Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Michelangelo Antonioni made incredibly provocative films, rich in a unique visual style and with a searing political point of view. Recently I watched L’Avventura for the fifth time and enjoyed its powerful direction and human depth more than ever before. Why does it continue to create such an impression even after repeated viewings? Here are some musings on the film I shared with the students from Messiah’s Honors Program who stayed after the screening and chatted with Professor Dean Curry, the Director of the Program, and me.

L’Avventura won a Special Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 for “a new film language and the beauty of its images”. The “metonymic” language which Antonioni employed was not entirely new. You can find smaller examples in the films of Jean Renoir, especially La Règle du jeu, and even Roberto Rosselini, for example in Stromboli. Recall that a metonym is a type of figurative language that involves using an attribute for the thing itself, so that someone might refer to the sovereign as “the Crown” or rich people as “wealth”. It is a simplified metaphor where rather than employing the attributes of one thing to represent another (as in a full-blown metaphor), the metonym uses a significant attribute of an item itself to represent its entirety.

Antonioni uses this approach over and over again in his visual images, providing a layering and reinforcing of the themes of the plot. The opening sequence shows Anna’s father, the diplomat, a representative of older humanist values being encroached upon by utilitarian housing constructions forced on him by the expanding world of crass capitalismo. This opening makes clear Antonioni’s major preoccupation in the quartet of films consisting of L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse and Il Deserto rosso: the decline of the bourgeoisie into a shiftless, morally decrepit and verministic class of people (also a theme in La Règle du jeu). As Antonioni depicts them they are parasites on the simple folk around them, alienated from genuine life, seeking the meaningless routine of hedonism and consumerism to keep them from imploding under the strain of capitalism’s crude reality. The random cruelty of Sandro or Giulia, the superficiality of Patrizia and Ettore, the self-destructiveness of Anna and Claudia — these are all signs of the despicable character of the bourgeoisie as a whole. The final scene — where Claudia’s hand moves hesitatingly to grasp Sandro’s head — is a prime example of the visual metynomic representation of the nauseating relationships formed by these parasitic people. Claudia’s hand seems at first to hold, then attempt a caress, but end finally in a firm grip on Sandro. The tears they separately shed are not out of remorse, but from anxiety and dread of who they have become. Their final togetherness, like that of Corrado and Giulia depicted earlier in the film, jails them in a bitter manipulative tangle that is hard to even call a human relationship.

Italy in the late 1950’s, through the 1960’s and 1970’s, had two main political currents: the Christian Democrats, influenced to a healthy extent by the Roman Catholic Church, and the several Marxist parties that controlled many of the major cities. Although the national government remained in the control of the Christian Democrats and their allied parties, most of the intellectuals and artists placed themselves squarely on the side of the Marxist and Euro-Communist parties and groups.

Why was this? Well, at that time they still hoped that, despite the evils perpetrated in the name of Marx in the Soviet Union and Communist China, somehow, in some way, the ideals of socialism would lead humankind to a “better tomorrow”. To us, in hindsight, this seems terribly naïve. In our own time, looking back on the demise of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the transformation of the Chinese state into a type of national socialism, Antonioni’s stories can seem heavy handed tales full of straw men. But the reality of bourgeoisie crassness and superficiality has not disappeared: take a look at the supermarket tabloids to witness only the tip of the iceberg. No, the symptoms of parasitic evil that Antonioni examines in his stories are still there; what has changed is the diagnosis that these are due to a “capitalist mode of production”. The real cause is much, much deeper, and is called “original sin.”