, and the detective/spy, Antonioni produces a self-conscious hybridisation of genre mechanisms aimed at dismantling the very foundation of those genres.
An invaluable resource for anyone interested in moving beyond established critical perspectives on the director of ‘alienation’ …
The essays included in the second section, ‘Aesthetics’, interrogate Antonioni’s reconfigurations of the concepts of beauty and art. Leonardo Quaresima objects to the ‘minor status’ assigned to the documentaries made during the 1940s, and demonstrates their autonomy as aesthetically mature works. Rosalind Galt analyses L’Avventura (1960) in terms of deployment of the picturesque. By connecting Antonioni’s cinematic representation of the Aeolian islands with an aesthetic mode of thinking about and picturing the Italian landscape in the eighteenth century, Galt reveals the film as being inherently concerned with the evolving status of the image in modernity. Alexander García Düttmann’s contribution questions aspects of spectatorial participation in art, which occurs via demands for immediacy and mediation. In Il provino, an episode of I tre volti (1965), Antonioni foregrounds the artificiality of the work of art by making the spectator aware of the dynamics of mediation governing the pro-filmic event. Arguing against critical views of Antonioni as an anti-humanist filmmaker who treated actors as mere elements of the mise-en-scène, David Forgacs inquires into his directorial practice to re-establish the centrality of acting and performance to his aesthetics.
