Michelangelo Antonioni: ‘My scripts are not formal screenplays’.

Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eclipse (L’Eclisse)

L'Eclisse is a modern masterpiece. It is the last of Antonioni's trilogy pictures providing an uncompromising critique of life in European postwar bourgeois society. Antonioni finds spectacular surroundings for the film's image of a contemporary wasteland in the Rome stock exchange and the Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR) housing complex — a tract of parched modernist structures situated amongst mostly vacant lots. 

Antonioni contributes his complete range of graphic design capabilities to L'Eclisse. He meticulously positions his characters amid this iconic image of the postwar urban landscape's stiff, off-putting, but enticing geometry. The film's defining image is a massive mushroom-shaped skyscraper that dominates numerous shots. The picture is saturated with the sensation of atomic dread evoked by the tower, making L'Eclisse the strangest of Antonioni's oeuvre. 

The stunning score by Giovanni Fusco adds to the sense of impending doom. The ideological themes of L'Eclisse extend beyond the broad philosophical meditation on the eclipse of humanity in the modern, post-Hiroshima era that appears to be the more obvious reference of the title, despite the fact that he is rarely regarded as an overtly political filmmaker. 

The film's point of view is mostly that of Vittoria (Monica Vitti), whose reaction to events serve as the audience's anchor. Antonioni represents the remaining traces of human feeling and experience via her fear, surprise, delight, and agony. Piero (Alain Delon) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), her two lovers, are obnoxious and egotistical. 

Piero is a young manic-depressive stockbroker who works on the floor of the Rome Borsa, a structure built on the foundations of the Hadrian monument. The frenzied, bankrupt rituals of financial capital are depicted here as a temple built for a man regarded as a deity. The postwar Italian economic "miracle" is intertwined with the history of European colonialism, most memorably represented in Vittoria, a translator recovering from the gloomy end phase of an affair with Riccardo, who won't take no for an answer, on her distracted nightly excursions. 

Riccardo can't comprehend why Vittoria would wish to stop things, therefore their parting is shown with a dreadful stillness. In the lengthy, wordless scene that opens the film, Antonioni demonstrates his remarkable skill in demonstrating how dreadfully uncomfortable such moments can be – due primarily to the male need for affirmation, even in the face of an obvious dead-end, amounting to the wasting away of moments of one's life.

‘It seems to me that L’Eclisse is one of the most interesting films of and about the middle of the last century, when humanity was caught between the promise of modernity and the threat of atomic annihilation. This air of paralysis hangs heavily throughout the film and partly defines the once critical term ‘Antonioniennui’ which was used to describe the psychology of his characters in this cycle of films. And yet in spite of its specific historical backdrop and its self-evident modishness in the early 1960s, the film remains a rich and complex portrait of the modern world that still demands and rewards repeat visits.

It is worth quoting David Sin at length on the film.

‘On the surface L’Eclisse is a love story, with its main character Vittoria (Monica Vitti) ending one affair with the writer Riccardo and moving on to a new relationship with the stock market trader Piero (Alain Delon). The setting is Rome – metropolitan, sophisticated, the subject and setting for Fellini’s La Dolce Vita only a couple of years before. We witness a breakup, a new affair, stock market crash, a car crash.

‘The character types and genre elements are all there, and yet the first striking aspect of the film is the deviation from the classic narrative structure of the modern romantic drama. From the very first frame, it sets out to defy conventional expectations and encourage the audience to create meaning from the film in a different way.

‘There are no conventional story signposts, climactic peaks or moments of emotional resonance. It’s as if Antonioni has designed a classic love triangle story and placed it in a time and place where the usual story drivers simply don’t work. He places the actors like static objects into conventional seeming scenes, but the underlying chemistry is missing its catalyst. Every gesture, every declaration of love between Riccardo and Vittoria, or Vittoria and Piero becomes completely artificial when evacuated of all feeling. In this the director is supported by the beautifully blank faces of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. It’s hard to imagine two other actors who could be better used in this film.’

