Michelangelo Antonioni

1935The Early Years 1935 -1950

Matthew Love
In the years following World War One, the baby that was Hollywood cinema started to grow inside the rectangular window. The world laughed as it tripped up and fell over, excited when it uttered its first words and in total awe at its colourful imagination. The European cinema on the other hand, had a less colourful childhood as an infant, when it was happy, it was cheap and cheerful and when it was sad it was downright depressing and miserable. It was not the cinema of escapism, but a cinema that reminded you who and what you were, the characters related to struggles and suffering and communicated on an entirely different level. This was hardly surprising in a continent that spent the first half of the 20th century embroiled in bitter wars. In Italy, after years of complete desolation, fear and control by an unstable and brutal hierarchy, a cinema orphaned from its repressive past emerged that was finally free to reflect its own feelings and opinions. This new cinema did not require the audience to lay back and enjoy the show, but to sit up, think, feel and reflect while it displayed both the real horror and the beauty of humanity in a single breath. The cinema of Italian Neo-realism may not immediately spring to mind when one considers the grand modernist, iconographic images, shapes, styles and landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni, but it is most certainly where his journey begins. In this essay we will examine examples of his early writing and biographical data in an attempt to discover the diversity of innovation in narrative structures, reoccurring themes and aesthetical details that are quite distinct and uniquely Antonionian. The essay concludes by locating these early examples to the later and more familiar career and cinematic oeuvre of Michelangelo Antonioni

Department of Creative Arts and Technologies, University of Bedfordshire , Park Square, Luton LU1 email: 96126803@beds.ac.uk

XMC05-06

Matthew Love: 96126803

Antonioni: The Early Years (1935-1950)

Introduction.

P.3

I.

Early Life..

P.11

II.

The Rise of The Italian Cinema (1905-1935)

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III. Corriere Padano (1935-1940)...

P.18

IV. Rome (1940-1950).

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V.

Documentary Films (1947-1950)

P.39

Conclusion

P.45

SOURCES P.55

Introduction
Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, mentions in an interview that someone once said that every filmmaker basically makes only one film in his lifetime, but he cuts it down and offers it in cinematic instalments to his audience over a period of time.1 The work of Michelangelo Antonioni operated in a similar mode of production, building his cinematic oeuvre extending his ideas in a series of instalments, from his early writings as a film critic in 1935 to the last short pieces of experimental film in 2004. This essay, which is, a journey into the incredibly fascinating world of Michelangelo Antonioni begins at the end, not at the end of Antonioni the great 20th century cinematic modernist master, who will doubtless be with us for many more years to come, but indeed the end of his mortal life.

The man, not the artist that was Michelangelo Antonioni died at his home in Rome on Monday evening 30th of July 2007. Antonioni was a film-maker famous for his unusual, thought provoking open ended closures to his films. It would probably be unfair to say narrative closure when we refer to Antonioni, as the films end, the narratives never really close. The narrative that is LAvventura (1960) is still going on for countless cineastes since its first screening at Cannes in 1960 (whatever did happen to Anna?) and now that Antonioni has left us maybe we wont finally get to see a re-union of Vittoria and Piero after all at that almost vacant street corner of the Roman suburb of EUR in LEclisse (1962). What really happened to John Locke in that Spanish hotel room in The Passenger (1975)? These burning questions and more will remain just questions of possibility and probability to the keen

An Interview with Abbas Kiarostrami taken from a clip of the actual interview on , YouTube.com. The interview goes on with Kiarostrami expressing his thoughts around his films. Retrieved from: <http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uSDWtdJKrG0> 3

spectator, scholar or follower of the cinema. There can never be a definitive answer, there was never meant to be one and that is just the start of the real subtle genius of Antonionis innovative play with narrative form and structure, which we will explore, as we examine the roots to the fruits of a lifetime of deeply calculated work of cinematic precision in all areas of his craftsmanship. Perhaps the same non-narrative closure can be aptly applied to Antonioni himself, it seems only fitting to start here at the end of his life, though certainly not the end of an intelligent mind and vision that will ultimately be always Antonioni.

The death of Antonioni produced much media frenzy and surprise due to the fact he had passed away within 24 hours of Ingmar Bergman which seemed like a golden gift to the newshounds of the world media press with a kind of morbid excitement of two dead elderly modernist film-makers for the price of one angle to the story, from the same kind of comedy paparazzo as represented in Antonionis national rival Fellini in La Dolce Vita, (1960) hungry for sensationalism and novelty. It had been a difficult year for international cinema, for not only did it witness the passing of Antonionis old veteran MGM producer Carlo Ponti earlier in the year, but also two other major important international film-makers, with not quite the same flurry of media attention. Senegalese Sembene Ousmane the father of African cinema and a prominent writer and leading figure in post-colonial literature also passed away in June, followed by Taiwanese new wave exponent and ardent Antonioni follower Edward Yang only three weeks later.

It is fair to say that Antonioni and Bergman did come from a different era and a very different film industry. The two emerge at a time when there was a great socio-cultural development and convergence in a divided Europe. They not only contributed incredible works of modern art to cinematic history, but challenged intellectual thinking with an almost profound effect
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bringing cinema into step with the other advanced arts of the time such as painting, literature and music. Both challenged audiences to dig deep and confront their essence of being. Each understood the power of the medium and strived to employ it in a fashion that would resonate with their audience. They had two very different philosophical modernist approaches and stylistics. While you couldnt exactly call them kindred spirits, Antonioni and Bergman shared common characteristics. They had poetry and visual signatures in the way they used the natural light and composed their frames. When you look at early work of either of these artists, you see a foundation of their great films. Bergman wrote screenplays and Antonioni made documentaries (and wrote screenplays and worked as a variety of assistants) and both directed films before they found their voice. However there always seemed to be a division in the modernist camp.

They both had singular visions and we cant deny these two men built up a significant body of work in which they explored their obsessions. The Christian ethics of Bergman famously grappled with mans isolation in the world, the absence of God, male female relationships as a battlefield, and the place of the artist in society. Bergman once remarked:
Antonioni has never properly learnt his craft. He's an aesthete. If, for example, he needs a certain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the houses repainted on the damned street. That is the attitude of an aesthete. He took great care over a single shot, but didn't understand that a film is a rhythmic stream of images, a living, moving process; for him, on the contrary, it was such a shot, then another shot, then yet another. So, sure, there are some brilliant bits in his films... I can't understand why Antonioni is held 2 in such high esteem.

If the position of Bergman is whatever else, at least coherent, what is one to say of Antonioni? What was Antonioni really addressing in the themes of his work? Is it fair to categorise Antonioni as an artistic auteur, who displayed philosophic or sociological insight

Taken from a translation of Ingmar Bergman in an interview with Jan Aghed, published in the Swedish daily newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet (May 2002) 5

against his own rigorous refusal to be labelled as such? There is nothing complacent about the expression of anguish in the Bergman films: his ruthless stripping down of style contrast sharply with the proliferation of the mannerisms of Antonioni
3

There is absolutely no doubt that Michelangelo Antonioni was a great and deeply intellectual film-maker, but at which point can we draw a parallel in his use of mise en scene, as an indication to a greater philosophical reading beyond the personal problems of his protagonists to reveal a much greater social illness on the human condition as a whole? What are these themes and how do they relate to the world we live in? And why did he only serve to highlight certain problems but offer no solutions?

The central focus on Michelangelo Antonioni has normally tended to lean more towards a narrow concentration on the psycho-analysis of his lead characters. Antonionis main protagonists have often been deconstructed to be in the midst of some kind of existential angst, desperation, lost, disconnected, or at the very least feeling out of sorts. This tendency produced much of the basis of the critical and theoretical thinking commonly associated around Antonioni such as, isolation, ennui, malaise and of course the subject of many an article and writings on Antonioni alienation. While the notion of alienation is often apparently evident and can be read in Antonionis dramas, there are much more emotional dimensions to his characters such as fear, loss, happiness, guilt, love, frustration, jealously, hatred, joy, compassion, bereavement, forgiveness, acceptance and emptiness. These basic psychological states often are employed momentarily and can change quickly from scene to scene.

Ian Cameron & Robin Wood Antonioni (108) Studio Vista. London. 1970

Andrew Sarris once coined the phrase Antonionennui, which was probably more a reference to his own boredom of Antonionis deeply difficult and slow meditative narratives, rather than the position of the main characters overall feelings and emotional states. The film that Sarris reckons drove him to the point of Antonionennui was Deserto Rosso (1964)4 where one would be very hard pushed to find even a single moment of ennui in the troubling neurosis of Guilana the main character, who is not so much isolated, but more in a very seriously desperate state of fear of becoming isolated. What the term Antonionennui really meant was that Andrew Sarris, couldnt be bothered working for his money that day and applying any deeper dissemination and seriously neglected his duty to the task of uncovering the finer intellectual points and aesthetical innovation he missed within an incredible majorly important film work. Perhaps the term Sarriscasm would have been more appropriate, to such a very poor and unwitting generalisation. Antonioni, however is not so much difficult but different. This is probably due to the fact more to what our own expectations of a film are, in the conventional sense, rather than what we are given or presented in a film.

All of Antonionis films differ from each other and not as a matter of story or plot, but in their manner 5 of representing, each has sought something new, each has been an experiment

Psychoanalytical theory is indeed an area crucial to the understanding to the work of Antonioni, but only when it is fair, accurate and not misleading. It was a field that he held a particular interest in and one he meticulously explored with immense care, detail, precision and incredible depth. Antonioni once said I have great feelings for things, perhaps more than

Andrew Sarris. Arrivederci Michelangelo! The Antonioni Adventure Winds Up. August 7, 2007 The New York Observer.
5

Sam Rohdie. Antonioni (4) BFI. London 1990 7

people, although the latter interest me more.6 However, important as this area of exploration is, it is not the sum total of any of his work, but merely a fragment. To get a more truer reading and a better understanding of Antonioni as an artist, this essay will concentrate on Antonionis early life, writing and documentaries of the 1930s and 1940s, in a hope to trace or indentify a source that can be extended to later work and themes.

.. the main value of Antonionis work at that time lay more in what he said, the misunderstanding of his films started with a lack of comprehension of his style, which was no means as revolutionary as some 7 commentators believed

Film theory throughout Antonionis own life time changed and evolved from Andre Bazins; Poetics de cinema, Andre Astrucs; Camera Stylo, Truffauts ;Politique des Auteurs to Gilles Deleuzes philosophical collection of essays on the classical; Cinema 1: The Movement Image and the modern; Cinema 2: The Time Image. Like the poetics of Jean Renoir in the classical sense, Antonioni used a modernist approach to the phenomena of human life and the world around it with more a scientific less than social focus on the individual self and the mysterious but abundant world around it. He had an undeniably unique style of camera, that didnt so much write a scene, but painted it with perfectly tight framing, movement and shot duration length; long durations that are normally extremely meditative and reflective which sometimes even remain held for a time after the characters have cleared the shot; there is absolutely no sense of urgency to heighten drama or build ambiguity through use of dramatic montage, except of course when he wants to finish the film as in LEclisse or Zabriskie Point, but even then it is not overly fast cutting, but fairly consistent with the dramatic imagery; a

Seymour Chatman, Antonioni or the surface of the world( p 54) University of California Press, 1985

Ian Cameron & Robin Wood. Antonioni (P.6) Studio Vista. London 1970.

building exploding is one thing (Zabriskie Point), but how anyone could make a street lamp (LEclisse) look dramatic and terrifying to end a film is really quite an extraordinary achievement. Antonioni sometimes focuses on individual objects found then pulls out wider or pans across into area before establishing a character, place or a scene, sometimes we are lost or kind of puzzled as to why he is showing us these things, more often than not, these things do not bear any actual relevance or create any sub-texts to the narrative and are merely a clever device to try and disorientate the spectator. However from time to time there are certain aspects in the mise en scene that could be read as deliberate visual puns that do have a direct reference to something Antonioni is trying to say, either to bolster the narrative or perhaps even comment on something exterior to the action in the film. Antonioni had a unique modernist visual style that created not only a language or dialogue, but this was also the voice he used to communicate and connect with his audience. Although it is easy to place Antonioni within these theories, it is difficult to apply film theory to films of Antonioni for they are almost theories in themselves. Antonioni created his own cinematic language based on aesthetics and technical formalism. This can be traced right back to even before Antonioni started making films, which is demonstrated in the discussion with examples of his early writings on the cinema and his short fiction work, paying particular attention to the areas that fascinated him and that constantly re-surface in his work, such as narrative construction, themes and styles. Antonionis own objectivism differentiated from that of other Italian film-makers of the late 1940s and early 1950s, not so much in technique but in more a kind of a regression from the motives of the neo-realist ideals. Neorealism promoted an image of warmth in humanity with sentiments of love, kindness or deep compassion and above all some a sort of optimism for a new future. Antonioni was slightly

more pessimistic, with a more cold detached portrayal of uneasy relationships, betrayals, adultery, greed, selfishness and an overall feeling of an inexpressive emptiness.

