The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger

Author:John Berger [Berger, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Those who admire Antonioni’s films often say that he narrates like a novelist. Those who criticise his films often accuse them of being abstract, over-aesthetic, formalist. It seems to me that if one wants to enter the world of his imagination, one should first think of him as a painter. Human behaviour and stories interest him, but he begins with what somebody or somewhere looks like. His most important perceptions are pre-verbal. (This is perhaps why he can use silence so well.) Kieslowski, for example, is a real novelist of the cinema because he thinks about the consequence of actions. Antonioni gazes at the silhouette of an action, with all the painter’s desire to find in it something that is timeless. I would even go so far as to suggest he often forgets the consequence.

Since Antonioni exhibits as a painter, I’m not pointing out anything very original here. But if we go back to the Po and the Madonna of the Fog, and if we remember how he’s a painter, we discover, I think, a clue to his life’s work.

Antonioni’s films question the visible until there’s not enough light to see any more. The visible may be Monica Vitti or Marcello Mastroianni or a river bank or a ship’s hull or a tree or a tennis court. Unlike a true painter he can’t touch the image with his hands; he has to worry it in other ways – by lighting, by movement, by waiting, by a kind of cinematic stealth. His purpose is to make us peer into his films as one peers into the Po as it flows, as Monet peered into the depths of his water lily pond, as one walks peering through the fog.

The hope which, I believe, sustained him as he made each film, was that, as we peer, something will come to meet us, something that almost escaped him, something so real that it doesn’t have a name.

Halfway through Gente del Po a peasant on the river bank sharpens a scythe and a line of women, dressed in black, rake hay. One of the women straightens her back to gaze at the river as the barges pass. She is young. She is like nobody else. She has slightly protruding white teeth when she smiles. And she smiles, because whilst she gazes at the wide river with its colossal will to reach the sea, something comes out of it to meet her. We can read it on her face. But on the film we can’t see it.

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