The following extract is from an interview by the film critic Bert Cardullo with Antonioni in which the director discusses his approach to filmmaking, his ideas for films, and his attitude toward his work.

BC: Do you do a lot of research before you start shooting a picture?

MA: Yes. If I didn’t do so much research for my films, my work would then be a lie. I must always start from more or less scientifically proven data. The biggest danger and temptation of cinema is the boundless possibility it gives movie directors to lie.

BC: When did you first put your eye behind a camera?

MA: “When” is not so important, but what happened at that moment was. The first time I got behind a camera was in a lunatic asylum. I had decided with a group of friends to do a documentary film on mad people. We positioned the camera, got the lamps ready, and disposed the patients around the room. The insane obeyed us with complete abandon, trying very hard not to make mistakes. I was very moved by their behavior, and things were going fine. Finally, I was able to give the order to turn on the lights. And in one second, the room was flooded with light . . .

I have never seen again, on any actor’s face, such an expression of fear, such total panic. For a very brief moment, the patients remained motionless, as if petrified. That lasted literally only a few seconds, followed by a scene really hard to describe. The men and women started having convulsions, then they screamed and rolled on the floor. In one instant, the room turned into a hellish pit. All the mad people were trying to escape from light as if they had been attacked by some prehistoric monster.

We all stood there, completely stunned. The cameraman didn’t even think to stop the camera. Finally, the doctor shouted, “Stop. Cut off the lights!” Then, when the room was dark and silent again, we saw piles of corpses, slightly shaking as if they were going through their final death throes. I have never forgotten that scene, and it is one of the reasons I keep making films.

BC: Research aside, how mentally prepared are you when you arrive on a set to shoot?

MA: Just as an actor, in my view, must arrive on the set in a state of mental virginity, so, too, must I. I force myself not to overintellectualize, and I force myself never to think the night before of the scene I’ll be shooting the next morning. I have a lot of confusion in my head, a real mess—lots of thoughts, lots of ideas, one of which cancels out the other. That’s why I can’t think about what I’m doing. I just do it.

Once on the set, I always spend a half hour alone to let the mood of the set, as well as its lighting, prevail. Then the actors arrive. I look at them. How are they? How do they seem to feel? I ask for rehearsals— a couple, no more—and then shooting starts. It’s while I’m shooting that everything, so to speak, becomes real. After a shot is finished, I frequently continue to shoot the actors, who don’t know that I am doing this. The aftereffects of an emotional scene, it had occurred to me, might have meaning, too, both for the actor and for the psychological progression of his character. Once shooting really stops, sometimes it takes me fifteen minutes of complete silence and solitude to prepare for the next scene. What I still cannot do, however, is concentrate when I feel the eyes of a complete stranger on me, because a stranger always interests me. I want to ask him questions....

BC: Where do you get your ideas for films?

MA: How can I say it? It’s one of my failings that everything I read or see gives me an idea for a film. Fortunately, I can’t do them all. If I could, maybe they would all be very bad. One thing I can say: Until I edit a film of mine, I have no idea myself what it will be about. And perhaps not even then. Perhaps it will only be the reflection of a mood; perhaps the film will have no plot at all in the conventional sense. I depart from my shooting script constantly, so it’s pointless beforehand to release a synop- sis of the film’s action or to discuss its meaning. In any case, my scripts are not formal screenplays but rather dialogue for the actors and a series of notes to the director—myself. When shooting begins, there is invariably a great degree of change. I may film scenes I had no intention of filming, for example, since things suggest themselves on location, and you improvise. Only in the cutting room, when I take the film and start to put it together—only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is all about.

Usually I write the original stories of my films myself, but I never start out with an idea that afterwards turns into a story. Most of the stories which go through my hands in search of form are simply germs which have been breathed in as from the air. If, when the film is finished, it turns out to be saying something, it has happened a posteriori, and that is natural enough. I am a human being, and I am not lacking in perceptions about the people and affairs of this world. If I make the film in all sincerity, then these perceptions will inevitably reveal themselves. However, it is the story which fascinates me most; the images are the medium through which a story can be understood. To be a lover of form for me means being a lover of substance.