There are other important theoretical contexts to consider in the work of Antonioni, such as feminism particularly in the early 1960s and the role and function of the lead female protagonists in his narratives. The changes to culture and landscape are a major re-occurring theme in Antonioni. Post-war life in Italy brought about many changes to some functions and roles within the family, an area which had been the central helix of many people lives for hundreds of years. Religious connections within a new modern environment were also severed by the growth of modern capitalism. There was a great change in the community landscape through massive re-building programs, re-location of people and a new found wealth in modern economics. What was basically happening was a rapidly progressive transition from that of a very old and familiar agrarian society to that of an increasingly aggressive industrial society, a kind of desperate scramble to carve a niche out of a new developing modern materialistic consumer culture. Antonioni clearly identifies a series of generations, representing some of those changes and challenges that socially chart a kind of moving transition of time from his early writing to his documentaries and eventually to the later stages of his career. Antonioni doesnt so much ask questions about the world, but certainly prompts us to ask questions to the very nature of the world we live in. There are much deeper questions of fundamental value in understanding humanity and its evolutionary role into post-war modern society buried within the texts of Antonioni, intentionally or not they do say a lot about the world in which we have inherited. On a more philosophical than historical level it is clear to see a change in the nature of humanity and its ideological functions, shifting states and general condition from the modern to post-modern cultures.

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Antonioni was utilising the resources of the cinema to the fullest extent for one particular purpose. This was the feelings underlying human behaviour.

What really made Antonionis work so different, interesting and invariably unique were the explorations of his themes. Personal styles of main themes and statements in Antonionis work

are: 1. Formal experimentation and a disregard for conventional storytelling. 2. A fascination with modernity (characters in the midst of existential crises) 3. Human emotions are explored through a variety of different means. 4. Attempts to describe psychological states through visual means.

Throughout the next chapters in this essay we will examine five key stages in the early life of Michelangelo Antonioni featuring examples of his writing, biographical data and the technical functions of his documentary film work in an attempt to discover, highlight and reach a better understanding of his life and work. We will then conclude with the evidence gathered, to locate and construct a view of Antonionis early writing in relation to his future film work and overall contribution to the field of international cinema.

I. Early life (1912-1935)

Michelangelo Antonioni was born on the 12th of September 1912 in Ferrara, a provincial capital in the Emila Romagna region along the Paduan Plain (Po Valley) in north-east Italy, situated 50km north-northeast of the regions administrative capital Bologna, just 5km south of the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream of the Po River. Ferrara is not only an important city for being the hometown of Michelangelo Antonioni that he used as a
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location for his first and final feature films Cronaco di un Amore (1950) and Al di l delle nuvole (1995), but it also features some of the most dignified and elegant architecture of the medieval period in Europe. More recently Ferrara qualified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its outstanding beauty and historic cultural significance to modern town planning.8

The area surrounding Ferrara and generally the Po Valley, seems to have had an enormously influential bearing around the work of Antonioni not just for his utilisation of the region as a location, but also the natural effects of the Paduan plain, with its humid sub-tropical climates, such as chilly cold damp morning mists, torrential rain and fog, which can be found in quite a few of his narratives. There, also seems to be very frequent juxtapositions between the natural environment and man-made landscapes in all of Antonionis films, echoing the vast expanse of the Po Valley with contrast to the grandiosity of the fine medieval and renaissance architectural structures of Ferrara. Antonioni made nearly half his Italian films in and around Ferrara and Po Valley including the subject of his first documentary Gente del Po in 1943, Cronaco di un Amore (1950), Il Grido (1957), Desserto Rosso (1964) and Al di l delle nuvole (1995).

Antonioni said, that his childhood growing up in Ferrara was a happy one which was fairly content and comfortable. His parents were successful local landowners, both came from predominately working class families; his mother, Elisabetta Roncagli, was a warm and intelligent woman who, in her youth, had been a labourer and his father, Carlo Antonioni, a good man, who succeeded in obtaining a comfortable position through evening courses and hard work. Most of his childhood days he remembered were spent playing outside with his

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/733 12

brother and friends.9

Antonioni began developing the artistic aspirations at an early age that would remain with him throughout his life; a love for literature, music, drawing and painting. He practised the violin giving his first concert at nine. It was perhaps through his imaginative early etchings and being surrounded in city of immense architectural importance that the familiar visual elements of Antonionis later life started to surface:
"I have never drawn, even as a child, either puppets or silhouettes but rather facades of houses and gates. One of my favourite games consisted of organising towns. Ignorant in architecture, I constructed buildings and streets crammed with little figures. I invented stories for them. These childhood happenings - I was eleven years old - were like little films."10

In the same observation of his early childhood life in Ferrara, Antonioni was also aware of the differences in the socio-economic class structure of the time with his own situation being somewhat on the bridge of a society placed between two apparently different definable social groups of people.
Curiously enough, our friends were invariably proletarian, and poor: the poor still existed at that time, you recognized them by their clothes...But, even in the way they wore their clothes, there was a fantasy, a frankness that made me prefer them to boys of bourgeois families. I always had sympathy for young women of working-class families, even later when I attended university: they were more authentic and spontaneous." 11

Antonioni continued to live at home and commuted daily to his studies at the Alma Mater Studiorum Universit di Bologna (University of Bologna), from 1931-1935. He was a popular character, leading a very active university life, a tennis champion and a founder of the universitys theatrical group for whom he wrote and gained his first experience in a directorial role. It was there, too, he also began to frequent the local cinemas and write short fiction stories.
9

Tassone, Aldo, Antonioni, Paris: Flammarion (2007), p.13. Ibid ., p.14. 11 Ibid., p.13.
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Around this time in the early 1930s there were many cultural programs designed to promote Italian film culture, in a bid to bolster a national industry led mainly by the Istituto Nazionale: LUnion Cinematografia Educativa (LUCE) and the Fascist government. The inauguration of the Mostra cinematografia di Venezia (Venice Film Festival) in 1932 was one such initiative; the Cine-GUF (Giovent universitaria fascista) organised film clubs mostly courting the young educated middle class; the educational and training facilities at the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, (the world first dedicated film school) and the Cinecitt film studios in Rome were also constructed in the mid 1930s, as part of a commitment to build an identifiable Italian national film industry and culture.12

In 1935, Antonioni left university earning a degree in economics and commerce. Combining his love for writing and his growing new found desire for the cinema, he pursued it with his first job as a journalist in the neighbouring city of Padua, where he wrote for the local newspaper Corriere Padano from 1935-1940. His new role as a professional writer suited him perfectly writing mostly film reviews, articles on cinema, festival reports and occasionally the odd short fiction story. Antonionis time at Corriere Padano was indeed a very productive time, which enabled him to a fully explore and comment on not just the growing amount of Italian genre films, but also a fair amount of foreign films mostly American and French. Antonioni enters into the Italian cinema at a very interesting period. It is perhaps important at this point to understanding Antonioni and his own direct relationship to the cinema by discussing at least very basically, a brief history and the aesthetical nature of the industry he was entering.

12

Shiel, Mark, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City, London: Wallflower (2006) p.21. 14

II. The rise of the Italian Cinema (1905-1935)

Prior to 1931, film production in Italy was widely dispersed and Italian cinema had no clear, staple Identity. Starting, relatively late, in 1905 the first Italian fiction film, Filoteo Albertinis La presa di Roma- 20 settembre 1870, was followed by a large expansion of Italian film production leading up to the events of World War I. Production around this time was completely de-centralised and usually responded more to local needs and many stylistic variances emerged around the country in Rome, Milan, Turin and Naples. Films were not normally motivated by profit, but more associated with systems of patronage, subsidised by Italian aristocrats, with a tendency towards traditional aesthetic culture.

The roots of the Italian cinema slanted towards narration through a variety of local stylistics, methods and techniques, with a very heavy emphasis on elementary visual device systems. This had been the modus operandi in Italian artistic culture and customs for centuries from the times of the Renaissance and even much further back to the days of ancient Rome. There are many ways to communicate a story through forms of signification; movement, gesture, prop or picture, in essence everything in the cinema that could be termed as mise en scene, had more weighting than the literary function. The early Italian cinema leaned more heavily towards a dignified, but highly bourgeois cultural celebration of Italy, often utilising its immensely rich ancient and varied local traditional narrative customs with depictions from ancient mythology, heroic romanticism, pantomime, opera, painting, puppetry, architecture and sculpture.

However, the representation of the image of Italy constructed in these early films had no
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real reflection or depiction of contemporary life in Italy but still proved to be highly popular. By 1914 a national distribution network was starting to appear with the proliferation of cinemas in the major cities, more importantly Italy had become the most successful distributor in the international market, with its most famous production company Cines becoming the biggest national distributor of Italian films before World War I.

With the difficulties of the war in Europe creating disruptions in financial backing for production and rising costs in the system of divismo (distribution) it all became too problematic and in the years that followed there was a sharp decline and eventually the production system collapsed. The rapid growth in the overwhelming popularity of Hollywood films made it difficult to compete and after 1921 American films dominated the Italian market, comprising nearly 80 percent of films exhibited through to the late 1920s, while Italian domestic production had been significantly been reduced to around eight films a year. Studios in Milan and Turin were abandoned, production in Naples declined and only Rome remained making small independent features.13

In 1926, the fascist controlled government, who supported a national film industry, set up the Istituto Nazionale: LUCE and centralised film production in Rome. This initiative was part of a broad national, public, economic and cultural policy which also imposed protectionist policies by limiting the import and exhibition of Hollywood cinema. While this policy was totally ineffective in curbing the widespread appeal and distribution of Hollywood films, it did help organise film distribution.

13

Sorlin, Pierre, Italian national cinema, 1896-1996, London: Routledge (1996) p.53. 16

The revival of Cines, built from the ashes, by Italian entrepreneur Stefano Pittaluga, in the late 1920s not only ushered Italy into a new era of national film production but also into the sound era with Alessandro Blasettis Sole (1929) and Mario Camerinis Rotaie (1929). Pittaluga died in 1931 and the industrialist Lodovico Toeplitz took over Cines appointing Emilio Cecchi as director of production. Cecchi embarked on a massive production programme of producing, comedies, melodramas and innovative documentaries. The success of Cines and its gradual progression at the box office made Italy less dependent on imports and renewed hope for an expanding cultural industry.

The fascist government exercised very little control over domestic feature films of the 1920s and early 1930s, although censorship was severe and the dubbing of not only foreign films (by a method of controlling the content of the soundtrack) had become a generalised practice even for Italian films. In 1934, Cines studio in Rome had burnt down and was rapidly replaced with the Cinecitt studio facilities and the establishment of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, both backed and supported by the Fascist party.

The strategies to protect and centralise film production by producing documentaries and newsreels for both national and international distribution, was not entirely for financial or artistic purposes, but with most countries of the time (and not just the totalitarian states) it could be used to win over hearts and minds as a psychological device to propagate fascist ideologies. In less than ten years, the fascist government had initiated and supported a successful film culture and industry. However, as the political climate was changing in Europe, the fascists began increasing their grip more tightly, to the point of complete control in 1938 under the doctrine of national self-sufficiency known as autarchy. This gave the
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regime complete control over the distribution of foreign films and effectively wiped American films completely off the screen until 1944. This was really a powder keg for what was to follow a few years later with the fall of fascism in 1943 and after the liberation of Italy in 1945, with the rise of the neo-realist movement.

