More on Antonioni.

With none other than J Hoberman chiming in now for the Voice, might as well start a fresh entry for Antonioni as well, picking up where "Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912 - 2007" leaves off.

"It was Antonioni who put the mod, as well as the modishness, in modernism," writes Hoberman. "Alienation has never been more gorgeously indulged than in L'Avventura - a mystery that casually abandons its ostensible premise midway through and the stormy triumph of the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, which bestowed its Palm d'Or on Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Seven years later, Antonioni achieved an even greater renown: Thanks to his English-language art-house blockbuster Blowup, he was Beckett in bell-bottoms.... The overrated Blowup and underrated Zabriskie Point form, with The Passenger (1975)... a loose trilogy, less enduring but more personal than the [Monica] Vitti vehicles.... Antonioni's trendiness was a factor of his desire to engage the history of his times. It's suggestive that those contemporary directors who have made the most use of Antonioni's example - Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, the late Edward Yang - are from nations once considered 'third world.'"

Updated through 8/11.

Update: "[I]s the first half of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (Eclipse) an intentional hommage to Marcel L'Herbier's 1928 silent masterpiece L'Argent?" wonders Pat Graham at the Chicago Reader's On Film. "The best argument against the idea is that nobody's ever really argued for it - not to my knowledge, at any rate. But consider the circumstantial clues..."

Updates, 8/8: "So when exactly did I tire of Antonioni to the point of Antonioniennui?" asks Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. Yes, he coined the term, but he also reminds us that he raved for L'Avventura in the Voice in his 1961 review. So what was the tipping point? "I am not sure. It may have been about the time of The Red Desert (1964), which I disliked, and well before Blow-Up (1966), which I liked enormously, unlike the late Pauline Kael, who dismissed it with a yawn." Then:

It suddenly strikes me that I have been writing two weeks about Bergman and Antonioni without ever using the word "eroticism." Antonioni himself once said, "Eroticism is the disease of our time." He may have meant that even sex was a casualty of the human failure to communicate with one another. Perhaps I have become too aware of all the gratuitous nudity and simulated copulation that masquerades as eroticism these days to embroil Bergman and Antonioni in the contemporary corruption of the term. Still, the men and women in their films crossed many frontiers of eroticism in their own time in search of love and identity and a more profound self-knowledge. They were never the hottest shows in town because of the cool intellects at work both behind and in front of the camera. Hence, the pain and poignancy of the soul was never lost sight of in even the steamiest carnal encounters.

"With Antonioni's death, no era has ended, least of all 'l'era atomica,'" writes Nikil Saval for n+1. "Those accords that underwrite our existence are as unstable, as false as ever. This falseness - the fissure between the healthy world we envision and the debilitated one we inherit and further undo - makes it easy to repeat the restless, unraveled lives of Antonioni's characters. It also makes it easy to praise those artists whose work enacts and amplifies the jittery unease that rules our everyday life - as if being distracted oneself were the same as representing and scrutinizing distraction. Antonioni reminds us that the sharpest effects are achieved by those who look unflinchingly at the pains and impasses of our time while maintaining a part of themselves that does not succumb to them - those artists who can help it if there's no peace."

Bergman and Antonioni "may have been mutually repulsed by their similarities to each other," suggests DK Holm at the Vancouver Voice. "Though I esteem both directors, as a viewer, right now in my life, I have to come down on the side of Antonioni.... His surrealism and odd, hard-edged view of modern life always struck me as realism."

Updates, 8/9: "No director did more to combat the idea that a movie is an illustrated novel," writes Jeffrey Gantz for the Boston Phoenix. "That was one of his two revolutions; he also created a post-Copernican cinema where human beings are not always the center of the cosmos.... Good or bad, Antonioni's films always start from cinema year zero. The narrative, when there is one, implodes: Sandro and Claudia don't find - or even look very hard for - Anna; Thomas (David Hemmings) in Blow-Up doesn't solve the murder he appears to have photographed.... It's a cinema of liberation - from the conventions of everyday movies, from the boundaries of everyday life."

