Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance
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forms (13); this very regularity in perception tends to couch and motivate the sort of critique one finds in Chatman, who bemoans the fact that Antonioni’s Niccolò didn’t have the production funds for a (presumably) authentic—and regular—science fiction film. Filmic forms, such as the science fiction type to which Blade Runner so handily conforms, are only part of the rationalization of public perception, only a result of the operations of measuring, tabulating, regularizing, constraining, filtering, and emphasizing conventional modes of perception. Niccolò’s film, a piece of which we see in a sequence that links the footage directly to his gazing eye—and thus to the personal quality of this vision (its eros)—is his attempt to see independently of the controlling system. Chatman is merely pointing out how deviant Antonioni is. Oddly, writing about the sex in Identification of a Woman, Chatman has no trouble spelling out this same revolutionary stance, noting that Mavi reveals her personal sexual attitude (keeping her underpants on until the last possible moment) “with the confidence of one instructed by her society that every person’s sex is his or her own affair, not subject to moral or psychological evaluation. She is simply explaining her preferences, not excusing herself for having them” (220). (It could also be argued that society did not instruct Mavi, but simply failed to provide instruction in this vital area of experience.) Our society also “instructs” us that the artist’s vision is problematically beyond social instruction: Niccolò’s way of filming is a part of his own erotic life, a part of what he endures that cannot be fully calibrated and regimented through the system. He is scrupulously personal (as is Antonioni), more so than the Ridley Scott who made Blade Runner or the George Lucas who made Star Wars or even the Stanley Kubrick who made 2001, all of whom finally sacrificed their own inner tensions and lacunae, doubts and interruptions to the grammar of a system that could rationalize their address to a diffuse and hungry public.
It is not because he has taken a vow to maintain principles of searching, labeling, knowing, and illuminating that Niccolò seeks to “identify” a woman as the center of his creative operation. He is neither monk nor bureaucrat. He is not committed a priori to a dispassionate and (officially) scientific gaze. Every step he takes in this film is tied to breathing, hopefulness, anticipation, disappointment, reawakened desire, and movement toward a resolution, and so there is an eros implicit in his very act of looking: not as though he gazes to find a sexual object, but as though his gazing is an absolute form of his sexuality. In his science fiction film Niccolò is finally divorced even from himself, not in the way that Crary, following Deleuze—and also a little eagerly—suggests the perceiver must ultimately be after cinema: “It is precisely the nonselectivity of the cinema eye that distinguishes it from the texture of a human attentiveness” (344), but through a careful and devoted selectivity, an all-absorbing selectivity, that throws him out toward a universe. This, too, is why Niccolò—a human, but also a maker of cinema—is continually ill at ease with the fact of his own gazing, since although he attempts to see the world around the core of a woman’s experience, to focus on a “point of great light and heat,” he knows at the same time that ultimately his film will produce a field, not a point, a field that is bounded, to be sure, yet one in which the depth of his concentration will not find a marker. Baudelaire, writes Sartre, had a similar obsession, with infinity, “something which is, without being given; something which today defines me and which nevertheless will not exist until tomorrow” (37–38).
NEITHER NIGHT NOR DAY
A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul—a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key.
—Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle”
At the soirée, Mavi and Niccolò are standing in conversation while in an adjacent room (that is painted avocado green) well-dressed aristocrats, some of whom have lots of money and some of whom haven’t a bean, chat the night away. “We don’t have one single idea of a society,” complains Mavi. We cut to another room (also avocado green, that soothing but also alarming color) where the voice of a woman praises François Mitterand as a “nice man” whom she hopes “will do well.” (I stood once in the lobby of a hotel while Mitterand padded from the elevators to the door, a silent gentle little gnome, it seemed, surrounded by gruff security men who did not appear to recognize him.) At one point an old man escorts a much younger woman through the frame, gloating to her in a whisper, “One of my ancestors invented the double-bass!” (This is perhaps an invitation to rest awhile upon his lap, since the earliest bass was a violone da gamba and the speaker may be referring to a certain familial “expertise” [See Stiller, 462]. It is also, most surely, a genealogical claim dating back at least four hundred years.) Standing in front of a massive canvas (Tiepolo? Caravaggio?), Niccolò and Mavi are discovered by a doyenne:
MAVI: Niccolò is trying to find someone.
DOYENNE: What has the poor man done?
MAVI: Nothing.
DOYENNE (taking her leave): Why look for him then?
What is this polite disengagement, this attitude of lethargy that permeates the upper class—a class that has nothing to do but consider itself? Mavi “moves like in a ballet within this world made up of counts, dukes, princes, and the black aristocracy, where there isn’t a single object that isn’t authentic. She moves at ease within these walls made up of ancient leather wallpaper” (Antonioni; qtd. in Bachmann, “Love” 172). “The Aristocrat devours nature,” writes Sartre. “The exquisite imperfection of forms and a discreet blurring of colours are the best guarantees of authenticity” (Masturbation 115–6).
Niccolò is in a doorway next to a young man in a tux, who gazes forward, past the camera, at someone or something, yet with an empty regard that betokens neither comprehension nor involvement. “Is there always this sectarian atmosphere at your parties, cocktails, and dinners?” the director asks the boy, “Are you afraid of being spied upon?” The kid drops his eyes: “Many of us have escaped already.” As if a comment were in order, Niccolò rejoins, “Once it was the poor who emigrated from Italy. Now it’s this lot.” Need we be told that the poor who emigrated had nothing to hope for, and therefore nothing to lose? But these rich: clearly they have everything and are still destitute. They have escaped in order to have more than everything. We can suddenly read the slightly pouting, pampered expression on the boy’s face. The eyes glazed, observant but uncaring; the lips, fulsome but pursed with possessiveness; the dark curly hair cut as though to impress Donatello, the shoulders artfully slouched. Nothing in his world appeals to this boy, has merit for him, holds his commitment. As Niccolò was told by Mavi, this is a society in which there is no orientation, no sense of duty or obligation, no agreement on higher principles that can guide everyone in a unifying way. It’s a world of personality and disconnection, in which the social life has dried up and everyone who can afford to escape has jumped to richer pastures.
In a party like this, one should be able to find the greatest lights of a society, the repositories and voices of its most supreme values. The paintings should be inspiring and beautiful, both classical and futurist: Guercino, Miró, Boccioni, Ensor, Crivelli, Duchamp, Canaletto, De Heem, Malevich. The language should be poetry, not the garble of the marketplace or the voting booth. Instead of talking about the double-bass, one should be invoking music. Meanwhile, a paid lutist is playing something inoffensive, popularly Mediterranean, vacuous, when he could be playing Bach or Vivaldi. And, given all the meaningless chatter, it is difficult for the personality who searches for light to locate a source of inspiration. All the guests are interchangeable, all the rooms interchangeable, the conversations all forgettable if indeed they are not full of lies or dissemblings: for instance, Mavi invites a man and his wife to dinner at her house, but soon makes it clear to Niccolò she hopes to borrow his place for this cultural adventure.
What sort of an aristocracy or managerial class works without a principle upon which to base its designs? “In fairly populous societies,” wrote Gaetano Mosca in the 1930s,
ruling classes do not justify their power exclusively by de facto possession of it, but try to find a moral and legal basis for it, representing it as the logical and necessary consequence of doctrines and beliefs that are generally recognized and accepted. So if a