III.

Corrado Padano 1935-1940

This subsequent high-jacking of the cinema, to create a platform for a political mouth piece, or at the very least to embody the spirit of fascism through its mass appeal was a notion that Antonioni strongly opposed and resisted. One of Antonionis very first pieces of critical writing in Corriere Padano in 1935 was centred on this subject. The intellectual political magazine Critica Fascista published an article which stated the need for a programmed production with a precise direction: a cinema of revolutionary inspiration.14 In addition, it also claimed that only through the writers subjective literary ideas and not the art of a director could such a commitment be achieved. Antonioni argued that it is the director, who, in the end, determines the real art of the cinema.15 Antonioni was aware that the term programmed production really meant propaganda; he also knew these were not the kind of people you could really argue with, even on an academic or intellectual discourse; so Antonioni conceded in his article by agreeing that, if fascist politics were a greater concern over cinematic art, then so be it, the script should weigh far higher than the total production:
This programmed cinema will be a very powerful propaganda arm that will deeply affect the people and will be a most effective means by which fascism can affirm throughout the world what is essential and irreplaceable about it. In that case the personality of the writer should take precedence over the wishes of

14 15

Critica Fascista, 15th March 1935, from Sam Rohdie, Antonioni, London: British Film Institute (1990) p.18.

Antonioni, Michelangelo, Colpi di sonda. Cinematografo: soggetto e regia, Corriere Padano (28th March 1935) Ibid. 18

the director.16

Antonioni two years later in 1937 challenged the fascist governments cultural policy in an article in Corriere Padano. Under the banner andare verso il popol (go to the people) the fascists sought not to raise awareness or create an understanding of art, but to forcibly feed the public with ideas and practices they neither understood or cared about. Antonioni believed this initiative to be negative, patronising and cruel, repelling the people against the arts, which, given the brutality, fear and social poverty they were experiencing at the time, was understandable. Antonioni proposed his own slogan portare il popolo di noi (bring the people to us) that people should come to the arts of their own accord and freewill; Antonioni declared, raise them to our level, educate them, dont pander them. 17

The motives to utilise the cinema towards more political than artistic ends, was not a position that Antonioni shared. His early writing at Corriere Padano, seem to constantly side step the political arena and his attention focused more on not so much why a film should been made (or read) but, how it should be made. If the manifesto for the fascists were to make political cinema or embody the national spirit in bid to unify fascism, Antonioni had his own agenda in the art and craft of film; camera, lighting, sound, mise en scene, montage, superimposition, fades, dissolves, direction, dramaturgy, the script and all other elements that constituted the language of film. When Antonioni wrote a review of Nocturne (1934) by Gustav Machaty in 1936, his main attention was not to the films social themes but, to its look and feel; its qualities of light, contrast of tones, the psychological strength of it protagonists, its ability to create and hold an air of atmosphere around the central figures:

16 17

Ibid. Antonioni, Michelangelo, Dell educazione artistica, Corriere Padano, (2nd March 1937) Ibid., p.17. 19

Nocturno is in fact is a film made of light and shade. The most beautiful effects are achieved by contrast of the one and the otherNothing is very clear. No protagonist is ever looked at directly, the photography is always in a dim light, but one has the exact sense of life lived by the characters.18

The visual imagery and use of mise en scene in a film had far more artistic and cinematic value to Antonioni than the words of a script. This is perhaps, truer to the traditional Italian method of narration, from sculpture and painting; to analyse or create a story from ones own interpretation of the image. Silent film had also created a basic grammar of visual language in its limitation. Talking pictures moved a step closer to a sense of the real and became more an extension to the ideals of literary theatre. Antonioni rejected films that were plainly recorded theatre, in favour of a deeper cinematic dialogue that utilised the camera and technical aesthetics to dictate narrative function. In a review of G. W Pabsts Mademoiselle Docteur (1936) Antonioni compared Pabst to Rene Clair on that very issue:
More political, or perhaps it should be said, more social than Pabst, Clair doesnt know how to free himself from the literary ideas. And it s true to say that while for the Frenchman it is the subject that is important, for the Viennese, it is the narration, which is what makes the former less cinematographic than the latter. The latter, let me say again, is a purist one of the very few, purists of the cinema.19

The kind of cinema Antonioni supported was tied to narrative, directly relating to artistic and technical aesthetics by searching for things that were new and modern in the cinema, with attention to the structure of narratives and exploring visual elements. Fascinated by the new innovations in colour film, Antonioni saw extraordinary expressive pictorial potential, not just to recreate a better reality of the world, but more as an aesthetical device:
The colour allows us to see the ocean directly, from up close, in all its varied aspects: at dusk, by moonlight, clear as glass thick and dark like ink, calm, angry, garlanded by foam at the tips of its waves. The inner life of the ocean, colour by Technicolorand except for sunsets worthy of a crepus colare painter of the nineteenth century, things are done extremely well: beautiful greenish-blue tones, suggestive horizons bleached milky white in the hazea sudden tragic darkening of the waves...20

18 19 20

Antonioni, Michelangelo, machty e il suo notturno , Corriere Padano, 30th June 1936 P.3. Ibid., p.20. Antonioni, Michelangelo, lutimo Pabst, Corriere Padano, 21st Sept 1937. Ibid., p.13. Antonioni, Michelangelo, isola delle perle di J hogan , Corriere Padano 23rd April 1938. Ibid., p.162. 20

There are number of articles Antonioni wrote in the late 1930s1940 with regard to technical innovation in the cinema other than colour; Technological advances in sound and audio recording techniques he praised for its improvement for both diegetic and non-diegetic quality. 21He supported the use of 16mm to make feature films, for reason of cost and a more flexibility to experiment which he argued could give life to a new and special cinema.22 Television, Antonioni viewed not as a threat to cinema, giving that at the time it was still in its infancy as a live medium and therefore not an art, unlike film where the image could be worked on before and after. However, television did have advantages in its limitations; the ability to adapt to the unforeseen and the immediate, the possibility of responding to the moment.23

Antonionis critical writings on documentary around 1937 highlight a need for poetry, art, interpretation of truth and not a mechanical document of reality. Antonioni asserted that fiction should never overcome the document or lose the sense of the real, for a set of false superimposed events. Documentary to Antonioni required two key components, first the cinematographic; camera position/distance/movement, the use of light and tones and secondly the lyrical; a personal, subjective response, expressed in style to the life and reality seen.

Equipped with this knowledge of a theoretical understanding of documentary and his enthusiasm for the 16mm camera to experiment, Antonioni set out to make his first piece of

21

Antonioni, Michelangelo and Gianni Puccini Due lustre di sonoro, & Parole di un tecnico Cinema, 25th December 1940 (both articles on sound) pp.459-460. Ibid., p.167 Antonioni, Michelangelo. Elzeviri a passo ridotto Corriere Padano 23rd July 1938, (on 16mm), Ibid. Antonioni, Michelangelo. allarmi inutili Cinema 10th April 1940 (on television) Ibid. 21

22 23

film on a Bell & Howell H16 camera. The subject of this documentary was mental health care in a local asylum in Ferrara. The director of the sanatorium described the effects of the patients conditions by rolling around on the floor. Antonioni wanted to make the documentary from reality, from among the insane and the director finally agreed. Antonioni set up his camera and ordered the lights turned on. Some years later in 1959 he would describe the patients reaction to the intensity of the light:
For a split second the patients remained immobile, as if it were stone. I have never seen on the face of an actor such profound, such total fear There was a hellish uproar. The mad desperately tried to protect themselves from the light as from the pre-historic monster who had attacked them; their faces at first quiet, were able to contain their madness within human limits, now appeared crazed, devastated..24

The director of the asylum ordered the lights off and the film to stop:
And in the room, returned now to semi-darkness and silence, we saw a knot of bodies twitching as it in the last shudders of death agony. I have never forgotten this scene. But it was with it that we began to speak, without knowing it, of neo-realism. This happened before the war.25

Antonioni soon learned abruptly that sometimes film theory and practical examples are not that simple to apply. However, through this first failed attempt Antonioni learned not only the difficulties in practical film making over theoretical thinking, but a new approach to documentary based more on ideas of realism by capturing a scene or a moment than manufacturing constructive subjectivity. At that time particularly in Flaherty and the British documentary, there was more ordered reality, a constructive organised view of a subject. Antonionis earliest notions of documentary were far more anarchic, instinctive reactions, preferring to seize actuality as it unfolds, rather than organise an arrangement of it. This intuitive position would maintain throughout his career, though unlike his first failed attempt, he would find better results by maintaining distance from the subject to get a less unobtrusive, undisturbed, and more better view in the sense of the real.
24 25

Antonioni, Michelangelo, Fare un film e per me vivere, Cinema Nuovo. March-April 1959. Ibid., pp.25-26. Ibid. 22

Antonionis early writings at Corriere Padano, were not just critical observations or cinema reviews, it also where he published his first attempts at creative fiction. He wrote three short fiction pieces in Corriere Padano, (Strada Ferrara, 8th October 1938, Ritratto 18th December 1938 and Uomini di note 18th February 1939). The stories Antonioni wrote normally related to the emotional and physical experiences of his characters coupled with a deep sense of their psychological state. These early pieces tended to be first person narrative. Abstract in their descriptions; they are often detailed perceptions in relation to the landscape, its climatic condition such as fog, rain; natural ambient and artificial lighting, moods, lit doorways, facades, buildings, gates, textures, surfaces, shadows, other people, objects, anything that created a mood to describe and alter the feelings and ambivalence of the protagonists view. The look of things is the centre of the drama than the event. These early fiction pieces in many ways resemble some of the themes later expressed in his future films:
Little by little my eyes became accustomed to the dark: I could see the edge of the road, a tree, a road marker, finally, with a great relief, a shadow of a man who came forward, like a spectre on the side of the roadsoon I saw anotherThen came a group of four or five, close to one another, because of the cold, but separate, each intent on his own segret. They slowly filed past in a kind of tottering parade, all wrapped up; it was sad to see those coats flapping in a line in the dark; the sadness was a deep funeral sadness which filled me with immense painI suddenly had the sense that we were all shadows: the dead and the living, the happy and the unhappyphantasms in the mist26

IV.

ROME (1940-1950)

In 1940, at the age of 27, Antonioni moved to Rome and continued to write, contributing for the state sponsored journal Cinema. The journal was edited by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolinis second son, Vittorio Mussolini. Regular contributors along with Antonioni included Mario Alicata, Gianni Puccini, Giuseppe De Santis and Luchino Visconti, some of
26

Antonioni, Michelangelo, Uomini di note Corriere Padano. 8th October 1938. Ibid., p.41-42. 23

whom, if not all, were members the underground Italian Communist Party and later became the exponents of the neo-realist cinema movement. The journal enjoyed relative freedom under the protection of Mussolini, who was completely shocked and surprised when in 1942 almost half the editorial board fled or were arrested for subversive activities, against the fascist regime.