BC: Are you ever satisfied with any of your films?

MA: Sometimes I think L’Eclisse is my best work. Other times I like L’Avventura better. The other day I screened La Notte again and thought it was pretty good. But I don’t think Blow-Up is one of my best pictures, and I don’t know why. I guess I am never really satisfied; I amuse myself by experimenting. Even though my experience is deeper now, and technically I am more mature—everything I have to say comes out fluently— I’m not happy after I complete a film. I’m not even happy while I’m shooting it. Again, I don’t know why. Still, I don’t look back, or at least I try not to. These are the best years because they are the only years. You can’t afford to look back; you have to make the best of the present, whatever it may send your way—and however, finally, you may respond.

– Bert Cardullo, Extract from ‘Interview with Antonioni’, Soundings on Cinema.

Antonioni Discusses The Passenger

The Passenger (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

Originally released in 1975, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger is, on one level, a thriller about a man trying to escape his past. This poignant film is a profile of an exhausted journalist, played by Jack Nicholson, whose means of escape is to take over the identity of a dead man. However, Antonioni is less interested in the suspense inherent in Nicholson’s situation, rather the plot is the starting point for a portrait of a man in spiritual and psychological crisis. 

Based on an original story by Mark Peploe and filmed from a screenplay by Peploe, Peter Wollen and Antonioni, The Passenger begins with Nicholson in remote Africa completing work on a documentary about rebels in Chad attempting to overthrow a tyrannical government. In a bar, he meets a stranger named Robertson (Charles Mulvehill) who unexpectedly dies in an adjoining hotel room (and who, unknown to Locke, is an in-demand arms dealer). Upon discovering the body, Locke — unhappily married and  sickened by the compromises of his work – assumes the dead man’s identity. 

Antonioni further suggests that Locke’s desire to identify with and absorb an alien personality is synonymous with the movie audience’s desire to identify with, and therefore live vicariously through, the experiences of fictional cinematic characters.

As Locke takes on Robertson’s life and commitments, it turns out that Locke has merely assumed one bleak prison for another. His odyssey takes him from Africa to Spain, Germany and England in a doomed flight from the past. In The Passenger, the only motif more prevalent than doubles is the image of spirals (from swirling sand, tyre marks in the dust, a rotating fan, or Antonioni’s spiralling camera movements) – a looped pattern which resolves to the idea that the cycle of life ends where it begins: in nothingness.

The famous climax of the film – a final sequence lasting seven minutes and taking eleven days to shoot – is a synthesis of the movie’s themes and a tribute to Antonioni’s virtuosity as a director. 

Antonioni considered The Passenger his most stylistically mature film. He also considered it a political film due to its topicality and the fact that it ‘fits with the dramatic rapport of the individual in today’s society.’

In the following interview with Larry Sturhahn and Betty Jeffries Demby, originally published in 1975, Antonioni discusses the making of The Passenger and analyses its place in the context of his work.

BETTY JEFFRlES DEMBY: Did you do the screenplay for ‘The Passenger’? 

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI: I have always written my own scripts, even if what I wrote was the result of discussions with my collaborators. The Passenger, however, was written by someone else. Naturally I made changes to adapt it to my way of thinking and shooting. I like to impro­vise  – in fact, I can’t do otherwise. It is only in this phase – that is, when I actually see it –  that the film becomes clear to me. Lucidity and clear­ness are not among my qualities, if I have any.

LARRY STURHAHN: In this case, were there any major changes in the screenplay? 

MA: The whole idea, the way the film is done, is different. The mood is changed – there is more of a spy feeling, it’s more political.

LS: Do you always adapt a piece of material to suit your particular needs? 

MA: Always, I got the idea for Blow-Up from a short story by Cortazar, but even there I changed a lot. And The Girlfriends was based on a story by Pavese. But I work on the scripts by myself with some collaboration, and as far as the act of writing is concerned, I always do that myself

LS: I have often felt that the short story is a better medium to adapt to film because it’s compact and about the same length as a film.

