antonioni

(apologies...)

what do people think of "blow up"? who else has read j. hoberman's piece on its enormous success?

do you mean gillian hills or jane birkin????

we've dealt with this, upthread.

no it's not getting a release. someone copied me the japanese dvd.

i will have to look into this.

:P

This wins!

For sure. Also Rossellini's General Della Rovere. Um, and Along Came Jones, I suppose.

I'm just in love with the SOUND and COLOR of the film. All those clanging and wheezing oil rigs and freighters, that industrial machinery interrupting everybody's conversations at every turn. That big belch of steam that erupts at the beginning of the film, when the two men are trying to have a conversation. The juxtaposition of the idyllic story of the tropical island that the Vitti character tells her son at the end of the movie, with the ugly gaseous drilling fields she leads him past. The grey colors of the cityscape (physically painted to look that way - no filters here). The fog.

His whole thing in that classic string of mid-60s films is basically good ol' bourgeois alienation and pretense -- how banal, right? -- but I think he's basically the master. His characters have a bit more depth and range of emotion than, say, the Bergman depressoids.

i guess a semi-exception is in red desert, where vitti's character makes several abortive attempts to explain her feelings (to her husband's friend and to a stranger IIRC). these scenes were difficult for me. the monologues have the unconnected quality of genuine desperation and confusion, and i experience feelings similar to when a certain friend pours out her angst for the umpteenth time... i wanted to be sympathetic but i was more pitying and a bit fed-up. i say "semi-exception" because while the character is unusually talkative for antonioni, it's not clear she's communicating anything at all.

ok, so antonioni's "theme" is the difficulty of communication between human beings in the modern world. well that's how many people have chosen to read it, anyway. it's become cant. i think people see an antonioni movie now expecting it to be "about" this. but i suspect that this "reading" is just a reduction, just an attempt to fill in spaces left by the elliptical narration and presentation of character. a way of reducing the film to an assimilable statement abt modern life. when--as i noted above--for me antonioni films are more (to be vulgar) mood pieces than anything else. if such visual phenomena as characters bobbing in and out of frame in patterns that have no obvious thematic meaning but tons of graphic dynamism can be considered contributors to mood.

fellini is always pretty obvious. take la strada. please.

I can't tell you many tiny little mini-scenes - devoid of dialogue - have permanently wormed there way into my consciousness. I can't be standing underneath a tree at midnight, as the wind loudly rustles the leaves, and not think of those park scenes in Blow Up. Or, the sound of clanging of ropes against flagpoles instantly transports me to that little shot in L'Eclisse where the Vitti character is running along after her friend as the flagpoles do just that...

actually, I should qualify that "weird-ass modernism" thing; modernist architecture strikes me as anything but weird -- the cellular structure and all that. But with Antonioni it's all in the framing; that's the thing -- he makes the mundane seem weird by isolating certain of its aspects. Like in that shot mentioned above, i'm assuming it's some standard multi-level living structure, but he frames the character standing on the roof in a cutaway -- this guy standing atop this strange geometric shape pointing at the sky -- which really just sort of emphasizes the odd character of contemporary life and our relationship with our physical envirmonment.

I mean, there's a laundry list of memorable scenes where he does this -- in Il Grido (those weird-ass spool things. wtf?), in the Red Desert stuff I mentioned, in La Notte when the Moreau character goes off by herself to explore the city .. even the relatively poor Zabriskie Point is just FILLED with this shit .. the Rauschenbergesque framings when the lead male character flees the campus and drives his truck through the city, the silly interlude with the development firm that "Daria" works for, and of course that odd cottage which explodes in a Wonder Bread frenzy at the end..

Fuck, I dunno .. Yeah, I love the guy for his striking imagery above all. But I do think in that halting dialogue, that inability to communicate -- he presents a sort of alternate "depth of character". or something.

yes, i agree completely. to some extent, this is what most art does. more specifically, i think antonioni is good at exploting the geometries of urban architecture in ways that render them unfamiliar (often excitingly so)..

ozu is another who does this. he manages to make even the most mundane office building strange and beautiful. in fact, when i saw an inn in tokyo (1935), with its boldly framed shots of hulking, derelict industrial equipment in a barren suburban landscape, i thought "antonioni!"

Formed thoughts forthcoming. I didn't think about my fingernails -- I can say that much already. The music was quite sticky.