One of Antonionis articles for Cinema was on the 1940 Venice International Film Festival. He had covered the event two years previously for Corriere Padano, but, now with World War II already in full swing and Italy firmly demarked as being an Axis territory, the once celebrated internationalism was no longer possible due to conflicting national loyalties. Nonetheless, the festival went ahead with main films from Italy, Germany and other annexe countries like Albania. The 1940 event which was not so much an international but more a fascist film festival, opening with a German entry, Orpenball (1940) by Gza von Bolvary. Antonioni wrote three pieces for Cinema: Inaugrazione 10th September 1940 and a two part article La Sorpreza Veneziana 25th September 1940. His main attention was not so much to the opening film, but more a sad reflection on the restrictions to the festival brought about by the war which rendered a rather anti-climatic atmosphere to the event itself:
There were no white jackets at the San Marco Cinema on the opening night, nor low cut gowns. The official opening took place after dark, it was evident in the main hall that the atmosphere was utterly different than it had been years past (things were otherwise in the days at the Lido, under bright lights; it was only memory now; a time that seems to be from a past before we were even born). Now, in war time, the war was present at the very heart of the festival; with the absence of the Venetian wealthy everything seemed austere. The entire event lacked all luxury though there were elegant (but never before so serious or silent) actresses, directors, celebrities. There were roses everywhere; it was possible to make use of them to form a lovely picture of life and colour; in that respect the hall seemed set for a gay ball, the only thing missing was the Chinese lanterns. By Midnight everthing was over. Officials, film-makers, the public silently left (the darkness made everything still before, in artificial, all had been excitement and volubility). The film continued outside though with an altered ton and script. Venice seemed completely unreal and so very dark; lights shimmered along invisible canals as if coming from nearby falling stars; here and there street lamps created strange perspectives. If suddenly the old Venetian masks had appeared from an angle of one of the hallways none of us would be surprised. San Marco square was like a soft field surrounded by tall hedges. At the far end of the square was the bell tower, an enormous black

24

cypress.27

A year later Antonioni returned to Venice to write another article on the Venice Film Festival. Antonioni had been somewhat disappointed the previous year, due to the restrictions of war. This time the mood and tone of the article was even more sombre than the year before and contained a deeper sadness and really was a testament to the failure of Italy and humanity:
The fate of Europe started to grow dark in 1914; from then, in fits and starts, things have worsened, and the disaster of today hardly surprises anyone, least of all historians. Italy has made a revolution; it has made a war in Africa- then another war in Spain and now it has undertaken a third, all in the spaces of twenty years. What has been the consequence of this for the cinema? And not only for European cinema but world cinema since world war is the official name of this new war? It is not only difficult to imagine. In periods of struggle, stagnation; in periods of truce, while the waters of the world were only stirred by the slightest ripple, the most subtle movement, as when a stone is thrown into the water and the outer circles grow larger and disappear. They were waters which gave only an appearance of tranquillity; only now can one say what currents surged beneath it. There was, however, time to think calmly about the cinema and all could occupy themselves with it: the best men were of that period, and the best works were of that period. Various tendencies, currents schools emerged: the French avant-garde, German expressionism and so forth; men of culture, re assured, no longer diffident, began to take an interest in the new expressive language of cinema to which they had no choice but to concede aesthetic legitimacy.28

Antonioni attended the Centro di Sperimentale Cinematografia, for a brief period during 1940-1941 on the directing course, there is not much information on his time at the film school other than he attended and made his first film after only a few months, he later recalled his first now long lost short fiction film:
A respectable woman meets up with a shady woman who is blackmailing her with some letters she has managed to get hold of. The respectable woman gives the other one some money and in return receives the letters. The camera follows the woman as she approaches the blackmailer. You soon see that the respectable woman and the blackmailer are played by the same actress. Never the less the movement of the camera is continious. It is all done in a single shot. No one was able to figure out how I was able to do it. In fact, there is a break, but it is absolutely undetectable29

27 28

Antonioni, Michelangelo Inaugrazione Cinema 10th September 1940, Ibid., pp.14-15 Antonioni, Michelangelo, Per una storia della mostra Cinema 10-25th September 1941, pp. 151-152, 187189. Ibid., p.57 Bernardini, Aldo Michelangelo Antonioni, da Gente del Po a blow up a blow up, Milan: Isetti editore, 1967 p.27
29

25

The film journal Bianco e Nero was the journal of the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia edited by one of the films schools academics Guido Aristraco. Antonioni published a good few articles for this journal (and a few others Italian publications including Lo Schermo, Film dOggi and Cosmopolita) from the 1940s onwards. One such article was a treatment for a feature film based on a story in Corriere della sera called Terra Verde by Guido Piovene (Piovene was a journalist, essayist and novelist; his major works of fiction appeared in the 1940s) Lettre di una novizia; one of the outstanding qualities of the novel was its descriptions of the Veneto Landscape, and particularly its colours. The story takes place in a mythical island. It is an ecological fantasy and concerns the progressive change in the climate of the island from temperate to near Arctic conditions, the ensuing destruction of its culture and the way of life and the emigration of its people to warmer lands to the south. At the end of the treatment, Antonioni discussed the use of colour of the projected film:
No One should ignore the use we expect to make of colour in our film: not exhibitionism, nor dcor, but rather the needs of the narrative; in it colour will determine not only the climate, but the psychological movement of the drama, which involves visually the changing of colours, their gradual loss of vividnessvery white or red veined tiny pebbles, the sea made up of the most beautiful of colours, like the colours of minerals collected in a museum: those reds, those unreal greens, sulphurous yellows, those forgotten silver whites in the sunshine, distant reefs in colours change according to the hour and the timegreenfields quivering with the colour of apricot or of pink in the light, fields of wheat, expanses of pale blue flowers, skies cut by rainbows: things which, when seen on the screen, will make one say: its the false, but precisely in this falsity that the truth of the far north rests, whose landscape sometimes takes on a tonality of an impossible palette. And then the terribly sad facing of all this, the excessive clarity of the air, the final burst of the flowers, of ornamentation before advancing whiteness glances by things with stellar reflections. All joyfulness, life itself disappears with the fading of colourDays which last for twenty four hours, nights which fall at eleven in the evening, a sun which lightly touches the water without setting or remains in a wait a little beneath the burning horizon, tinting over the hanging clouds red, while the sea is of the purest steel making one dizzy: these are- it said- truly apocalyptic scenes30

Antonioni made his first entry into the practical side of commercial film-making as writer in collaboration with a handful of other writers, to write the classic Italian wartime propaganda

30

Antonioni, Michelangelo, Terra Verde (Sunto per un film) Bianco e Nero (October 1940) pp.971-972 from Sam Rohdie Antonioni, London: British Film Institute (1990) 26

film Un Pilota ritorna (1942) directed by Roberto Rossellini. Antonioni was primarily responsible and credited for the screenplay, though not for the dialogue. The film centres around the story of young aviator shot down in battle over Greece, who is then captured and held in a prisoner of war camp in England, but manages to escape and on his heroic return to Italy, learns of the victory over Greece by the axis forces. It was film that Roberto Rossellini was later keen to distance himself from and although entirely different from his later neorealist works and despite the political ambitions of Italy at the time, it is still a widely recognised classic of wartime drama.

Antonionis work on the screenplay for Un Pilota ritorna, led to the signing of a contract with the production company Scalera. Antonioni was drafted into the army, but he managed to work under assignment on I Due Foscari (1942) directed by Enrico Fulchigoni, not only on collaboration of the screenplay but, also gaining experience on set as an assistant. I Due Foscari is an adaptation of a play (The Two Foscaris) by Lord Byron based on the tragic life of Francesco Foscari, the Doge of Venice, who during the renaissance became involved in a series of unsuccessful wars with Milan and died shortly after his son was apparently wrongly tried and executed on charges of bribery and corruption. It is a prolific event in Italian history and was also adapted into a three act opera of the same name by Giuseppe Verdi in the mid 19th Century. Both I Due Foscari and Un Pilota Ritorna were typical of the highly stylised drama made under fascism to rally feelings of heroic patriotism, pretty much in the same way as the British and American war and historical costume drama served as a model to falsify the reality of a glorious event and collective unity in the face of adversity.

Antonionis next assignment took him to occupied France where he had landed a job working
27

as an assistant to Marcel Carn on his film Les Visiteurs du Soir (The Devils Envoys, 1942) in Paris. Antonioni had little sympathetic regard for French cinema, Jean Renoir and Carn being the few exceptions, because French films were mainly too involved with contemporary politics. History, politics and art were conceived too directly for Antonioni but he appreciated Carn for his attention to reality. Les Visteurs du Soir is based on a French legend set in the 15th Century, in which the devil sends two envoys in the form of travelling minstrels to rake havoc and disrupt a wedding between a young knight and a Barons daughter. The plan fails and one of the devils envoys falls in love with the bride and renounces his loyalty to the devil, forcing the devil to appear to deal with his insubordinate aide. The film was one of the most popular French films of the German occupation, scripted by Jacques Prvert and has been seen to have been more an allegorical message at the time to the French for resilience and that ultimately truth and love would triumph over meddlesome evil interferences.

Antonionis working relationship with Carn was difficult, perhaps, partly due to the circumstances of political and nationalistic loyalties of wartime Europe, his inexperience to a learned craftsman such as Carn and even though Antonioni was a fluent speaker of French, there would still have been very clear cultural differences and certainly working practices. Antonioni had said of his experience, that, he learned very little from Carn and that Carn was not an influence on his work. And even though this is not strictly true (and is maybe a misunderstanding of what he actually said and meant by that) he still wrote a very appreciative article on Carn for Bianco e Nero in 1948, which would suggest to the contrary he learned, if not a lot, then certainly enough from Carn: beginning with a quote from the French Naturalism writers the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt; Historians are the narrators of the past, novelists are the narrators of the present:
28

 Every approach between art and its times, between cinema and politics, presupposes not so much an attempt at a direct correspondence between images and events, as it does an echo of events in the souls of individuals, where, at the most intimate of levels, sometimes necessitous, sometimes casually, life and art meet and diverge. With Carne, it seems clear that it is not so much a moral that is important as the force with which he grounds reality in facts and represents these with logic or fateful concatenations, or rather it is the force with which he recreates reality. No act is refused, no consequence shunned, everything is illuminated and interpreted with a precise intuition of the particular. In the course of things what will define itself as the core of his style will be technique. But this isnt merely mechanical practice, a kind of grammatical play as an end in itself, rather a technique which, being aware of itself, revolves and clarifies things, neither dominating or allowing itself to be dominated. From that flows the fluidity of the narrative of his films, but from it comes the refinement and intelligence of some of his solutions which he will never renounce. It is not for nothing that the predominantly content-orientated methods of Clair seemed to him intolerable. Beauty for Carne was something that he saw behind the lens, and it is necessary to see with what tenacity he pursued what he defined Joli or rejected as mauvais or moche; and with that lucidity and for seeing surety he mentally placed every shot, in the act of taking it, in an ideal montage: dans mon montage. Not that there was not any interest in humanity in him, but most of the time it was unproclaimed adherence he was loyal to populist themesbut one cannot place Carne as has been done, among directors who propose a human message, counterposed to those who propose poetics. Themes certainly enthused Carne, but never to the point of forcing him to give expression to them.31

En Route to Paris Antonioni had to stop in Nice and wait for a visa to be issued to work and stay Paris which was now occupied by the Germans. Antonioni wrote a short piece, about the discovery of a drowned bather on the beach in Negresco crossing real events with fiction:
They were days of impatience and boredom, and of news about a war which stood still on an absurd thing called the Maginot Line. Suppose one had to construct a bit of film, based on this event from the scene, and leave on this state of mind: The sky is white; the seafront deserted, the sea cold and empty; the hotels white and half shuttered. One of the white seats of the promenade des anglais the bathing attendant is seated, a negro in a white singlet. It is early. The sun labours to emerge from a layer of mist, the same as everyday. There is nobody on the beach except a single bather floating inert a few yards from the shore. There is nothing to be heard except the sound of the sea, nothing to observe except the rocking of that body. The attendant goes down to the beach and into the bathing station. A girl comes out and walks towards the sea. She is wearing a flesh coloured costume. The cry is short, sharp and piercing. A glance is enough to tell that the bather is dead. The pallor of his face, the mouth full of saliva, the jaws stiff as in the act of biting, the few hairs glued to the forehead, the eyes staring, not with the fixity of death but with the troubled memory of a life. The body is stretched out on the sand with the stomach in the air, the feet apart and pointing outwards. In a few moments, while the attendant attempts to artificial respiration, the beach fills up with people. A boy of ten, pushing forward a little girl of about eight, shoves his way through to watch. look he says to the girl can you see yes she says very quietly. Can you see the spit on his mouth? Yes and the swollen stomach? Do you see it? Its full of water the little girl watches as though fascinated in silence. The boy goes on, with a kind of sadistic joy. Now hes still white; but in a few moments hell go blue. Look under his eyes; look, its starting. The girl nods in assent, but remains silent; her face shows clearly that she is beginning to feel sick. The boy notices this and looks gloating. You scared? No the little girl replies in a thin voice. Yes you are, he insists, and goes on chanting. Youre scaredyoure scared after ten minutes or so the police arrive, and the beach is cleared. The attendant is the only one who remains with the policeman. Then he goes off, summed by a lady with violet hair for her usual lesson of gymnastics.32