MA: I agree. The Girlfriends was based on a short novel, Among Women Only. And the most difficult pages to translate into images were the best pages as far as the novel and the writing were concerned. I mean the best of the pages – the pages I liked the most – were the most difficult. When you have just an idea it’s easier. Putting something into a differ­ent medium is difficult because the first medium was there first. In a novel there’s usually too much dialogue – and getting rid of the dialogue is difficult.

LS: Do you change the dialogue even further when you’re on the set?

MA: Yes, I change it a lot. I need to hear a line pronounced by the actors.

LS: How much do you see of a film when you’re looking at the script? Do you see the locations? Do you see where you’re going to work with the film?

MA: Yes, more or less. But I never try to copy what I see because this is impossible. I will never find the exact counterpart of my imagination.

LS: So you wipe the slate clean when you’re looking for your location?

MA: Yes. I just go and look. I know what I need, of course. Actually, it’s very simple.

BJD: Then you don’t leave the selection of location up to your assistants?

MA: The location is the very substance of which the shot is made. Those colors, that light, those trees, those objects, those faces. How could I leave the choice of all this to my assistants? Their choices would be entirely dif­ferent from mine. Who knows the film I am making better than me?

BJD: Was ‘The Passenger’ shot entirely on location? 

MA: Yes.

BJD: I believe most of your other films were too. Why do you have such a strong preference for location shooting?

MA: Because reality is unpredictable. In the studio everything has been foreseen.

BJD: One of the most interesting scenes in the film is the one which takes place on the roof of the Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona. Why did you choose this loca­tion?

MA: The Gaudi towers reveal, perhaps, the oddity of an encounter between a man who has the name of a dead man and a girl who doesn’t have any name. (She doesn’t need it in the film.)

BJD: I understand that in ‘Red Desert’ you actually painted the grass and col­ored the sea to get the effects you wanted Did you do anything similar in ‘The Passenger’?

MA: No. In The Passenger I have not tampered with reality. I looked at it with the same eye with which the hero, a reporter, looks at the events he is reporting on. Objectivity is one of the themes of the film. If you look closely, there are two documentaries in the film, Locke’s documentary on Africa and mine on him.

BJD: What about the sequence where Nicholson is isolated in the desert? The desert is especially striking, and the color is unusually intense and burning. Did you use any special filters or forced processing to create this effect?

MA: The color is the color of the desert. We used a filter, but not to alter it; on the contrary, in order not to alter it. The exact warmness of the color was obtained in the laboratory by the usual processes.

BJD: Did shooting in the desert with its high temperatures and blowing sand create any special problems for you?

MA: Not especially. We brought along a refrigerator in which to keep the film, and we tried to protect the camera from the blowing sand by cov­ering it in any possible way.

BJD: How do you cast your actors?

MA: I know the actors, I know the characters of the film. It is a question of juxtaposition.

LS: Specifically, why did you choose Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider?

MA: Jack Nicholson and I wanted to make a film together, and I thought he would be very good, very right for this part. The same for Maria Schneider. She was my understanding of the girl. And I think she was perfect for the role. I may have changed it a bit for her, but that is a real­ity I must face: you can’t invent an abstract feeling. Being a ‘star’ is irrel­evant – if the actor is different from the part, if the feeling doesn’t work, even Jack Nicholson won’t get the part.

LS: Are you saying that Nicholson acts like a star, that he’s hard to work with? 

MA: No. He’s very competent and a very, very good actor, so it’s easy to work with him. He’s intense, yet he doesn’t create any problems – you can cut his hair (I didn’t), he’s not concerned about his ‘good’ side or whether the camera is too high or too low; you can do whatever you want.

BJD: You once said that you see actors as part of the composition; that you don’t want to explain the characters’ motivations to them but want them to be pas­sive. Do you still handle actors this way?

MA: I never said that I want the actors to be passive. I said that sometimes if you explain too much, you run the risk that the actors become their own directors, and this doesn’t help the film. Nor the actor. I prefer work­ing with the actors not on an intellectual but on a sensorial level. To stim­ulate rather than teach.