Josef Braun has DVD recommendations in the Vue Weekly.

Ted Pigeon has a terrific entry on learning about Bergman and Antonioni over the past weeks and days via blogging and online discussions, "the likes of which few newspaper or magazine articles - barring perhaps the New York Times - can replicate."

Update, 8/10: "The essentially forward-looking Bergman and Antonioni would be mildly appalled at the idea that their deaths had closed the door on a particular strain of filmmaking," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman:

"Of course, I'm just as worried as anyone else about the future of the cinema as we know it," [Antonioni] said in Wim Wenders's documentary Chambre 666. "We're attached to it because it gave us so many ways of saying what we felt and thought we had to say. But as the spectrum of new technical possibilities gets wider, that feeling will eventually disappear. There probably always was that discrepancy between the present and the unimaginable future. Who knows what houses are going to look like in the future? The structures we see when we look out of the window probably won't even exist tomorrow... All our contemporary structures will disappear. It won't be quick or straightforward, but it will happen, and we can't do anything to prevent it. All we can do is try to adjust to it."

The structures of which he spoke look pretty sturdy to me. It's more a case of being inundated with evidence of the enduring spirit of Bergman, Antonioni and their contemporaries than having to hunt for it. Antonioni's influence is palpable in the work of Carlos Reygadas (Japón, Battle in Heaven) and Todd Haynes (Safe), and in Gus Van Sant's extraordinary trilogy of Gerry, Elephant and Last Days.

Update, 8/11: David Bordwell notes that Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his reply to Roger Ebert's response to the former's NYT oped - deep breath - he refers to one of David Bordwell's books, "where I make the case that Dreyer experimented with cinematic space (and time). Right: I wrote a book. It takes a book to make such a case. It would take a book to explain and back up in an intellectually satisfying way the charges that Jonathan makes." Comments on popular journalism and responses to several of JR's other points follow - and then: "I'll try to explore just one of the issues Jonathan raises but can't pursue: the question of how stylistically innovative Bergman was." Then comes a valuable primer (with links to earlier entries) on a general arc of the evolution of style in cinema that stretches from deep ranges of focus to flatter tableaus offered by longer lenses and widescreen. After discussing Bergman, he writes, "let's push a bit further and examine Antonioni, that perpetual foil to Bergman.... In the 1950s, unlike Bergman, Antonioni employed quite intricate staging, sustained by long takes," and examples follow. "Once color came along, Antonioni changed his style, moving toward less dense staging and at times almost casual framing (as in The Passenger). He also had recourse to the telephoto technique, but I'd argue he brought something new to it. With Red Desert he accepted the abstraction inherent in the long lens and combined that with color design to create a pure pictorialism." The entry wraps with a "bestiary of stylists."

"Where almost every other movie I'd seen wound things up, L'Avventura wound them down," writes Martin Scorsese in the New York Times:

L'Avventura gave me one of the most profound shocks I've ever had at the movies, greater even than Breathless or Hiroshima, Mon Amour... Or La Dolce Vita. At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked L'Avventura. I knew I was firmly on Antonioni's side of the line, but if you'd asked me at the time, I'm not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini's pictures and I admired La Dolce Vita but I was challenged by L'Avventura. Fellini's film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni's film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. (It was two years later when I caught up with Fellini again, and had the same kind of epiphany with 8 ½.)

The people Antonioni was dealing with, quite similar to the people in F Scott Fitzgerald's novels (of which I later discovered that Antonioni was very fond), were about as foreign to my own life as it was possible to be. But in the end that seemed unimportant. I was mesmerized by L'Avventura and by Antonioni's subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries - or rather the mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time....

Antonioni seemed to open up new possibilities with every movie. The last seven minutes of L'Eclisse... were even more terrifying and eloquent than the final moments of the earlier picture.... Gradually Antonioni brings us face to face with time and space, nothing more, nothing less. And they stare right back at us. It was frightening, and it was freeing. The possibilities of cinema were suddenly limitless.

Posted by dwhudson at August 7, 2007 12:25 PM