Exceptionally gracious in contributing to my understanding of 35 mm color processes has been Richard Haines (Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.), an artist and scholar of astounding knowledge and a warm and patient teacher. Further, I have been touched by help far beyond the call of duty from Ned Comstock at the Cinema-Television Library of the University of Southern California and Jenny Romero at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills. And Beverly Walker (Los Angeles) has worked hard and eagerly on my behalf, even while suffering the flu, out of a respect and love for Michelangelo which are undying. To James Daley (Wheaton, Ill.) for his assistance with photographic reproduction, and for still being there after all these years, my heartfelt thanks. My assistant Ian Dahlman was a whirling dervish of a researcher, or at least a supersleuth, able to leap tall reference stacks in a single bound and never less than a perfectly cheery ideal reader. And my friend and colleague John Oslansky (Perugia) has been an inspiration for the thoughts contained here.
To Mary Francis, Suzanne Knott, Caroline Knapp, Kalicia Pivirotto, and Eric Schmidt at University of California Press go my sincere thanks for a sweet collaboration. And to Nellie Perret and Ariel Pomerance, who have made many helpful comments and been my support through thick and thin, not to say the craft for my craft, a special thank you for keeping home lights burning.
Toronto, Los Angeles, Dooagh, Dublin, London October 2010
On the Images in This Book
Acknowledging the splendid frontispieces made for all the volumes of that edition by Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, in his preface to the 1909 Scribner’s edition of The Golden Bowl, Henry James argued for the sort of image that might “plead its case with some shyness.” My desire in finding a way to illustrate this book was to go still further, with images that might each, in an idiosyncratic way, summon up the whole tenor or tension evoked by the poetry of a film while at the same time drawing into recollection the unfolding argument of this writer’s prose. Michelangelo Antonioni’s color films are complex and monumental structures, and finding the “right” image for each was a project with problems. Conventional publicity stills, for example, are made to highlight either action—not always at the heart of my analysis—or principal actors in character (so as to publicize their work quite as much as the film itself). These shots are therefore typically repetitive for any film, inspirations for my fear that the reader would in most cases have come across them, or very similar images, before. The canonical reading of Antonioni’s works tends toward gender relations in a time of modernist alienation, and one will have trouble scouting through publicity stills if one wishes to find brilliant and evocative images that do not bark this now worn (if not, indeed, misconstrued) theme. Further, many publicity shots are technically altered for color, in order to reproduce well in newsprint. And still worse, many of the shots typify filmic moments vaguely but do not actually represent what we ever precisely see onscreen. To make matters more painful, if more painful they can be: with some of the films included in this book there are virtually no usable publicity images in existence.
Thus I have turned to digital frame enlargements, which permit a very precise selection of moments and a sharply focused attention to the exact nuances of color and composition in any image. Our decisions in printing the images as they are to be found here were made with a view to heightening their sense of color and form, and to getting the best possible reproduction given the necessarily variant and restrictive limits of the originating materials. One image is worth a special word, and that is the illustration for The Mystery of Oberwald, plate 8. This film was produced originally for Radiotelevisione Italiana using an electronic—not a cinematic—recording process, and the resultant film was later transferred to celluloid in Los Angeles, through the now rather outdated process of kinescoping, in which a camera records on film the image that is broadcast in front of its lens on a television screen. Given that Italian television uses a different screen resolution than American television in the first place, even watching the film on TV here would have been a visually degraded experience; but a kinescope makes for a picture that is even softer and imprecise as to color. It is therefore the case that the picture I include, for all its lack of sharpness, really does represent Oberwald as closely as is possible now (there are no sharper publicity stills)—really does hint at the muted and subtly transformational color Antonioni had in mind.
Introduction
Where does violet end and lilac begin?
—Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
In one of Antonioni’s films that I discuss in these pages, two characters meet by chance outside a theater after watching the same film. They talk about one another, about the chance of their encounter, but of the film they have not a word to say. A film can enter us and reside there, turning and changing through our biography and our fortune. To evoke a film, speak of it, try to write its long and ghostly presence: and especially an Antonioni film, one of the eight major works in color that he produced starting in 1964, after it became hopelessly apparent that color was his world: to face the growing fact of a film, honest as to its structure, its repetitions, its allusions and elusions, its tones, the way something suddenly becomes obvious that was invisible before, to address a film not only as subject material but as form, is my challenge here. That a story does not mean everything, indeed sometimes means nothing. That a revelation can be charged through the turn of a face from shadow into light, colored shadow into colored light. Colors, after all, are more than facts, more than indications. Color has resonance, descends into a past, causes us to remember and fall. To find—not the theme, not the statement, but—the song of the films, what they intimate and how they intimate it, not their formula but their personality.
“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words,” wrote Wittgenstein (Tractatus 6.522). So, these eight meditations might have been a string of silences. It is always difficult to use language for coming to terms with a cinematic image, especially Antonioni’s images, brilliant, provocative, fugitive. Stanley Cavell said the problem beautifully of another book: “Its difficulty lies as much in the obscurity of its promptings as in its particular surfacings of expression” (162). The Antonionian surface is complicated by delicacy, pain, rhythm, distance, time, urgency, body, the perils of sound. Cavell also suggests that in color films, “the world created is neither a world just past nor a world of make-believe. It is a world of an immediate future” (82). Antonioni always has his eye on the future: What is this? That is, what is this becoming?
Things to remember:
1. What people—that is, characters—say in film is not the same as what we see.
2. There is no proper treatise for elucidating or unlocking the puzzles Antonioni has left us. The puzzle, the mystery, is a quintessentially serious form.
3.