By contrast, Vincentio opens Measure for Measure by reflecting to Escalus upon a different and broader way of knowing, suggesting that as to the properties of government “your own science/Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice/My strength can give you” (I.i.7–9). For Shakespeare, science exceeded observation and data collection, exceeded the amassing of “facts,” and included any and all aspects of knowing and apperceiving. The more limited “science” of white-coated technicians heavily equipped and wrapped in secrecy, that largely informs our view of this process today, valorizes certain professionalizations and class restrictions, accredits and sanctions some seekers as “legitimate” and “authoritative” while others are relegated to the marginalia of history as charlatans, dilettantes, skeptics, and so on. We may think of the sacred tasks of scientific philosophers touted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows” (47). And for a “would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge” one would reasonably have “the greatest disdain” (41).
But all thinking creatures have their respective scientiae, and working upon our relation to the world we do scientia routinely, if unevenly and unrepeatably; even and especially is this the case for those whose science is articulated as an art. Auteurism is something of an equivalent to science, utilizing different methods and rigors and with an altogether separate history and taxonomy. For example, if David Bordwell suggests that the credits of an art film “can tease us with fragmentary, indecipherable images that announce the power of the author to control what we know” (43), it remains true as well that the author is being teased by his world, and is responding in kind. The artist explores the world, searching with a different kind of eye than our typical “scientist” uses; what the artist sees must be accepted as though others can also see and understand it, but this acceptance, this recognition, must be immediate and does not depend upon careful replication of experimental technique and comparison of results. The artist must speak in a language that is instantly apprehendable.
Is Niccolò autobiographical, Antonioni was asked by Cahiers du cinéma; “What happened to him never happened to me …. A film is autobiographical to the extent that it is authentic and, in order to be that, it has to be sincere” (Cottino-Jones 368). Our attention is being directed to Niccolò as a filmmaker, and to the process not of forming an artistic crystal but of finding the seed around which, if conditions are right, the crystal will unavoidably form. The “seed” in this case is a certain female sensibility that seems open to some form of continuance (sadly lacking in both Mavi and Ida). To the extent that we may view the filmmaker’s quest as his science, Identification of a Woman turns out to be, actually, the sci-fi film that the little boy asks for; a sci-fi film, indeed, about the ultimate making of a sci-fi film, that “new mysticism” (Kelly 42). Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana said to Antonioni, “The little boy asks Niccolò, ‘Why don’t you make a sci-fi film?’ We ask the same question of you.” And he replied to them, “It’s a question a little boy like that can ask, but not you!” (5)
Niccolò’s search for his character is a voyage with, but also around, women who constitute not only his alien “other” but also his universe, a universe, in the filmmaker’s view, of startling moral discontinuity:
Today the world is endangered by an extremely serious split between a science that is totally and consciously projected into the future, and a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice or sheer laziness …. Science has never been more humble and less dogmatic than it is today. Whereas our moral attitudes are governed by an absolute sense of stultification …. we have not been capable of finding new ones, we have not been capable of making any head-way whatsoever towards a solution of this problem, of this everincreasing split between moral man and scientific man, a split which is becoming more and more serious and more and more accentuated. (Film Culture 31–32)
Niccolò’s is likewise a universe that is sure to be changed: “In the future—not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century—these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them” (Samuels 82). Antonioni admitted to Seymour Chatman that he had begun to read more and more about science: “As soon as you talk about the universe, everything is involved” (Chatman, “Interview” 156).
In the last scene of the film, this link between science fiction, the filmmaker, his world, and his women is apparent. Coming home, he stops to listen through the door of his apartment. Who can he be listening for? What is he thinking? That she is inside. She? Not Mavi, to be sure, because Mavi is with her lover, Mavi has forgotten him. Not Ida, because he has abandoned Ida. He is listening for the sounds—female sounds absolutely—that will identify his world and connect him with it, the sounds of his truest nature, indeed a sound, distinct, that will address specifically and only him. Then we go inside. Jauntily he tosses his coat away. A landscape hangs restfully upon a wall, seen from an acute angle. The door to his study—it is marked with a Greek key—he steps past it, places his hand upon the wall, lets his fingers creep toward the handle. Quickly, without a reflective pause, he opens. No one is in there, but through a beautiful vertical rectangle the window light spreads in, and, far off, a rolling hill is covered with cushions of trees. “In each of Antonioni’s films, especially those in color, there exists a proportionate relationship between the sheer beauty of the images and the terrible reality contained in them” (Kelly 42). He grabs some sunglasses and positions himself in the window. We cut to a close-up of his face as, shielding his eyes a little, he peers outward. Delicate sounds of exploratory music. The sun, informing and blinding, floods in upon him as his voice is heard narrating the story of the asteroid-ship that is his film. Indeed, as his image dissolves away, certain hot spots linger on the screen and become dark green, parts of the space void that the ship haunts. “Individual time accords mysteriously with that of the cosmos” (Antonioni; qtd. in Cardullo 154).
ATTENTION
The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him.
—W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants
Seymour Chatman is neither at ease with Identification of a Woman nor able to escape the temptation to imagine how it could have been improved, when he writes,
There is no discernable answer to the question that Niccolò writes in the steam on a window of his apartment (in the treatment only): “But why am I so attracted to this woman whom I cannot manage to respect?” It might have been well if the question