31 32

Antonioni, Michelangelo, Marcel Carn, parigino, Bianco e Nero, December 1948, pp 17-47, Ibid., pp.36-37. Antonioni, Michelangelo il fatto e limmagine Cinema Nuovo July/August (1963) translated by Geoffrey 29

This remarkable piece of writing shows hints and traces of the kind of narrative play recognisable in Antonioni not only in his later fiction, but to a variable degree his documentaries also deploy a similar an external observation of an event. He also writes in almost film grammar, linking things by visual and movement around the subject almost like a talking camera. As in the previous example of his early fictional writings a few years before for Corriere Padano, this piece is built around feelings and emotional reactions. First, he paints the landscape in description of the hotel building and sky almost like an establishment shot of the scene. This is then interrupted by the disturbance and attention to a section of the scene on the beach, raising the ambiguity to that particular area and situation, concentrating on the discovery of a ghastly object found floating on the surface of the water, we are now inside the action and following the reaction of the children and onlookers. It then jumps ten minutes, the children and the crowd have gone. Only the attendant and the dead man and the police are seen from a distance, then shortly after the attendant leaves. It is not a story about the person who discovers the body, the beach attendant, the children, the police or even the poor dead chap on the beach, but in fact a story of them all, in a temporal space of the landscape. The event passes, the landscape is still the same, but our reaction to the space is different and not quite the same as before. Antonioni attempts to heighten the overbearing nature of the landscape through the use of the temps mort, this is a device linked to the nouveau roman movement in its modernist use of micro-realism. The temps mort defines and lingers upon post-diegetic cinematic space; it rests upon a scene after the main action has finished or has moved on. The temps mort shot, by heightening the importance of background landscape, gives it a life all its own, one that threatens to overpower the inconsequential

Nowell-Smith and published as The Event and the Image in Sight and Sound, Winter 1963/64, p.14. Ibid., pp 38-39. 30

humans which previously inhabited its space. What had previously been the setting for the characters suddenly becomes the protagonist itself. A kind of spiritual or psychological altercation now exists around the space and feelings to it, the story suddenly manifests and then fades, disappearing into the void of time. This shifting, stirring, interruption or disturbance of the landscape is a very common Antonioni trait. Antonioni described his own feelings of the event as true emptiness mixed with malaise, anxiety, nausea, the atrophy of all normal feelings and desires, fear and anger commenting:

I found myself in that whiteness, in that nothingness, which took shape around a black point.33

One can imagine Antonioni sitting by the seafront observing this and constructing, microcosmic stories lives and dialogue, even inner feelings of people he had no direct connection or contact with. Seated in an almost balcony view of a real life theatre, forming his own cinematic interpretation, far, but close enough, at safe distance of an exterior view, imagining the emotional thoughts, reactions, feelings and even dialogue of those present within the interior space. Antonioni also described how he wrote the piece:
I would try first to remove the actual scene, and leave only the image described in the first four lines. In that white sea-front, that lonely figure, that silence, there seems to me an extraordinary strength of impact. The event here adds nothing: it is superfluous. I remember very well that I was interested, when it happened. The dead man acted as a distraction to a state of tension.34

The contrast between large grand events such as the war, politics and economics against a concentration of seemingly smaller insignificant, almost momentary history, were far more interesting to Antonioni, than popular collective themes. His attention had turned beyond the narrow focus of the mass event and became a pursuit of searching for hidden things such as

33 34

Ibid. Ibid. 31

individual feelings, reactions, thoughts and relations, basically anything which sometimes makes interaction interesting, but difficult. In Antonionis written works of the 1930/40s there are traces of his future fictions, such as the temps mort device, a scientific approach to details ( shape, form, light, shade, tone) in micro-realism, coupled with a deep psychological precision. However, although these are incredible studies in their own right and highly innovative for any film-maker there is also an insistence to find new narrative forms for the cinema, that try to reach a level of human maturity, beyond the childish declarations of political, religious or social faiths that divide and disable humanity. The attempt to find new narrative forms for the cinema was quite possibly an attempt in a response to what had happened in other artistic fields through modernism; such as the move towards abstraction in painting by artists such as Henri Matisse and most notably, Pablo Picasso; in Music, the intense emotional depth and sometimes disturbing charge of Igor Stravinsky and neoclassicism; and most certainly within a new modern tradition of narrative in literature through the works of most notably of Henri-Marie Beyle (aka Stendhal) ,Gustav Flaubert, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Antonioni in fact often referred to Flaubert and Stendhal (who had a special place for Italians for the affection he had for Italy) Flaubert he admired for craftmanship in writing: He was also interested in the indirect and necessary oblique relation Stendhal posed between exterior events and interior sentiments. It would be this modernist approach that would later set him apart later from the other Italian film-makers of a period which tends to have had him more outside the prevailing social and political ideologies, particularly in Italy at time of drastic change and upheaval. In 1939 Antonioni, wrote a treatment in Cinema that was to be his first documentary on the people on the Po.
It is not at all a sentimental assertion that the people of the Po valley are enamoured of the river. In fact a halo of deep feeling, one should say love, surrounds this river which is in a sense, is the despot of the valley. The people of the valley feel the Po. Precisely how they feel about it we dont know; but what we do know is that it is something there in the very air which, like a kind of subtle witchcraft, affects one 32

immediately

35

In 1942, Antonioni began work on Gente del Po, concerning the squalid living conditions of the inhabitants of the Po valley region, near Ferrara. With the fall of the fascist government in 1943, the Germans remained occupying Rome, and filmmaking around Italy grew almost to an immediate halt. Much of the original footage of Gente del Po shot between 1942-43 was lost during the war. In the interim, the bulk of the footage was lost through degradation, accident, and, possibly, deliberate tampering. Still, Antonioni displayed an early resilience and a determination to complete the film, a trait that would resurface on numerous occasions in the future. After the war the remains were edited and released as a nine-minute curtainraiser at the Venice Film International Festival for Alfred Hitchcocks Spellbound in 1947. The film is close to Antonionis original 1939 treatment: with two subjects he stressed in it; the magic of the landscape and the feelings of the people. The landscape fascinates with trees lining the banks against the horizontal of the river, the light of the evening on the water, the new shapes, dissolutions of shapes, disappearances and appearances are effected by fog, mist, clouds and light.

Antonioni was always fond of recalling that while he was shooting Gente del Po on one side of the river, Luchino Visconti was shooting Ossessione (1943) on the other part. Ossessione is an important landmark in Italian film history because of its reflection of social reality in neorealism and anti-fascism. It is story of passion and violence among ordinary people: a vagabond, an innkeeper, his wife, a homosexual Spanish anarchist. The characters are social signs that represented contemporary Italy, depicting poverty, adultery, murder, homosexuality and prostitution, which suggested that the very bonds of society were disintegrating with its
35

Antonioni, Michelangelo. Per un film sul fiume Po Cinema 25 April 1939. Ibid., p.27 33

values and institutions slipping away. The film, an adaptation of the John M. McCain American street novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, shocked censors and proved to be a forerunner of neo-realism.

Shortly after the premiere of Ossessione, changes were afoot in Italy with the arrest of Benito Mussolini on July 25th 1943, heralding the start of the dismantling and eventual collapse of Italian fascism. The new regime appointed by King Vittorio Emmanuelle III formed an armistice with the allied forces and for the next two years bitter and bloody battles across Italy ensued, with tens of thousands of anti-fascist partisans engaged in fierce urban guerrilla warfare, culminating first with the liberation of Rome in June 1944, and then finally with allied support, forcing the Germans to retreat northwards by the spring of 1945. The end of the war in Italy, with Fascism discredited, the economy in ruins, nearly 300000 dead civilians, extensive collateral damage with nearly half million people displaced, left a widespread mixed reaction of relief, loss, anger, guilt, but above all a sense of optimism that the worst was over. The style of cinema pioneered immediately after generically known as neo-realism shared that sense of opportunity.

Italian neo-realist cinema was developed from a variety of sources and influences mainly around the criticism of the popular journal Cinema. The move towards neo-realism was in part, reactionary to the telefono bianco (white telephone) genre of films that dominated the contemporary Italian cinema; and a stronger desire to adopt a method of film-making that depicted a stronger reality and representation of ordinary everyday life Italians. The late 19th century Italian literary and operatic movement verimso (realism) in most notably the works of Giovanni Verga, utilised some of the practices found in French naturalism. French poetic
34

realism, an offshoot of French socialist realism, had been popular in Italy in 1930s through the works of Jean Renoir, Marcel Carn and Ren Clair. Antonioni and Visconti both had a deep admiration for Renoir and his work. Visconti had also worked as an assistant to Renoir on Une partie de champagne (1936) and briefly on La Tosca (1939) before the project was abandoned by Renoir (later completed by the German director Karl Koch) due to the outbreak of World War II. There is no doubt that Viscontis relationship to Renoir certainly had a lot, if not, definitely some, influence on Ossessione.

Another important key figure to the Italian neo-realism movement was film-maker/Cinema critic is Giuseppe De Santis who had worked on the script for Ossessione. De Santis wrote an article in Cinema in 1941 calling for a new improved cinematic naturalism. Under fascism there were attempts to produce a realist style through the use of what was known as calligraphism. The calligraphic system didnt go anywhere even near far enough towards realism for De Santis and the critics at Cinema. Cesare Zavattini another Cinema critic/filmmaker (a close associate of De Santis), reinforced this in 1942 with a call for a new cinema. In the midst of this call a demand for a less calligraphic, more realist cinema, Zavattini argued that, The ideal film would be 90 minutes of the life of a man to whom nothing happens.36

While Antonioni fully supported the calls for realism and especially the desire for a new cinema in his early writings and later film works, he was also aware of the political functions that realism could serve through narrative. Antonionis writing of the early 1940s were marked particularly by discussion of neo-realist films, by his distance from political and
36

Quoted from an old Radio Times article, Internet article retrieved from: <http://www.sofacinema.co.uk/visitor/product/27745-Umberto-D.html> 35

social messages these contained, and especially from the dominant notion of a national popular culture which emerged from the direct experience of the war, of the resistance, and of ideas of the left anti-fascist struggle put forward in cinema, in the films from the Cinema group, by De Santis, Lizzani, Zavattini ,Visconti and then in later films and by the later defenders of Neo-realism.37

Whilst the possibility of utilising the cinema, to benefit the cause of socialism excited many of the young critics at the Cinema journal, the substitution of art for political motivation, Antonioni believed was not the function of cinema and a betrayal to creative possibilities. The Cinema was for making films, for experimenting, with new forms and exploring streams of consciousness, for investigating deeper human sciences and spiritual mysteries of reality to the edge of abstraction. Politics on the other hand was for politicians, not for film-makers, it was an entirely separate field, of hidden dusty old civil servants waving pieces of paper at each other and soulless machine like bureaucratic clerks stamping and filing requests. Antonioni, once again found himself in the same critical position he had been before in 1935 when fascist intellectuals wanted to utilise the cinema for propaganda, only this time with leftist ideals. He was particularly interested in the positions taken by the editorial group at Cinema at the time:
In fact, today, there is a group of young intellectuals whose predominant activity is with the cinema or with literature who are particularly attentive to the most trying daily realities. Many of them (not all) have our esteem and there can be no doubt that their actions are governed by the purity of their feelings, but these are informed by a principle according to which social problems diminish the force of the artistic problem. The artist ought not to seek to avoid speaking his own language. If by dedicating himself to other work, he ends by killing that voice, it would suggest that his artistic needs were not sufficiently compelling. In the contrary instance the work of art will be born, and in it contingent events and set programs to an abstract level.38
37 38

see Lorenzo Cuccu, La vision come problema (Rome, Bulzoni 1973)

Antonioni, Michelangelo, La questione individuale Lo Schermo (August-September 1943) pp.11-12. 36

Antonioni wrote this article in the autumn of 1943 in the months of the upheaval and fall of Mussolinis fascist regime. Its an unusual article, unusual in the sense that Antonioni very rarely made political statements and normally when he did it was plea to distance cinema from the political arena. Antonioni said that:

If social questions preoccupy my thoughts, it is because my creative demon has left me.39

