Learning on ScreenAntonioni, Centenary Essays
Antonioni’s relationship to the media is extensively revisited in the third section of the volume, ‘Medium Specifics’. Matilde Nardelli contextualises Blow-Up with the emergence of the 1960s photographic ‘boom’. Informed by the idea of photography as an intrinsically ‘plural’ art, Nardelli’s piece illustrates how the film articulates such plurality on different levels, ultimately representing how cinema itself operates. Focusing on Il mistero di Oberwald (1980), Francesco Casetti recounts Antonioni’s experimentation with video, and looks at the film as an anticipatory case of ‘media relocation’. Last but not least, Michael Loren Siegel examines one of Antonioni’s most unappreciated films, Identificazione di una donna (1982), in the context of the emerging phenomenon of the commercial television system in Italy. This film, for Siegel, needs to be reconsidered because of the way it has critically assimilated elements of mass media and popular culture.
The last section of the book, ‘Ecologies’, offers an understanding of Antonioni’s work in the context of waste and environmental theories. Karl Schoonover positions the imagery of waste in N.U. (1948) at the core of Antonioni’s reflection on late-capitalism’s mode of excess. Karen Pinkus puts forward Antonioni as ‘the poet laureate of climate change’, and illustrates how the director dealt proleptically with the release of invisible greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In the final chapter, John David Rhodes queries the problem of style, and notably of visual abstraction, in relation to a landscape of vertiginous economic and industrial development in the years of the ‘economic miracle’.
An invaluable resource for anyone interested in moving beyond established critical perspectives on the director of ‘alienation’, this text covers Antonioni’s cinema almost in its entirety, from the earliest documentaries to Identificazione di una donna (1982). The essays, written by prominent film scholars, provide fresh and inspirational readings that, hopefully, will be a catalyst for further analysis of Antonioni’s relevance to world culture.
Giulia Baso
