Learning on ScreenAntonioni, Centenary Essays
Edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes
(British Film Institute / Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 326 pages, ISBN: 978-1-844573844 (paperback). Price: £ 18.99
About the Author: Giulia Baso is a PhD Candidate in Italian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter. Her research project is is a comparative study of the work by Michelangelo Antonioni and Atom Egoyan. In particular, the aim is to investigate how their films deal with issues of mediation and contamination in a context of major socio-historical transformations. Her recent publications include ‘Apocalypse Now’ in Pagine di Celluloide, 12, (Palermo: L’Epos, 2011).
E-mail: g.baso@exeter.ac.uk
This book marks the centenary of Antonioni’s birth. Approaching the work of one of the masters of European art cinema today, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, means acknowledging that ‘his position in the history of modern cinema is not fixed once and forever, but is mutating and still uncharted in its extraordinary richness and propulsive, experimental innovativeness.’ The essays collected in this volume reappraise the centrality and continuing influence of Antonioni’s unique, demanding, and controversial language to world filmmakers. They testify that, even from a cultural and historical moment different from ours, his films can give us insights that allow to look with new eyes at the complexities and contradictions of late-modernity.
… Antonioni’s work has been both enthusiastically acclaimed as well as harshly criticised
The text is divided into four sections, with Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes providing an overall introduction that also comprises a brief summary of the conceptual terms by which Antonioni’s work has been both enthusiastically acclaimed as well as harshly criticised. The Antonioni that emerges from the first section, ‘Modernities’, is a filmmaker deeply engaged with the processes of historical transition that have characterised Italian society since the post-war period. Jacopo Benci highlights the importance of a neglected part of the director’s biography: the journey that brought him from his native Ferrara to Rome in the early 1940s. The documentaries and films made between 1948 and 1953 reveal a parallel shift in location, as the director begins to focus on the capital, dealing with the whole spectrum of its composite society. Benci thus investigates the evolution of the image of Rome in Antonioni’s films, up to and including Tentato suicidio (1953), drawing attention to aspects of dialectical engagement with the neo-realist tradition. Laura Rascaroli’s piece explores ‘the uncanny significance of the object’ in the director’s representation of modernity, and identifies Blow-Up (1966) as a ‘proto-postmodern’ work that marks a turning point in his discourse on ‘objectuality’.
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.
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
