Michelangelo Antonioni Films | Michelangelo Antonioni Filmography | Michelangelo Antonioni Biography | Michelangelo Antonioni Career | Michelangelo Antonioni Awards

Antonioni's cinema is one of non-identification and displacement. In almost all of his films shots can be found striking emphasis on visual structure that works in opposition to the spectator's desire to identify, as in classical Hollywood cinema, with either a protagonist's existential situation or with anything like a seamless narrative continuity?the ?impression of reality? so often evoked in conjunction with the effect of fiction films on the spectator.

Since his first feature, Cronaca di un amore, Antonioni's introduction of utterly autonomous, graphically stunning shots into the film's narrative flow has gradually expanded to the point where, in Professione: Reporter, but even more emphatically in Il mistero di Oberwald and Identificazione di una donna, the unsettling effect of these discrete moments in the narrative continuity of the earlier work has taken over entirely. If these graphically autonomous shots of Antonioni's films of the fifties and sixties functioned as striking ?figures? which unsettled the ?ground? of narrative continuity, his latest films undo altogether this opposition between form and content, technique and substance, in order to spread the strangeness of the previously isolated figure across the entirety of the film which will thus emphatically establish itself as a "text."

That which might at first seem to mark a simple inversion of this opposition?where narrative substance would take a back seat to formal technique?instead works to question, in a broad manner, the ways in which films establish themselves as fictions. Antonioni's cinema strains the traditional conventions defining fiction films to the breaking point where, beginning at least as early as Professione: Reporter, those aspects always presumed to define what is ?given? or ?specific? or ?proper? to film (which are commonly grouped together under the general heading of "technique") find themselves explicitly incorporated into the overall fabric of the film's narration; technique finds itself drawn into that which it supposedly presents neutrally, namely, the film's fictional universe. One might name this strategy the fictionalization of technique.

Such a strategy, however, is anything but self-reflexive, nor does it bear upon the thematics of Antonioni's films. In even those films where the protagonist has something to do with producing images, narratives, or other works of art (the filmmaker of La signorasenza camelie, the architect of L'avventura, the novelist of La notte, the photographer of Blow-Up, the television reporter of Professione: Reporter, the poet of Il mistero di Oberwald, and the film director of Identificazione di una donna ), their professions remain important only on the level of the film's drama, never in terms of its technique. It is as though the image of the artist were trapped in a world where self-reflection is impossible. Indeed, one common strand linking the thematics of all of Antonioni's films?the impossibility for men to communicate with women?might be Michelangelo Antonioni: seen to illustrate, on the level of drama, the kind of communicational impasse to be found on the level of ?technique? in his cinema. Though his films are far from ?experimental? in the sense of the work of Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, or Andy Warhol, Antonioni's fictional narratives always feel flattened or, to borrow a term from Roland Barthes, they seem curiously mat, as if the spectator's ability to gain immediate access to the fiction were being impeded by something.

Antonioni's films, then, are not simply ?about? the cinema, but rather, in attempting to make films which always side-step the commonplace or the conventional (modes responsible for spectatorial identification and the ?impression of reality?), they call into question what is taken to be a ?language? of cinema by constructing a kind of textual idiolect which defies comparison with any other film, even Antonioni's other films. This may at least in part account for the formidable strangeness and difficulty of Antonioni's work, not just for general audiences but for mainstream critics as well. One constantly has the impression that the complexity of his films requires years in the cellar of critical speculation before it is ready to be understood; a film that is initially described as sour and flat ends up ten years later, as in the case of L'avventura, being proclaimed one of the ten best films of all time ("International Critics Poll," Sight and Sound). To judge from the reception in the United States of his most recent work, it appears that we are still at least ten years behind Antonioni.

As Antonioni has himself stressed repeatedly, the dramatic or the narrative aspect of his films?telling a story in the manner of literary narrative?comes to be of less and less importance; frequently, this is manifested by an absurd and complete absence of dramatic plausibility (Zabriskie Point, Professione: Reporter, Il mistero di Oberwald ). The nonverbal logic of what remain narrative films depends, Antonioni says, upon neither a conceptual nor emotional organization: "Some people believe I make films with my head; a few others think they come from the heart; for my part, I feel as though I make them with my Stomach."?KIMBALL LOCKHART