Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance
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de Guilan rose. She tells him she wants to escape from her body, and at that he pauses to slake his thirst. By easily satisfying his body, has he escaped from it? Is she trapped in the fact that she insists on denying herself? What Antonioni typically wishes to escape from is the prison of rationality, the abject quotidian use of intelligence, or at least the use of words that, “more than anything else, serve to hide our thoughts” (Cottino-Jones 21). Her self-contentment, her private love—these are not rational. Later, this narrative voice that is both Antonioni and not-Antonioni mentions the sound of the water running in the fountains as a voice, gives evidence that he hears voices everywhere, a voice but not mere words. “The voice is a ‘noise’ which emerges with other noises in a rapport” (Cottino-Jones 49). The voice is the expression of the spirit of the moment through the fact of the body, and what is said, the message to which words are tantamount, does not summarize the voice but merely localizes it. The voice, indeed, is presence and fullness of the act of speaking itself. Goodman says, “When speaking intervenes in the world and shapes experience, it often is, or is taken as, a direct action in the environment, an energy or even a physical thing, rather than the use of the common code for communication” (19). Speaking itself is the voice. In this part of the film, for example, the boy and girl speak to one another, from the moment of their meeting until the moment of their parting, rather as though at cross purposes, and certainly following two apparently discreet lines of intent that do not promise to intersect. Yet here, as in the story of Carmen and Silvano, the voices of two human beings gradually approximate to one another, just as the rationales upon which they insist on basing their lives move apart. Does one follow the voice or the message?
“This Body of Filth” is the name of the little story from which this segment of the film is taken. It has an interesting ending:
Only now does he notice her strong sensuous figure. It seems to him that he’s never felt so intense a desire to possess a woman. But it’s a different desire, with a certain tenderness and respect. It’s ridiculous, he thinks. And yet there’s a quaver in his voice, and he can’t help it, when he says,
“Can I see you tomorrow?”
She keeps on smiling in the few seconds of silence that precede her reply. And her voice is devoid of all emotion when she speaks.
“I’m entering a cloistered convent tomorrow.”
What a stunning opening for a film. But for me it’s a film that ends here. (Tiber 35)
And we can imagine it, indeed, ending precisely there. On that top landing of the flat of apartments in which she lives. The angelica green, so dense and sweetly gummy one feels the color warping through one’s flesh, and the wine red carpet, red as sacrificial blood, transubstantial, interior. She at her door, looking directly into him, then the door closing. Fade to black.
But onscreen this is not how Antonioni ends his story at all.
We cut to Niccolo frozen in place, his mouth open in shock or amazement, in disappointment or incomprehension, his eyes trained upon her door. Then clumsily he turns, makes his way to the stairwell, and we look down the opening to see him pass all the way to the bottom level—Orfeo searching for Eurydice in the nightmarish bureaucracy in Orfeu Negro (1959), where papers fall down such a stairwell like snow, or Antoine Doinel running away from Fabienne Tabard in Baisers volés (1968)—and stride out of the building. Down the golden street he goes, golden after the rains have washed the sandstone buildings, the street studded with golden light, and walks faster, and breaks into a run. Perhaps, stunningly, he has decided that she is altogether not the person he hoped she would be, that the voice she had kept hidden deep inside, the voice of all truths, the voice he hears only at the end, is a radically strange, even inimical, voice. He is running to save himself. Or he has accepted the impossibility of his love in the face of the definitiveness of hers for something beyond the mortal, and he runs now in freedom, having released—perhaps not her but—the hope of her that he has cherished and targeted. Or else that hope of her has chained him to the rocks, his gaping wound open to the sky.
It doesn’t matter, because also possible is that she has not yet spoken with her truest voice, that she has only made a little speech to fill in the map of her days, to put him off a little, to suspend him. She may well be bypassing both her feelings and what she wants. And this boy: perhaps at her doorway he could have stepped forward instead of remaining in place, extended himself across the gap. So it is that the final moment of Antonioni’s film, in which Niccolo scampers down the street, perhaps singin’ in the rain, is full of optimism and hope, not a moment of closure at all, since both of them may yet find the voice that speaks a companionship. He may stop, just after we can no longer watch, and reconsider: “Maybe I misinterpreted.”
BEYOND THE CLOUDS
Beyond the Clouds, a “box-office smash” in Italy (Rosenbaum), found a more rational appreciation among the American critics. Jonathan Rosenbaum noted “a lot of beautiful things” in the film, saying that it “isn’t so much sexy as erotic … every bit as involved with the erotics of place as with the erotics of flesh” yet does not manage to get beyond desire (“Return”). In The New York Times, Michael Holden wrote—enthusiastically but also without the clarity that comes with conviction—that “you are all but transported through the screen to a place where the physical and emotional weather fuse into a palpable sadness” and also that the vignettes “portray characters caught up in romantic obsessions presented as metaphors for the artist’s pursuit of an elusive truth” (“Transformed”). But the central glory of Antonioni, after all, is that in his films truth is not elusive, that he depicts a truth quite clearly, although it is perhaps a far more complex truth than we crave in an era of uncommitted movement, promise, pulse, and surface.
Much as when we fly above the clouds we sense ourselves to be “beyond” the society churning below, out of touch and in fact hopelessly, if also deliriously, unable to make contact; and sense that our movement is dependent on our status as outsiders; so all of the characters in the four stories Antonioni has filmed for Beyond the Clouds are separated from one another and, thus, from shared direct presence and experience. All of them are, in some deep and evocative sense, alone. It is perhaps the case that in this, they resemble and even mirror the condition of every person, always, trapped on one or the other side of some barely substantial essence that keeps people away from the human race. We cannot fully know the world, even though we can recognize its surfaces, and so the surfaces become the world: a thematic that Seymour Chatman attributes to Antonioni’s filmmaking. Gilberto Perez very perceptively writes of a kind of separation in Antonioni’s camera’s vision, to the extent that “we observe the man and the woman from the point of view of a stranger who somehow has come upon them” (367). But it is not this that I have in mind when I invoke separation, since strangers, too, have homes, and all strangers can imagine a country in which they are neither separated from those they watch nor set apart from the rituals of the flow of life. I have in mind, much more, a kind of nostalgia for an irrevocable but unforgettable past, such as was felt by a diarist Sebald quotes, who is remembering a “distinctly creepy” house to which her family moved: there, she writes, “I leafed through a page or two of the blue velvet postcard album which had its place on the shelf of the smoking table, and felt like a visitor” (Emigrants 210). In Beyond the Clouds, it is exactly as though, in some “distinctly creepy” place, and looking at images of some irrevocable but unforgettable past, we have become visitors, arbitrarily and knowingly accelerating out of that familiar orbit from which we might see a world presented in its telling details, so that, moving more quickly than our souls can move, we stand outside ourselves and look back with the eyes of some well-meaning inconnu. All this horribly sweet turmoil is artfully measured and evidenced in Silvano almost touching Carmen while not touching her; in the director and the girl making love with movement and tension, with drive and hunger, while yet seeming to be on different planets, their bodies unaware that they are gliding against one another in our view as we busily note (to quote Durrell again) not them exactly but the act in which they are engaged; in Carlo and Patrizia navigating through the waters of the memory of their marriages, their lost furniture, their betrayed dreams; in Niccolo running away from someone who is also running away, in Aix. In all of this, the relation of touch, which is the oldest relation, and the