Vital Crises in Italian Cinema by P. Adams Sitney

Author:P. Adams Sitney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

An innovator will have his own manner of projecting the future. Antonioni gets it, beginning with L’Avventura, with his spacing of film time, in particular by his fermata over single shots, which enclose an air of pressenti-ment. This is the autograph emotion of surrealist painting; and one is reminded of iconographic or thematic features of Antonioni’s films that show him the inheritor of surrealism from painting. There is his obsession with the fagades of uninhabited, new buildings (the town development in L’Avventura… is a transcription of Chirico); they are not haunted, we know nothing is present inside them, they have no past…. Absence is obviously a root topic in Antonioni as it was in surrealism. In both it is registered by the sheen or finish of the frames, which, along with the clean, deep lines of perspective, perfects the avoidance of human clutter or arbitrariness; nothing is behind this space.30

A number of different visual strategies at work in the film have sources in De Chirico’s paintings from the period 1910–1918. Many of his haunted townscapes articulate depth by drawing in perspective and the abstraction of arches and galleries. Often the architecture bisects or trisects the canvas with well-defined vertical lines (Piazza con Arianna [1913], L’Enigme de I’arcade [1913], La Lassitude de I’infini [1912–13]), or an arched facade will run parallel to the picture plane (L’enigma dell’ora [1911]). In all of Antonioni’s films of the early sixties he uses the strong verticals of arches, walls, doorways, and pillars to section the rectangular screen into two, three, or more zones of human action (or mere human presence) and empty space. Often the human figures are as isolated and dwarfed by the setting as are De Chirico’s people and statues.

De Chirico frequently inserted a train in the distance of his townscapes (La meditazione del pomeriggio [1912–13], Les Plaisirs du poète [1912–13], La Récompense du devin [1913]). One of the striking visual shocks in L’avventura comes from the placement of the train in the scene in which Claudia first submits to Sandro’s lovemaking. They have just left the uninhabited town Cavell correctly identified as a transcription of De Chirico. They embrace each other in a field through a series of extreme closeups before the camera cuts away to a distanced shot of a train passing from right to left. The shock occurs in the next shot, again of the lovers in middle distance, into which the train shoots surprisingly close and moving from left to right.

The lovemaking recalls the way in which the earlier sex between Sandro and Anna had been photographed. Their heads had been so near to the camera that they evoked De Chirico’s placement of a plaster head in the lower foreground of paintings such as L’Arc des échelles noires (1914). Even the cluttered studio of the teenage painter of nudes bears a resemblance to the compositions of easels and paintings in several of the canvases called interno metafisico of 1917 and 1918.

If Antonioni has moved his beneficiaries of the economic

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