A Grammar of Cinepoiesis by Carlorosi Silvia

Author:Carlorosi, Silvia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Antonioni’s Visual Aesthetics

Antonioni’s poetic camera creates a visual experience for viewers, who are personally called upon to re-establish potential connections between scenes, to disentangle multiple points of view from the reigning state of confusion, and to immerse themselves in the image. Colors and camera focus are the major poetic techniques the director uses for this purpose, together with Pasolinian “im-signs,” free indirect subjective, and with sound and metrical rhythm. The world perceived by Giuliana’s neurotic gaze is a fluid experience in search of a form, while the one perceived by Thomas’s artistic eye is an ambiguous entity that needs to be molded. Antonioni gives life to these subjective worlds with his palette, freeing his poetics of cinematography to represent such amorphous experiences in the moment of their creation, even as he involves viewers in the process. As Cuccu underlines: “The artist should not resign himself to the amorphous material that constitutes its medium, since art, as a matter of fact, is precisely the capacity to make the real visible.”[91] The director’s need to think of reality as an open-ended process, “a reality that matures and consumes itself,” is translated in Il deserto rosso and Blow-Up and becomes essential to the viewers caught up in such a visual experience.[92] The images of the films are not the final product of the director’s artistic process, but rather the representation of its subjective expression in the moment of its creation.[93] It becomes a “cinema of the eye,” or “cinema of poetry” with which it becomes possible to reveal the invisible. Antonioni here represents reality in unrealistic terms, which, however, define it in the most balanced way.

Poetic images portrayed visually are “im-signs” thus charged with multiple meanings: a single image, such as the one of Giuliana looking at the sea from the banks of the Po or that of Thomas gazing at his blown-up photographs, concentrates within itself the whole story at the same time that it sustains all the possible untold stories excluded from the narration. The real, as elaborate as it is, cannot be exhausted in a single story; it must maintain its complex nature. Only images thus created can answer the questions that reality generates. With his cinepoiesis, Antonioni seeks to capture the nexus between possible and actual, invisible and visible, reserving space for the unsaid. He portrays all this in his images within images, which develop vertically with a stratification of color and deep or soft focus and reveal a multifaceted visual perspective, open to the viewers’ analysis. This is what he means when he explains that “writing for me is the in-depth study of the gaze.”[94] Since “to look at” is “to live” (let us remember Corrado’s comment to Giuliana: “You say to look at, I say to live: they’re the same thing”), this is probably one of the ways to interpret Antonioni’s claim that “To make a film, for me, is to live.”[95]

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