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The former girlfriend has a lesson of sorts that Niccolò is unable to apprehend when, wanting to find a place to pee, she walks with him up the steep dark steps toward the theater. “I think you’re happy,” says she, “when your body is in tune with your thoughts. Mine is used to being near fields, rivers, trees, frost. Thoughts are different there from thoughts in the city. The laws of nature don’t count here, and I feel … empty.” The body, then, is part of a physical world, subject to temperatures, winds, visions, colors, textures, waves, obstructions, objects. But Niccolò is an obsessive, persistently unaffected by the physical scene, persistently concentrating on locating his “woman,” a character with whom he can be “silent” and “have with her the kind of relationship one has with nature.” Underneath that villa he imagines is still his, to which he brings Mavi out of the fog, is a Roman atrium, and when he takes her down there, coolly disinterested in history and locale, he is moving to another universe, but without consciousness. She is terrified by a flying creature—perhaps a giant bat, more likely an owl. He seems not to have noticed.
BLIND KNOWLEDGE
Our words become increasingly impenetrable.
—Niccolò to Mario
As Alain Bergala points out, Mavi and Ida both keep secrets, and so identifying them is a matter of difficulty (part of what makes this film, for John Powers, merely “another evaporating detective story”). In this they typify any “other,” who is unknowable because in possession of an inaccessible inner life: Niccolò’s struggle to know them, for the purposes of either love or characterization, represents any person’s work at intersubjectivity. Mavi knows, but does not reveal, the shape of her desire. Ida does not know she is pregnant when she takes up with Niccolò, but she suspects it, and has clearly planned going for the test the results of which are announced in Venice. (Mavi is the one who makes an appointment to see a gynecologist, Niccolò’s sister.) Nor does their secrecy exhaust the impenetrability of the film. Barriers to understanding are everywhere around, especially for Niccolò, so that he must send out interrogatory probes into social space to investigate the foreign bodies that hover before him in order to have any hope of increasing his knowledge, rounding off his understanding. Niccolò himself does not grasp his own working method, except to say he wishes to find a certain kind of woman. He certainly does not understand the confusions that beset him as he searches for this ideal character.
Every action is something of a question for Niccolò, every step a possible augmentation of experience. Yet at the same time, every presentation is a riddle. Mavi has bathed and is drying herself with a carmine red towel. She notices, high on her thigh, cellulite, and comments that a woman her age shouldn’t have that, yet she does. How to interpret this? Does she, for instance, have knowledge about the cause of cellulite, and is she suggesting that something in the way life is lived today favors women developing this—in short, telling us that she is like many young women, all different than their mothers were at their age? Or is she puzzled, because all her friends have smooth skin and she cannot imagine how this happened to her? Is she concerned about herself, or is she thinking that perhaps Niccolò will notice and find the ripples unattractive? Is she making a light-hearted comment, or a humorous reflection on her own condition—saying she is older than she feels? Niccolò is listening carefully to her, perhaps too carefully. Indeed, at the party scene he chides her at one point for not taking seriously something he’s said and gives a tiny lecture: “Mavi, we must listen to one another.” As he listens, what does—what could—he apprehend that is of any use to him in deciding where he will go next, or what he will do? To be extremely sensitive to one’s universe is a kind of (delicious) passivity, a force that makes one stand in a doorway with eyes wide open drinking in the pleasures of a soirée but unable to move. Situated human action, after all, shares with other instances of organized production a reliance not only on appropriate materials, available spaces, and talented performers but also on knowledge, or at least what simulacrum of knowledge seems sufficient and credible. And just as being able to go somewhere or do something—something complex, for example, like making a film—hangs upon knowing one’s world in a certain way; so, too, does knowing one’s world hang upon motive and reason.
Yet—and this is the central thrust of Identification—Niccolò does make his way forward. What this film suggests about human action, then, is that we commit ourselves ongoingly, without having real knowledge at all. One could say that knowledge is a dramatization, and thus that a film is a way of knowing the world or a demonstration and collection of knowledge, a library. Unable to access the world, cut off from contact, from direct perception, and restricted to the apprehension of surfaces and our conventions for guessing what surfaces may cover, we know by picturing, and the act of picturing is always an attempt, always fallible. Niccolò is trying to get a “picture” of Mavi, and later of Ida, and in both cases it could be said that he fails, yet it is also true that he makes—that Antonioni, acting for him, makes—a sufficient picture for us to believe we have seen them and can come to know them. He makes way.
For each of us, understanding is beyond. This is why at the end of Identification, we must imagine that Niccolò is aboard that asteroidcraft. Somewhere, near the sun or near some other part of the universe, he will find what he needs.
SCIENCE
To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.
—Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
The argument can be made—is often made, in fact, in the most commonplace ways as well as the most sophisticated ones—that the right and proper approach toward expanding human knowledge is science, which to most people means a system of methods with its history, its taxonomy, its devotions, its rigors, and, to be sure, its enemies. We think of scientific progress, scientific revolutions, scientific laboratories, mad scientists, and so on, following more or less from Francis Bacon’s theorizing at the end of the sixteenth century. For him, the world had previously been accepted as a completed creation with its laws implicit and open to deduction, but now and henceforth it was to be seen instead as an aggregation of facts which were open to discreet observation. Just as the laws according to which nature moved had to be induced from an accretion of suppositions based upon clearly observed facts, so, too, was the power of the observer now held paramount in the formation of knowledge. Seeing clearly, discerning with refinement, measuring with assiduity—these were the powers involved in learning the world. And such a world, structured so as to be learnable, shone in its special visibility, its openness to measurement and observation. In this enlightenment, as Jean Starobinski described it, the processes of the reasoning mind “appear to have been closely akin to those of the seeing eye” (Invention 210; qtd. in Jay 85). Martin Jay describes the difficulties of apperception as they applied to politics: the court of the Sun King (Louis XIV) “at once theater and spectacle, was a dazzling display of superficial brilliance, bewildering to outsiders but legible to those who knew how to read its meaning. Here courtiers learned to decode the signs of power, distinction, and hierarchy in the gestures and accoutrements of bodies semaphorically on view” (87)—a type of situation handily described again and again by Dumas, of course, in Le Comte de Monte Cristo.
Science understood in this (limited) way involves calibration, measurement, recording, publication, testing and retesting, doubt, hypothesis, experiment, controlled variables, and so on. The observation upon which it stands is very old as a process. “All early natural philosophers acknowledged that vision is man’s most noble and dependable sense,” claims David Lindberg (qtd. in Jay 39). In the Enlightenment, writes Patricia Fara, “seeing was closely allied with knowing. Progressive thinkers often claimed that they were living in an enlightened age, when the bright flame of reason would dispel the dark clouds of ignorance and superstition” (15). Scientific experiments became rationalized as a superior avenue to the truth, even though they weren’t always successful, even though “people make mistakes, ignore results that later seem significant, or persuade themselves—and others—to adopt theories that turn out to be false” (Fara 10). Beyond wanting to understand the world, “Enlightenment philos ophers wanted … to promote themselves by displaying their command of apparently inexplicable phenomena” (20–21), and “hoped to gain authority over society by proving their dominion over nature” (22), ultimately beginning to professionalize