Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance
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sofa in her red chemise; and the husband who plays something not quite Bach on the dark polished piano, who says almost nothing when the moment for speaking has come.
Each of these persons is a stranger to the others even—perhaps especially—during lovemaking. Modern life brings us close to distance, surrounds us with people we recognize but do not know. “Was [Antonioni] just fashion?” Michael Atkinson wondered with youthful irritation in The Village Voice, describing the film’s episodes as “dreamy, pretentious fickle-finger-of-fate mini-tales” containing “preposterously casual … sex” that “seems only to invoke an itch the 83-year-old film-maker can perhaps no longer scratch” (“Snoozes”). Antonioni is showing how lovemaking is the most distant act of all, a fact the young are too distracted by the promise of pleasure to apprehend.
On the Boulevard
That cozy, colorful, well-lit café (the clean, well-lighted place) in which at the beginning of this episode the husband meets the girl who will become his lover (the prowler, the mover), is on or near one of the great boulevards of Paris, magnificent post-Haussmannian thoroughfares that through the nineteenth century, as Hazel Hahn writes, housed those sententious organs, the newspapers and were thus made into “a centre for news and communications that reached its peak at the fin de siècle”:
The newspapers themselves not only reported in minute detail on events on the Boulevards, but were read in the cafés along the street so that much of what was advertised was available just around the corner. The proximity of the places where newspapers were read to the boutiques, department stores, theatres and café-concerts advertised in their pages underscored the centrality of information and consumption to life on the Boulevards. (156)
A particular urbaneness must have characterized the denizens of the café, an openness to advertisement as a mode of speech and a vulnerability to strangeness and the exotic. Not only is the habitué of the café continually on the make, shuffling along beside the traffic, meandering through the crowds, entering and exiting shops for a relatively brief sojourn and experience; but he is also continually prone to being influenced by a world brought from afar, an imported universe, for that is what the newspaper offered on a consistent basis. While the girl’s reaction to the story of the Mexican porters is surprise, the fact that she is surprised does not surprise her, since surprise is precisely the fruit of the sort of casual encounter one has through reading in a spot like this.
Nor can her surprise at the punch line of the story—that the porters felt they were moving so fast their souls had not caught up with them—fail to indicate the intensive degree to which, as an inheritor of the culture of the nineteenth century and an inhabitant of Paris in its stage of hypermodernization, she casually takes her own motion for granted and does not quite see in her own jittery dispensation the same tendency to displace an inner and more ancient world, even though she points, with a certain slack liberalism, to the “peril” of losing her own soul. It is clear if we look carefully at her open, but also modulated and articulately controlled, features when she speaks to the man; and at his guarded, but also unreservedly eager, features when he responds, that more than experiencing interest and fascination, these two are advertising availability to one another, playing skillfully where the presentation of a claim is an expected immediate feature of the environment. They are like posters for a pretense, and, like what is reproduced upon the typical French poster of the fin de siècle, neither face, as it will turn out, has a “direct link” with the “announced object” (Hahn 169). That here and throughout the episode the girl wears relatively bright colors hardly mitigates against our interpretation of her as a spectacle offering itself to a view.
The same publishing industry that brings the husband and his lover together at the beginning has the responsibility for linking Patrizia and Carlo at the end, since she discovers him only because in the want ads she has discovered the apartment in which he lives (and from which he, apparently with too much frequency, travels). No less than the other two, Patrizia and Carlo are thus gullible to advertisement and committed to a lifestyle in which claims and presentations, traveling at the speed of newsprint, take precedence over feelings. The intent of the Haussmannian boulevard, first and finally, was to make possible a great urban fluidity, to let the masses shift position from one neighborhood, horizon, and perspective to another; it worked to link—as Wolfgang Schivelbusch shows in The Railway Journey—the new railroad transportation with the transactional domain of the department store. The café in which this tale begins is suffused with the atmosphere of the boulevard, designed to facilitate this motion and structured as a business enterprise to encourage both the quick conversations that epitomize rational calculation and the quick transactions that make for uncontaminating profit. Movement was inexorably bound with shopping, and shopping bound with the glance. What the characters are engaged in here: a shopping spree.
NICCOLO IN AIX
The Pathway
A young hopeful, Niccolo (Vincent Perez), emerges from an architect’s office in an apartment building in Aix-en-Provence and holds the door for a young woman emerging behind him (Irène Jacob). He catches up with her and they walk together, speaking of religion because she is going to mass. He tells her it is evident to him she is in love, and insists she is like a cherry tree he read about in a newspaper, that eats its own cherries. The word “aloof,” originating as it does in military taxonomy, does not do justice to her abstractness, which is like that of a nurse ready to give an injection, or to the boldness with which she demands to know whether he believes in God, the humility in which she retracts that question, and the renewed boldness in which she withdraws the retraction. He makes it plain he’s interested in her but she tells him he would do well to abjure physical desires, using the tone of a moral guide, quite as though she recognizes that his search is for truths and goodness, not architecture. The church, finally opening at the end of a narrow street, is the Église Saint-Jean-de-Malte, from the thirteenth century. She sits apart from him and loses herself in prayer—“Throughout the entire mass she remains on her knees,” Antonioni had written originally (Tiber 33), though we do not see her do this—and having wandered among the columns, observing the choir, he sits and falls asleep. When he wakes the church is empty and he must run to find her, but she has disappeared. He scours the glistening nocturnal streets. Then, blocks away at a little fountain, there she is, innocently chalking flowers onto the pavement. He tells her he does not find flowers beautiful because they last a few days and then die (and that is why the Japanese do not grow them). “You are afraid of death,” says she, “I am afraid of life”—meaning, the life that people are leading nowadays. It is night. Rain begins to fall. He continues to follow her, admitting that he could love her, and she slips on the pavement and gets her coat wet. Rather than crying, however, she laughs. Back at her apartment, she enters by way of great wooden doors. He races after her. The stairwell is painted a vivid angelica green and pale Béarnaise yellow, and the carpet is deep Beaujolais red. Outside her door he stands awkwardly, until their eyes meet.
Both of these people voyage without awareness, in a way. She was going to mass, and did not expect to encounter this young man. Now she has fallen into something of a relationship with him, so that before she can make the transition she is planning for the morrow—the culminating moment of her life at this time—she must first account to him for it, must experience his reaction either directly or in her imagination. For his part, he was on point of delivering a portfolio, perhaps opening the door to a future, with no thought of meeting a young woman he might wish to accompany. “I should accompany you,” he proclaimed at one point. Heading toward a mass, as he surmises, he cannot know that he will fall asleep and awaken lost, disturbed, dislocated in time and space, or that he will be desperate to find her, or that in finding her he will continue a journey upward to a summit that brings, instead of perspective, a riddling fog. “Mental suffering is effectively without end” (Sebald, Emigrants 170).
Cézanne
Sebald writes that there is no past or future. I was given one day, as a boy, by a gentle piano teacher, a small book containing black-and-white reproductions of paintings by Paul Cézanne. I had no idea who Cézanne was, or why it was this that I was given, or why, for that matter, I was given anything, but certainly there was a mystery to this book of all possible books,