The Story of Film by Cousins Mark;

Author:Cousins, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pavilion Books

213

A master director at the height of his powers during a great decade for Italian cinema: Federico Fellini’s acclaimed account of creative indecision and mid-life crisis, 8½. Italy, 1963.

214

Although the film was shot in widescreen, this frame grab still reveals how Antonioni and his cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo framed their actors (here Jeanne Moreau) unconventionally in La Notte. Italy, 1961.

81⁄2’s storyline dipped in and out of Mastroianni’s character’s inner life but our final Italian director of the period rejected storytelling more radically than Fellini or any of his fellow countrymen. Michelangelo Antonioni started working in cinema by making documentaries, directed somewhat conventional features in the 1950s, became interested in the American abstract painting of the end of that decade and, in 1960, began a trilogy of films which are often thought of as the most modern of their time. L’Avventura (Italy, 1960), La notte/The Night (Italy, 1961) and L’éclisse/Eclipse (Italy, 1962) each try to express the anxiety of the modern age, as Fellini had latterly done, but use emptiness rather than fantasy as their central idea. This image from La notte helps explain (214). Jeanne Moreau plays the rich wife of a writer – Mastroianni again. They go to a party together, meet other people and, at dawn, she says to him, “I feel like dying because I no longer love you.”

This is just a starting point, however. Where Pasolini photographed people square on and mostly in close-up, Antonioni’s characters are often to the side of the frame or small in it, or half hidden. When they walk out of it entirely, the shot holds and we gaze at nothing, a concrete wall, the corner of a street, dying light in the sky. When he directs Moreau – the muse of the French filmmakers – he is very specific, treating her like a chess piece on a board. Her character’s feelings, her psychology, are not the centre of the film as were Brando’s or Steiger’s in America, for example. Space and dead time are as important. The imagery does not express what she feels but what the director feels about her isolation. As if to emphasize this point, the camera often films from way above eye level, looking down on the characters who wander through their lives like figures from Baudelaire. L’Avventura, La notte, and l’éclisse place their protagonists in a built landscape as Alain Resnais had done in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, made at the same time (France, 1961). But where Resnais was interested in the ambiguities of memory and time, Antonioni looks at the despair and meaninglessness of modern life with the eye of an architect. He takes the themes of dramatist Ibsen and films them with the uncluttered rigour of the buildings of Le Corbusier. Just a year or so after Godard’s breakthrough, Antonioni reduced the action in his films – what the characters do – to just one of many other spatial and temporal elements. His long, slow, semi-abstract shots paved the way for three great

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