Realism in film for Antonioni was a significant aesthetical strategy just as it had been in the 19th Century in the novels of Flaubert, Dickens, Tolstoy and Joyce and in the paintings of Gustave Coubert and Franois Millet. A similar, perhaps and possibly only a coincidence is, just like these men used also used realism in the articulation of their work Antonioni avoided being labelled, categorised or succumbed to any kind of ideological political or religious group. In defence of his own position against the use of politics in art, Antonioni argued in order for art to be art, it must be pure art and that the use of politics counters art so in fact renders it more towards a political piece than a work of art. Antonioni mentioned Matisses worst canvas, his only political one at a time when he had turned to briefly to divisionism (political anarchism), he also cited James Joyces; Negations of Political Passions, which Joyce satirised both politics and religion as some kind of mental health disease, more hindrance than help, a vile and repulsive scourge to humanity,. These examples had contemporary import; they affected Antonioni and the Italian Cinema:
One cant help hearing the rumblings, the laments, that are so crucial in the history of humanity and behind which there are all those problems that everyone knows so well. But these problems of a social kind, before which an older right of the artist to isolation needs to be affirmed.One needs to respond with ones own language and if this language touches on being art, it will have accomplished a valuable social responsibility. Because the pleasure which art gives is not merely an illusory pleasure; today more

39

Ibid., 37

than ever it appears as the most human of all happiness.40

The neorealist cinema that emerged immediately after the war in 1945 was not only the result of a contention for a different style of cinema, but to some an ongoing struggle for a different way of life, freed from the bondage of fascism. This new cinema was an anti-fascist cinema, it had a role to play to re-connect the Risorgimento and continue its revolution of a unified Italy. The fight, victory and eradication of a common fascist enemy by Christian, Communist, Socialist, Marxist and Humanist factions, now supplied the cinema with a fertile ground to utilise, explore new and uncensored ideas and in turn re-point the moral compass of the Italian nation in the wake of its transformation. Neo-realism had a clear and definable purpose in the aftermath of the war years to witness the ills of society and then to state them before the public in order to raise their consciousness.41The immediate post war represented a golden historical moment for Italy to traverse from the rubble of a dark fascist society towards a brighter new optimism of a compassionate and more caring socialist society.

Roberto Rossellini, was one of the first at that decisive moment to answer the call with substantial level of moral content with his war trilogy, Rome, Open City (1945) following it immediately after with Paisa (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948). Vittorio De Sica quickly followed suit, concentrating more on the hardships and social reality of the working class, with Shoeshine (1946) Bicycle Thieves in (1947). De Santis, also found his ground through a display of overt sexuality, with the Tragic Hunt (1947) and with commercially successful neo-realist film of that year Bitter Rice. The neo-realist era pushed forward into the 1950s

40 41

Ibid., Michalczyk, John J, The Italian political filmmakers. Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, (1986) p.14

38

with films like Stromboli (1950), Miracle in Milan (1951) and Umberto D (1952). At its extreme point neo-realism was a celebration of populism, humanism, a love of the people, their goodness, their love, and of a realism that was essentially of a social and political reality of Italy immediately after the war and post fascism.

Antonioni would also continue to make neo-realist films in the 1950s beginning with his first feature with Cronaco di Amore (1950), though Antonioni, would focus more on style and personal relationships of outside the focus of the social conditions of the working class. By the late 40/50s the neorealist cinema seemed too subject to a concern in its attempts to avoid changes of commercialism, of escapism, of an interest in illusions and illusory happiness, and above all the fear of not participating in current political and social events; its gritty realism was sometimes programmatic, academic, artificial, parading itself as a sign of truth; in fact such truth to Antonioni, often resulted in the avoidance and repression of fantasy and dream, and even of ideas.

V. Documentary Films (1947-1950)

In 1948 Antonioni made another short documentary N.U (Netteza Urbana) about street cleaners of Rome. The rather spare visual quality of Antonionis film is evident in his second short. The last shots are unmistakably Antonionis. It is dusk and the street cleaners are returning home, a train is heard of screen. The last shot shows the train leaving carrying/them or the days sweepings. It moves across the frame to reveal a wide, bare, and very clean road. In N.U Antonioni rejects the formality of conventional Italian documentary of the time, aiming for truth rather than logic and building his film not from planned sequences but from
39

lots of small fragments. N.U also finds a rhythm in the subject of Romes sanitation workers, who sweep away as the busy city whirls around them, the film emphasises their invisible omnipresence. Antonioni asks us to take a slow, steady look at the world around us, to forget the ordinary pre-occupations and to contemplate. Though the film begins at dawn and ends at dusk, its principle arrangement is geographic as well as chronological. First we see a worker alone then another, then another against the bells of Trinita dei Monti, and so on.

The film reverses the travelogue interests; however variegated the brilliant Eternal City may be, the street cleaner is everywhere, in visible to the populance and indifferent to the landmarks yet ironically essential to them, to Romes Nettezza. We see him humble and modest, even docile, working alone or with a fellow worker, behind a broom, followed by a truck. We see him eating against a wall or taking a nap. We see his efficacy and modest technology. We see him feed scraps to the pigs. Workers drink milk out of metal pails, fetch morsels from a trash can, or eat their lunches in a bleak street against a stone wall. A worker sweeps up the scraps of a letter discarded in an argument. Halfway through the film, we encounter a street cleaner asleep at the foot of some steps. Then the camera pans to the faade of a tiny Church. The next shot shows another street cleaner sleeping in a quite different place, on a wall overlooking a panoramic view of Rome. The film is about how we overlook workers in the everyday obsession with our own affairs. The camera refuses to simplify. And we are not asked to sympathise or pity the street cleaners.

The carefully articulated scale and distribution of the figures, the textures and lighting, the very beautiful imagery, discourages easy social judgements. Antonionis most valuable contribution to the cinema can already be seen is his unrelenting insistence on the value of the
40

pure visual given. Here is one part of the banal urban scene made visible. Few filmmakers before 1948 had asked before. The invisibility of the Spazzini (street cleaners) is made clearly evident before we are told they are invisible. The best parts are unaccompanied by voice over, like the elderly street cleaner who swoops down on the torn love letter or the amorous young street cleaner who drags his broom behind him. He yearned to look beyond such things and into the hearts of individuals. His films were about street sweepers, not street sweeping, is the way the film critic Robert Haller put it. But no one would let him make the kind of films he wanted to make.42

In Lamorosa menzogna (The amorous life 1948-1949) on the fumetti, picture magazines which tell stories in strip cartoon form, but with photographs instead of drawing (photo romance comic strip). The film opens with photographs being taken for a story in a very unglamorous small studio in Rome. It goes on to show the lives of the stars of the fumetti. Far from being romantic figures of their audiences dreams, they are ordinary working people - the hero for instance is Sergio Raimondo, a garage mechanic and a shop girl Annie OHarra, along with the director of the fumetti, his photographer and lighting technician. Already Antonioni is interested in people first as individuals, rather than symbolic figures, or representatives of a social condition. Antonioni said:
The events and situations of the day were extraordinarily unusual, and perhaps the most interesting thing to examine at the time was the relationship between the individual and society. It wasnt necessary to know the protagonists thoughts however, when I started making films, things were somewhat 43 different

The creation of the fumetti resembles in a modest way the creation of a film, though the critical moment the historically posed models freeze instead of act. In place of a
42

Online Obituary New York Times, retrieved from < http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/movies/31cnd-antonio.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all> 43 Quoted in Robin Wood and Ian Cameron Antonioni London:Vista (1970) P. 33 41

cinematographer and an imposing Arriflex, there is a funny little photographer and an old twin-lens Rolleicord. The film is not too visually striking, except for one sequence that anticipates later work in some interesting ways. It is Antonionis first mirror shot. A pan shows Annie O Haras reflection in a big vanity mirror shot, then repeats it in a small mirror to her right, then moves across the fumetti cover to the real Annie. Antonioni uses the mirrors quite elaborately in L Avventura (1960) and Leclisse (1963) to reflect critical moments when the heroines sense of identity is questioned. Lamorosa menzogna, which is amusing in a light satirical way, reflects an aspect of Antonioni that the broad public doesnt know well but that is amply evident in his interviews and writings. He is a man of wit and intelligence. Indeed he used the experience of this film to draft a scenario that became Fellinis Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik) with the same thematic quality as The Three Faces of a Woman episode he directed in I Tre Volti (1965) and the studio photography scenes in Blow-up (1966).

Superstizione (Superstition, 1949) locates its case histories on a catalogue of outlawed superstitious practices in a small village in Camerino in the Marches in the central eastern region of Italy. The interest is mostly anthropological. The film shows villagers making charms, casting spells, and exorcising ills in the most unself conscious way. A girl breaks a mirror. A warlock helps another girl find out why her fianc has not written in three months. An old woman kills a snake, burns it, and scatters the ashes in front of an enemys door. Another old woman puts money in the pocket of a dead man who is carried on a wooden sled. There is no particular order in which these practices are displayed, but documentary film in which Antonioni evoked real places.

Sette canne, un vestito (Seven Reeds, One Suit, 1950) on the manufacture of rayon thread shot
42

in Torviscosa near Trieste. This a wonderful short piece of post-war industrial documentary. The theme of the film follows the production process of the rayon in quite literally in a very linear thread of shots. It opens with a nicely timed steady 2000 sweeping pan over establishing the wide expanse of the rayon industrial area before coming to halt in the centre of the main factory building itself, then cuts straight to an extreme long shot of a well balanced field of surface area and sky, with a 400 line of the edge of the field running up from the bottom right corner of the frame parallel with the long line of Rayon reeds.

In this bottom right corner a dark shadow is moving along the line of the reeds, we just about have time to register its a harvesting machine, and Antonioni confirms this with by following it now side on, with a wide medium tracking shot of the machine moving right to left in slap back centre in the frame. He then takes a static shot, of the machine coming towards the camera allowing it to pass beyond the driver to reveal the two workers collecting the reeds on a trailer towed behind the machine. He then moves to the left side of the machine and takes a close-up tracking the blade as it cuts the rayon reeds, he holds this shot for a little while then the camera tilts following the reeds up the belt of the machine and takes a candid shot of the workers collecting the reeds. He matches this shot by reversing back to the original side of machine for a full view riding or tracking along with the tin pot headed workers blindly scrambling to pull the rayon clear from the machine, he then stops and holds the shot while the trailer full of rayon to pass.

Then we see a long line of trailers moving in full screen, once the pass they reveal an empty field with the large smoking chimneys of the Rayon factory in the back ground. It then cuts to a slow steady pan around of the factory building and courtyard, then to shot of a truck pulling
43

wood (for the furnaces). We then get a reverse shot of the truck with a cloud of dust rising up behind it and in the same shot an awesome tilt shot up the large brick and glass lit faade of architectural structure of the main factory building. It then quickly moves to from a very low angle ground tilt shot, to a high angle air to surface shot slowly panning and tilting the arrival of the train of rayon carts being pulled around the factory courtyard into the building as the music slows to halt.

The next scene is the first interior shot, the fade of the music was only momentary and it rises again in crescendo this time with a faster tempo as the camera follows it down the conveyor belt to the grinder and then tilts up to show the network of pipes it must travel through, even going to and exterior shot of the pipes scaling the building walls and up over the roof and back in again to close up of now shredded and grinded lumps of pulp. Again we see the usual Antonioni of people working and disappearing in clouds of steam and dust. And candid shots of people or only parts of them from obscure angles, the film continues in much the same way, with very rhythmic patterns of machinery, to the collection and assembly of the reels of thread, with a collection of close-ups and wide shots, which reveal the magnitude of this modern industrial manufacturing process. The journey of the rayon culminates in the display of fine garments on the high fashion Milan cat walk. Sette canne, un vestito, resonates of themes, devices and kind shot structure that surface in many of Antonionis future. Antonioni made two other documentaries around this period in 1950: La villa dei mostri (The Villa of Monsters, 1950), on the sculptures of monstrous human figures in the park of the ancient Villa Orsini in Bomarzo, near Viterbo; and La funiva del faloria (The Funicular of Mount Faloria, 1950) on the cable railway that runs bewteen the town of Cortina dAmpezzo and Mount Faloria. Antonioni was unable to make the film he planned because of a drastic
44

reduction in budget. N.U. - Nettezza urbana (1948) and L'Amorosa menzogna (1949), in particular, were well received: both won awards from the Italian Guild of Film Journalists and the latter competed at Cannes. On the strength of his documentaries, Antonioni secured financing from Vallani Film to make his first fictional feature in Milan. He returned to Rome for conferences on the making of a feature.

