Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film by Giuliana Minghelli

Author:Giuliana Minghelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

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1950 Antonioni

Cronaca di un Amore’s Landscapes of Remorse

Penso che gli uomini di cinema debbano sempre essere legati, come ispirazione, al loro tempo, non tanto per esprimerlo e interpretarlo nei suoi eventi piú crudi e piú tragici … quanto per raccoglierne le risonanze dentro di noi …

E’ l’unico modo mi sembra, di essere vivi.1

Michelangelo Antonion

It was wartime. I was in Nice waiting for a visa to go to Paris to join Marcel Carné, with whom I was going to work as an assistant. They were days full of impatience, boredom, and of news about a war that stood still on an absurd thing called the Maginot Line. Suppose one had to construct a bit of film based on this event and on this state of mind. I would try first to remove the actual “fact” from the scene, and leave only the image described in the first four lines. (“The sky is white, the sea-front deserted; the sea cold and empty; the hotels white and half-shuttered. On one of the white seats of the Promenade des Anglais the bathing attendant is seated, a black man in a white singlet. It is early … a single bather floating inert a few yards from shore.”) In that white sea-front, that lonely figure, that silence, there seems to me to be an extraordinary strength of impact. The event here adds nothing—it is superfluous. I remember very well that I was interested when it happened. The dead man acted as a distraction to a state of tension. But the true emptiness, the malaise, the anxiety, the nausea, the atrophy of all normal feelings and desires, the fear, the anger—all these I felt when, coming out of the Negresco [Hotel], I found myself in that whiteness, in that nothingness, which took shape around a black point. (Antonioni, “The Event and the Image,” 1994, 51–52)2

Sometime in 1940; World War II is raging.3 Following the Italian invasion of southern France, a young filmmaker is yearning to reach Paris to shoot a movie (Les visiteursdusoir [The Devil’s Envoys], 1942) when a dead man floats ashore on an empty beach. These could be the perfect makings of a movie, but for Antonioni, whether a grand historical act or an item from the local crime page, the event must first be removed in order to construct the filmic image. The work of storytelling is one of subtraction and silencing. Detached from its original referents (the war, the dead body), “the sense of emptiness, anxiety, nausea, the atrophy of all normal feelings and desires” is deflected to another quite enigmatic signifier: the dismal seaside landscape. The figure disappears, the ground becomes figure.4 The desire for erasure goes further still: the landscape dissolves in the absolute purity of the image, cinema becoming an abstract canvas on which nothingness huddles around a lonely black point in a field of whiteness.

This vignette, which is part of the essay “Il fatto e l’immagine” (The Fact and the Image), first published in the daily La Stampa in 1963, is, as Rhodes observes, “as close to an ars poetica as Antonioni would offer.

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