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It is time for Antonioni to show us that he can put aside this pretentiousness and really say something. 7 February 1963:
Michelangelo Antonioni is one of those film makers who make a world. Like his style or hate it, there is no denying that his style exists as something distinct, influential, and infectious. You may react violently against an Antonioni-type situation, but you cannot deny that there is a kind of human situation which his films have appropriated. And as with the situations, so with the people in them they may give you pain or pleasure, but you cannot fail to recognise them.
In Antonioni’s world the people are Italians (Romans for preference) who are either rich or at least are almost totally unconcerned with making money. They are idle people almost totally concerned with their lack of purpose in life. They want to find a solution in love but they cannot – perhaps because they approach love without gusto and with an infinite concern for the minutiae of their own reactions. They are wholly subjective-minded, wholly incapable of giving themselves. Have they much to give? On the evidence abundantly provided by “L’Avventura,” “La Notte,” and now “The Eclipse” it seems that they have remarkably little because they are trivial people. And from their introspective triviality comes the boredom which permeates their screen-existence.
There is much beauty in this world of theirs. It is a spare, elegant, slow beauty on which the eye is invited to dwell for long minutes at a time. It is also, in aspiration at least, a significant beauty because it is shown to us not for its own sake but to suggest states of mind. The calm, aristocratic, carefully placed photography of the animate and the inanimate is calculated to tell us, first, what Antonioni’s people are thinking, feeling, hoping, and fearing; secondly to tell us what Antonioni himself wants us to think and feel about them.
The trouble is that we do not much care what these people feel or think, and accordingly Antonioni’s continual interest in them seems a waste of talented time. Once or, at most, twice was enough. It was fun to watch, in “L’Avventura,” the director-writer’s skill in registering the tiny wriggles of the human spirit as expressed in visible image and spoken word: it was perhaps worth having the confirmation of “La Notte” that the director-writer could go on using the same fastidious means to the same ends. But when he did it yet again in “The Eclipse” it surely became apparent that here was an obsession with the unimportant.
What his apologists would have us believe is not only that he is particularly acute in catching the significance of tiny aspects of human behaviour and in relating pictures of inanimate objects to states of mind and feeling, but also that his “Human studies” express something significant about life in this sad atomic age. I can accept gladly that his eye, and therefore his camera’s eye, is particularly acute and subtle, but what I find quite unacceptable is the significance which he apparently attaches to his human subjects.
It has been said that in Italian and especially in Roman society the more or less irresponsible, idle class is more representative, less insignificant than it is elsewhere. That is as may be. The fact remains that Antonioni’s projection of this lacklustre way of Italian life does not travel well. Instead of feeling that it epitomises, in its own special terms, a generally valid and significant human experience, I feel only that Antonioni’s people are bored (therefore boring), unimportant, and silly. They simply do not matter. And since I do not suppose that they are in themselves really so much more trivial than the people in the very special and esoteric world to which Proust (for instance) gave such wonderful life and significance, the blame must be firmly ascribed to their author.
In Antonioni’s world the people are fatuous and the means of studying them are very skilled and subtle. Unfortunately the application of such skill to such ends produces almost inevitably a high degree of pretentiousness. It is time for Antonioni to show us that he can put aside this pretentiousness and really say something instead of using his fastidious artistry as a cloak for emptiness.
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