Conclusion
Antonionis early writings and documentaries of the 1930 and 40s are positive indications and laid strong foundations, to the kind of cinematic visual narrative style later surface in his most of his future film works. The substance for these foundations, can be attributed to the main factors covered in the discussion, such as; his early life growing up in Ferrara, with an early fascination to architectural shapes and landscape within his locale; intellectual development, knowledge in the classical and modern visual arts, music and literature; an interest and involvement in theatre and writing; an attraction and growing attachment to cinematic form and narrative. These factors are all internal, constructed by Antonionis own personal circumstances, decisions, interests and pursuits. External factors which Antonioni had no control over such as; the fascist regime and its policy; the rise, development and establishment of an Italian cinematic culture and film industry; were all firmly seated and in place before Antonioni started writing for Corriere Padano in 1935.

This is not to say, that had these external factors not been in place, Antonioni would not have embarked on a journey into cinema and eventually became a film-maker. Antonioni own personal vision and ideas were so disconnected, (but not oblivious) to external events outside the cinema, so, it is highly possible he would have still been a film-maker, and even made the
45

same films shot for shot, frame for frame, because even in his early writing we can see some of the familiar ideas he utilised many years later. In the same way his early writings were a direct internal self-determined decision, beyond the external events of the war, the fall of fascism and the liberation, he kept working and building on his own original internal ideas and eventually extended these ideas to his documentary work, which in turn manifested later his feature films. There is almost a revolving cyclonic pattern effect in maintaining the internal, in the midst of external change punctuating throughout the work of Antonioni.

What we get from an Antonionis early writing is a very precise study of the technical aesthetics of film, with a deep concentration to detail of the photography and mise en scene, its light, shade and contrasts, position, movement and framing. The visual style constituted the look, feel and atmosphere of a film, all these elements were a purer source of cinematic art, than the functions of the conventional literary theatre. The kind of films Antonioni had a tendency to be enthusiastic for, were films that explored narrative more creatively in a pictorial sense and relied less dependently on oral narration. He focused very rarely on the underlying or overall meaning of a film, but on the way these were conveyed through the language of film. He judged and valued films more on their artistic merit and creative ability to order a film into images, than their attempts to convey a social or moral message.

This should not be misunderstood or read that Antonioni was anti-storytelling or against character driven narratives. Antonioni had a great passion for storytelling and nearly all his feature films are indentified with strong performances and some memorable dialogue from his main protagonists. However, what Antonioni strived and was attempting to do, even as far in his early writing in the late 1930s was to explore deeper the visual possibilities of
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narrative as a means of storytelling. His study and criticism of film and his fiction writing moved him closer in this direction, in that a story shouldnt have to be just from the position of what we hear from a character, but what we can see in a character, either as an observer in the action utilising the camera as a third person, (just as in the proscenium theatre the audience is from the fourth wall) or from a shared point of view, so we get the direct experience of being the character temporally. Most, if not all, of Antonionis early fiction writings are written in the 1st person narrative, from the point of view from the thoughts, feelings and descriptions of a scene by the narrator. There is almost a kind of film noir detective style effect of the narrator in a situation, trying to make sense of what is unfolding before their eyes, often in quite a serious, dark, dulcet, mysterious construction of an almost abstract reality. And although these are more, observational moments of mixed emotions, sometimes often fraught with intense anxiety (Uomini di note) or an extremely cold calculated detachment to a horrible disturbing reality (il fatto e limmagine), Antonioni was extremely creative and well crafted at using words to paint these images in the absence of a camera with astonishing detail.

In Antonionis work there is never clear cut complete resolution, or a linear string of events of cause and effect, building to a final conclusion or moral justification, but episodic serial moments. Even in Antonionis early fiction writing we are still left with questions that are never provided; Uomini di note, is more translation of a state of mind, a perception of reality through abstract thinking, but it is never made clear as to how or why the narrator is feeling as he does; the death on the beach, the discovery of the floating corpse in il fatto e limmagine, is only merely a record of a real incident or a moment crossed with elaborate fictional details, it never explains, who was the corpse? What happened after, what was the
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result of the incident? Of course, Antonioni is sharing a small personal moment (within a larger historical moment of the war), then leaves us almost stranded in the temps mort of the narrative, with questions, but no answers, simply shifting to another scene, event, episode or incident, that often bears no relation to each other.

This echoes and resonates through lot of Antonioni later films, in fact probably in all of his work, there are questions which remain unsolved and while it may have been his intention to just purely to construct moments or incidents with no other reason other than simply to build ambiguity, for their cinematic potential, he certainly did them with exact precision, innate detail and above all a unique identifiable style. Antonioni not only captured the look of the scene, but the very essence of the air around the scene, there is something deeply spiritual, an almost quest to indentify something that is omnipresent, unseen or heard in the momentary temporal space embedded somewhere between, a silence, a laughter, a shape, a building, a surface, a shadow, a landscape. The natural elements and temperature; wind, fog, rain, cold mist, a bright hot sunny day, all these settings and conditions have temporary effect which create and enhance the mood or ambience of scene. Antonioni was aware of the incredible potential of the co-existence of the natural world and his portrayal of humanity and itself imposed identity upon and within it. There is crossover in this respect that is equally applicable to both his documentary and fiction. Antonioni once said: Rather than there being a documentary influence in my films, it seems to me more correct to speak of 44 the narrative tendency in my documentaries

Gente del Po, is a film about the Po river and the people who live and work on and along its

44

Antoninoni, Michelangelo, Questions a Antonioni Positif No 20 July 1959 p.9. 48

banks, it tells a story from an objective reality. In much the same way N.U is as much about the Rome city landscape as it is about the spazzini (street cleaners). These are two very good films which highlight humanity in relation to, on one hand a natural landscape in the case of Gente del Po, and the manmade structures of Rome in N.U. In addition to this, Sette canne, un vestito (Seven Reeds, One Suit) is the production of a manmade material from a raw natural material, which clearly demarks the relationship of the natural environment with the highly mechanised industrial environment. In all these examples, the vast expanse of the world landscape is balanced neatly between surface and sky, natural space and manufactured structures. This stylistic of an overbearing landscape or the immediate surroundings are an integral part of the work of Antonioni, and although the compositional aspects of the setting and framing are among some of the finest examples of 20th century cinematic art and he was exceptionally good at it, imagery, it is not the sum total of his work. It is a seriously unfair and unjustified notion to label Antonioni as an artist purely obsessed with creating images over content. As much as there is a firmly grounded, technical, formalistic aesthetical approach to the art and craft of film-making in Antonioni, he did not neglect the fundamental issues of the human condition in his characters.

Uomini di note, is as much about the internal psychological state of the narrator, and his relation to the dark foggy night streets of Ferrara, lost in an uncertain reality. His festival reports on the Venice film festival, are as much about the people at the event in wartime Venice (Inaugurazione, 1940 and Per una storia della mostra, 1941) creates and invokes an atmosphere of the event and both pieces reiterate a dark gloomy sadness, that reads more like a funeral, than a cultural celebration of film, which is, indeed understandable, given the time and circumstances around the writings. Antonioni centres a lot of his work around human
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relations, interaction and feelings.

In Il fatto e limmagine fiction is crossed with a factual incident, but the central idea of people in the space on the beach, united in the morbid curiosity of the grim discovery of a dead person, of whom we know nothing about. This was to become one of Antonionis recurring themes, and in some way or another most of his later fiction films would include a death, normally a very public death, either through an accident, suicide, natural causes or murder. In Cronaco di Amore (1950) there are two deaths, one in rather suspicious circumstances when Guidos former fiance Giovanna falls to her death down an elevator shaft and a plot to murder Paulos husband Enrico never materialises as he dies in a car accident on the fateful night of his planned assignation. I Vinti (1953) highlights three case of deliberate and reactionary killing by delinquent youths in three European countries (France, Italy and the UK). In Le amiche (1955) Rossetta attempts an overdose and eventually kills herself by drowning in the river, a subject that Antonioni had explored previously in Tentato Suicidio, an episode in L'Amore in Citt (1953) a documentary account of real people who had attempted suicide. Il Grido (1957) begins with the news of Irmas husband death in Australia and culminates with the death of Aldo falling from a factory tower either by accident or from suicide it is not made clear, but he dies nonetheless. While there is no death as such in Lavventuura, there is a suggestion that Anna had fallen either accidently or as Antonioni said himself I heard she committed suicide but I dont believe that. La notte begins with a visit to Giovanni and Lidias dying friend Tommaso who passes away before the end of the film In Leclisse, there is the body of the dead drunk driver drowned at the wheel of Pieros stolen Alfa Romeo sports car, as it pulled out the river. Blow-up is centred around a murder (either real or imagined). Zabriskie Point has three deaths, one of student activist shot dead by a
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policeman, who is then shot dead by the main protagonist as a reaction, who is eventually shot dead on his return to Los Angeles in his stolen aeroplane by the Police. In The Passenger (1975) the weapons salesman Mr Robertson dies early in the film of a heart attack, and the character of John Locke who assumes his identity, is suggested to have been murdered in the long closing hotel/courtyard shot of the film. And in Antonionis final feature film, Beyond The Clouds a young woman describes to a roaming director played by John Malkowitz, how she killed her father. Nearly all Antonionis films feature a death. It is perhaps a curious coincidence that Antonioni opted to make his first attempt at documentary in a mental health hospital in the late 1930s, because periodically he would return to this issue in future film works. Antonioni kind of viewed people, normally indentified with a mental health problem, as not so much mad, but different or outside of the normal everyday perception of reality. His early experience may have struck a chord or touched him in a way that he developed a deep sense of sympathy for people who were shunned, hidden or neglected for the simple reason they were out of the common perception of the world or just felt they couldnt dance to the same tune that society demanded from them. Antonioni would later explore mental health difficulties, through the experiences and stories of real people in the episode Tentato Suicidio in L'Amore in Citt, in a bold attempt to not only to raise awareness of the issue of suicide, depression and anxiety in a predominately Italian catholic society, which viewed the very notion of suicide as a sin, ungodly and totally unthinkable. Guido Aristarco, a leading critic and editor of Cinema Nuovo, well known for his Crocean ideals, criticised Tentato Suicidio, for being over academic, intellectualist, formalist and labelled it elzeverisimo (pretentious) and compared it with the high culture pages of a newspaper45 Antonioni responded to the article, first commenting

45

Aristarco, Guido. L'Amore in Citt, Cinema Nuovo 15th January 1954 P.27 51

to his own serious convictions and concern for the psychological and moral plight of the subjects suffering. Furthermore, he stated he was directly concerned with content, with the substance of theme and attempting to arouse in the audience a revulsion towards suicide by depicting the spiritual squalor of the characters. He totally rejected the accusation of elzeverisimo or silly nonsense and expressed his deepest gratitude to the bravery of the subjects who came forward to share their stories and appear in the film: They also came because they were aware that this moment of sincerity might be useful to them and for
others to take a look at an action which is truly the only irremediable action anyone can takewhen the motive is that of love, it is matter of a passing crisis if the person wanting to suicide is able to overcome it, 46 nothing is more apparently easier than finding once again an appetite for living

Despite the criticism Antonioni unperplexed furthered his commitment to this issue in his next feature film Le amiche, in which a young woman attempts and finally kills herself, in a story of unrequited love. In all of Antonionis films there are characters who are not so much alienated, but detached in their relationships either as couples, friends, lovers or from the world at large. Antonioni operated on a highly close and personal level of his characters, not just highlight their plight, but try and get a sense of what it must be like them in a confused state of mind. The character of Guilana in Deserto Rosso, is a woman also experiencing mental health difficulties which she has struggling coming to terms with. Antonioni attempted to her convey Guillanas condition, and the intense moments of fear she experiences through using high pitched electronic sounds and sudden flashes of colour, which is a common symptom of sufferers of schizophrenia.

