Antonioni

A few weeks ago, I shuffled downtown to the E-Street to catch the recent reissue of Antonioni’s 1975 film, The Passenger. I was suitably shaken and awed by the film, a mysterious, coolly unnerving thriller about the destabilization of identity, and made a mental note to see some of his other pictures. Last night, after much delay and distraction (unrelated to the current House leadership dilemma), I finished watching his earlier masterpiece Blow-Up. I can’t say that either are light viewing, and neither work hard to make themselves clear, but both have a sort of transfixing distance about them, a pent up paranoia so anxious it doesn’t know what to do with itself.

Antonioni’s worldview strikes me as a more anguished, uncertain Kubrick, or perhaps even Woody Allen, if you replaced cynicism and self-laceration with despair and near-paralyzing uncertainty. He presents life as an unknowable charade, a surrealist, made-up game played by mad mimes—one that, despite being patently empty and false, can sweep you up in its absurdist unreality all the same.

And where Kubrick gave the world a cold, merciless staredown, Antonioni watches with apprehension and reticence. He’s hoping. I think, to find meaning and connection within the vast, muddled sphere of human relationships, but he fails at every turn. Events, people and meanings are not just unstable, but unknowable. Disconnection and anticlimax, meaningless fragments of time are all anyone has. His characters lives’ are spent in pursuit of some unknown force that reveals itself only as void, if it reveals itself at all.

It’s essentially bleak, hopeless and post-modern, a stew of fear and vagary. Antionioni gives his films a kind of eerie stillness and silence, accenting the distance and disconnection of it all. Nicholson’s initial desert trudge in The Passenger is cruelly uneventful, and the gloriously long single-shot finale gains much of its power from an absolute refusal to show any more than is necessary. Even Blow Up’s central moment—the photo development montage—suggests that the salient details of life and death are hidden in plain sight, surrounded by a cultivated wilderness of misdirection--in this case a city park. If anything matters, the films seem to suggest, it's the small things, the miniscule details and easy-to-miss minor moments--but even those are an illusion, a glimpse of hope in a vast sea of anxious uncertainty.