Antonioni was aware of the potential of colour film in his early writing for its use as an

46

Antonioni responds to Aristarcos review of Antonionis episode in La amore in cittaSucidi in citta Cinema Nuovo 15th March 1954. The article is in the form of a letter to Aristarco 52

aesthetical property, his 1940 treatment for a colour film Terra Verde, echoes the fantasy world in which Guillana describes the magical colourful beach in her bedtime story for her son in Deserto Rosso Antonionis first ever colour film. The thematic subject of Terra Verde and notion of an ecological catastrophe through climate change is yet again, another early example of how far ahead Antonionis was thinking in relation to humanity and the natural world. Desserto Rosso was innovative in the 1960s for its attention to the environmental damage in Italys own transformation from an agrarian society to a heavy industrialised nation, an issue which is now a global concern in both the developed and developing world.

It is clear that a lot of Antonionis work really came from an extension of his original ideas in his writing and experiences of the 1930/40s. Starting, first with a close attention and exploration of cinematic ideas and possibilities, attempts to make a documentary, creates his own pieces of fictional writing where he begins addressing the themes of human perception and reality for Corriere Padano. He moves to Rome attends the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, making his first short film and continues to write reviews, criticism, treatments and festival reports for the journals Cinema and Bianco e Nero. He then journeys towards collaborative scriptwriting and gaining practical experience as an assistant. This experience and involvement enables him to make his first commercial documentary film Gente del Po, which is hampered due to footage lost damaged during the German occupation but is finally completed in 1947. This is the beginning of his own, technical apprenticeship as a film-maker where he develops an astonishing and remarkable skill for technical and artistic composition.

It was all these elements of almost nearly 15 years of study, writing, attempts, failures, wars, losing footage, maintaining his distance from the political bandwagons and his sheer
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determination that set Antonioni on the road to become one of worlds most gifted International film-makers, who would, and continues to inspire film-makers worldwide. Antonionis life is as much as a testament to the struggle of art and the humanities. His film works are themselves, a struggle to observe, learn, innovate, dream and realise. Antonioni teaches the fundamental faults in humanity, through its insensitivity and ignorance to each other and the world around it, but, in the same breath, also what is incredibly unique and fascinating in its beauty and mystery and as another great poet, Wallace Stevens, wrote, "Death is the mother of beauty."

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Works Cited

Bibliography:
Antonioni, Michelangelo, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, American edition ed. Marga Cottino-Jones. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996 Arrowsmith, William, Antonioni: The Poet of Images, ed. Ted Perry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995 Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema, From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum,1983. Cameron, Ian and Robin Wood, Antonioni. London: Studio Vista, 1968 Chatman, Seymour, Antonioni: Or, the Surface of the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 Joyce, James. Ulysses. The corrected text. (Gabler, Hans Walter. Editor). New York: Random House, 1986. Michalczyk, John J, The Italian political filmmakers. Fairleigh: Dickinson University Press, 1986 Monaco, James. How to Read a Film. The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media. Oxford University Press, 1981. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Lavventura. London: British Film Institute, 1997. Rifkin, Lee Edwin, Antonioni's Visual Language. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982 Rohdie, Sam, Antonioni. London: British Film Institute, 1990 Shiel, Mark, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City, London: Wallflower, 2006 55

Sorlin, Pierre, Italian National Cinema, (1896-1996), London: Routledge,1996 Tassone, Aldo, Antonioni, Paris: Flammarion, 2007 Vanoye, Francis. Profession : reporter. Michelangelo Antonioni. Nathan, 1992. [In French].

Journal articles:
Antonioni, Michelangelo. La poesie par la bande Positif No. 232/233 (July/Aug 1980) pp. 124-125. Antonioni, Michelangelo. Sei Film. Positif, [Revue] No.69 (Dec 1964) pp.82-91 Antonioni, Michelangelo, Makaroni Postif No.66 (Sept 1964) pp. 64-72, No. 67-68 (Oct/ Nov 1964) pp. 93-107 (extracted and translated from Cinema Nuovo, No.163, 164, 165) Antonioni, Michelangelo. Questions Antonioni. [interview] Positif, No.30. (July 1959). Antonioni, Michelangelo. Le realite et le Cinema Direct Postif, No.66 (Sept 1964) pp. 33-36 (extract from Cinema Nuovo No.167 Aude, Francoise & Thirard, Paul-Louis. Entretien avec Michelangelo Antonioni, Postif No.263 (Jan 1983) pp.20-27 Benayoun, Robert. Une dialectique du detachment Positif No.263 (Jan 1983) Bonsaver, Guido. Geometry of Feelings. Sight and Sound, (July 2005) pp 22-24. Carrere Emmanuel. De retour en Italie: Indentification dune femme Positif, No.263 (Jan 1983) pp.36-40 Fallaci, Oriana, Viste A Antonioni Postif No.44 (March 1962) pp.29-35 Franklin, Anna, Antonioni signs for Two Telegrams Screen International No.1055 (April 1996) p.14 Kral, Petr, Traversee du Desert: De quelques constantes antonioniennes Postif, No.263 (Jan 1983) pp.30-36 Labarthe, Andr. Entretien avec Michelangelo Antonioni. Cahiers du cinma, no 112 (Oct 1960) pp. 1-14. Le Fanu, Mark. No Place like the Present. Sight and Sound, (July 2006) pp 34-38.l Nowell-Smith Geoffery. Antonioni: Before and After, Sight and Sound, (Nov 1995) pp.16-20. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. Shape around a Black Point. Sight and Sound, (Winter 1963/64) p.14. Ranvaud, Don. Identification of a Woman [Review]. Monthly Film Bulletin, (March 1983) pp.59-60 Ranvaud, Don. Chronicle of a Career. Monthly Film Bulletin, (March 1983) pp.61-62 Schliesser, John. Antonionis Heideggerian Swerve Film and Literature Quarterly, Vol 26, No 4 (1998) pp. 279-287. 56

Tassone, Aldo. Entretien avec Michelangelo Antonioni Postif No.292 (June 1985) pp.38-45 Thirard, Paul-Louis. A Propos Du Desert Rouge, Positif [Revue] No.69 (Dec 1964) pp.92-93

Internet articles:
Brottman, Mikita. Risus Sardonicus: Neurotic and pyschological laughter. Maryland Institute College of Art. Retrieved from:

<http://www.degruyter.de/journals/humor/2002/pdf/15_401.pdf>
Brown, James. (Untitled Internet article; copyright May, 2002.) Retrieved from:

<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/antonioni.html>
Capozzi, Rocco. Ecos Prophetic Vision of Mass Culture. In McLuhan Studies. Premiere Issue. Retrieved from:

<http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss1/1_1art10.htm>
Chan, Adrian. Gilles Deleuze and Contemplative Cinema Internet site, retrieved from:

<http://www.gravity7.com/blog/film/2007/01/gilles-deleuze-andcontemplative-cinema.html>
Chuang, Alice. In Search of Lost Time: La notte and the Time Image, Internet site, retrieved from:

<http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/ETD-db/available/etd-06102006151253/unrestricted/In_Search_of_Lost_Time.pdf>
Corbett, Daniel. Is the adventure of Universalizing, emancipatory Culture ["Modernity" as it arose in the West...] over?

<http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/jpg/Kahn_Salk.html>
Gilles Deleuze. Excerpt from Cinema 2, The Time Image Internet site, retrieved from:

<http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0105.html>
Donato Totaro. Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project Part One & Two (31 March 1999) International Festival, Internet site, retrieved from:

<http://www.international-festival.org/node/28661> <http://www.international-festival.org/node/28662>
Gandy, Matthew Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonionis Red Desert retrieved from: 57

<http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118868765/abstract>
Gardner, Colin. Antonioni's Blow Up And The Chiasmus Of Memory Internet site, retrieved from:

<http://artbrain.org/journal2/gardner.html>
Labarthe, Andr. Entretien avec Michelangelo Antonioni. Cahiers du cinma, no 112 (Oct 1960)

<http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/interviews/michelangelo_antonioni_510.html>
Norton, Glen W. Antonionis Modernist Language. Internet site, retrieved from:

<http//:www.geocities.com/hollywood/3781/modernism.html?200621>
Pratt-Robson, David. Michelangelo Antonioni. Internet site, retrieved from:

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/pop_playground/michelangeloantonioni.html
Solman, Gregory, L'Avventura Internet site, retrieved from:

<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/l_avventura.html>
Turner, Jack. Antonionis The Passenger as Lacanian Text. Other Voices, The (e) Journal of Cultural Criticism. v.1, n.3 (January 1999).

<http://www.othervoices.org/1.3/jturner/passenger.html>
Villella, Fiona A. Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point Internet site, retrieved from:

<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/00/4/zabriskie.html>
York, Gregory. Chung Kuo Comes To China Globe and Mail article (2nd Nov 2004) East, South, West, North. Internet site retrieved from:

<http://zonaeuropa.com/20070803_1.htm>

Filmography: Assistant Director: 1942: I Due Foscari. Directed by Enrico Fulchigoni 1942: Les Visteurs du Soir. Directed by Marcel Carn
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Scriptwriter: 1942: I Due Foscari in collaboration with G Campanile Mancini, Mino Doletti, Enrico Fulchigoni. 1942: Un Pilot ritorna in collaboration with Rosario Leone, Ugo Betti, Massimo Mida, Gherardo Gherardi. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. 1947: Caccia Tragica in collaboration with Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Cesare Zavattini, Corrado Alvaro, Umberto, Tullio Pinelli. Directed by Giuseppe De Santis 1952: Le Sciecco Bianco (The White Shiek) in collaboration with Fredrico Tullini. Directed by Fredrico Fellini. Early Documentaries: 1943-1947 Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley) (Italy) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Production: I.C.E.T. Photographed by Piero Portalupi, Music by Mario Labroca (Length: 9 minutes) 1948: N.U. - Nettezza urbana (City Cleaners) (Italy) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Production: I.C.E.T Photographed by Giovanni Ventimiglia. Music by Giovanni Fusco ( Length: 9 minutes) 1948: Superstizione - Non ci credo! (Superstitions) (Italy) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Production: I.C.E.T. Photographed by Giovanni Ventimiglia. Music by Giovanni Fusco. (Length: 9 minutes) 1948-49: LAmorosa menzogna (Lies of Love) (Italy) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Production: Filmus. Photographed by Renato del Frate. Music by Giovanni Fusco, Assistant director: Francesco Maselli (Length:10 minutes) 1950 Sette canne, un vestito (Seven Reeds, One Suit) (Italy) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Production: I.C.E.T. Photographed by Giovanni Ventimiglia. Stock Music (Length: 10 minutes) 1950 La Villa dei mostri (The Villa of the Monsters) (Italy) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Production: Filmus. Photographed by Giovanni De Paoli. Music by Giovanni Fusco. (Length: 10 minutes) 1950 La Funivia del Faloria (The Funicular of Mount Faloria) (Italy) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Production: Theo Uselli. Photographed by Geofreddo Bellisario, Ghedina. Music by Theo Uselli. Length: 10 Minutes Later work written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni: 1950 Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair) 1953 La Signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias) 1953 I Vinti (The Vanquished) ( 1953 Tentato suicidio (Suicide Attempt) ( episode of L'Amore in Citt (Love in the City) 59

1955 Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) 1957 Il Grido (The Cry) 1960 L'Avventura (The Adventure) 1961 La Notte (The Night) 1962 L'Eclisse (The Eclipse) 1964 Il Deserto rosso (Red Desert) 1965 Prefazione: Il Provino (Preface: The Screen Test) episode of I Tre volti (The Three Faces) 1966 Blow-Up 1970 Zabriskie Point 1972 Chung Kuo Cina (Chung Kuo China) 1975 The Passenger (Professione: Reporter) 1980 Il Mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery) 1982 Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman) 1983 Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (Return to Lisca Bianca) (segment of Falsi Ritorni (Fake Returns) 1989 Kumbha Mela 1990 Roma segment of 12 Autori per 12 Citt (12 Authors for 12 Cities) 1992 Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale ( 1995 Al di l delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds) Co-directed by Wim Wenders 2004 Eros , segment omnibus film (Italy)

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