First of all, I am not very good at talking to them because it is difficult for me to find the right words. Also, I am not the kind of director who wants ‘messages’ on each line. So I don’t have anything more to say about the scene than how to do it. What I try to do is provoke them, put them in the right mood. And then I watch them through the camera and at that moment tell them to do this or that. But not before. I have to have my shot, and they are an element of the image – and not always the most important element.

Also, I see the film in its unity whereas an actor sees the film through his character. It was difficult working with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider at the same time because they are such completely different actors. They are natural in opposite ways: Nicholson knows where the camera is and acts accordingly. But Maria doesn’t know where the cam­era is – she doesn’t know anything; she just lives the scene. Which is great. Sometimes she just moves and no one knows how to follow her. She has a gift for improvising, and I like that – I like to improvise.

LS: Then you don’t preplan what you are going to do on the set? You don’t sit down the evening before or in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to do this and this’? 

MA: No. Never, never.

LS: You just let it happen as you’re on the set? 

MA: Yes.

LS: Do you at least let your actors rehearse a scene first, or do you just go right into it?

MA: I rehearse very little – maybe twice, but not more. I want the actors to be fresh, not tired.

BJD: What about camera angles and camera movement? Do you carefully pre­plan in this area?

MA: Very carefully.

LS: Are you able to make decisions about print takes very soon, or do you –? 

MA: Immediately.

LS: Then you don’t shoot a lot of takes?

MA: No. Three. Maybe five or six. Sometimes we may do fifteen, but that is very rare.

LS: Would you be able to estimate how much footage you shoot per day? 

MA: No.

LS: Just whatever you can accomplish?

MA: In China I made as many as eighty shots in one day, but that was very different work; I had to rush.

LS: How long did it take to do the final scene of ‘The Passenger’?

MA: Eleven days. But that was not because of me but because of the wind. It was very windy weather and so difficult to keep the camera steady.

BJD: One critic has said that the final seven-minute sequence is destined to become a classic of film history. Can you explain how you conceived it?

MA: I had the idea for the final sequence as soon as I started shooting. I knew, naturally, that my protagonist must die, but the idea of seeing him die bored me. So I thought of a window and what was outside, the afternoon sun. For a second, just for a fraction – Hemingway crossed my mind: ‘Death in the Afternoon.’ And the arena. We found the arena and immediately realized this was the place. But I didn’t yet know how to realize such a long shot. I had heard about the Canadian camera, but I had no first–hand knowledge of its possibilities. In London, I saw some film tests. I met with the English technicians responsible for the camera and we decided to try. There were many problems to solve. The biggest was that the camera was 16mm and I needed 35mm. To modify it would have involved modifying its whole equilibrium since the camera is mounted on a series of gyroscopes. However. I succeeded in doing it.

LS: Did you use a zoom lens or a very slow dolly?

MA: A zoom was mounted on the camera. But it was only used when the camera was about to pass through the gate.

LS: It’s interesting how the camera moves toward the man in the center against the wall but we never get to see him, the camera never focuses on him.

MA: Well, he is part of the landscape, that’s all. And everything is in focus – everything. But not specifically on him. I didn’t want to go closer to anybody. The surprise is the use of this long shot. You see the girl out­side and you see her movements and you understand very well without going closer to her what she’s doing, maybe what her thoughts are. You see, I am using this very long shot like closeups, the shot actually takes the place of closeups.

LS: Did you cover that shot in any other way or was this your sole commitment? 

MA: I had this idea of doing it in one take at the beginning of the shoot­ing and I kept working on it all during the shooting.

LS: How closely do you work with your cinematographer?

MA: Who is the cinematographer? We don’t have this character in Italy.

LS: How big a crew do you work with?

MA: I prefer a small crew. On this one I had a big crew – forty people­ but we had union problems so it couldn’t be smaller.

LS: How important is your continuity girl to your work?

MA: Very important. Because we have to change in the middle, we can’t go chronologically.

BJD: How closely do you work with your editor?

MA: We always work together. However, I edited Blow-Up myself and the first version of The Passenger as well. But it was too long and so I redid it with Franco Arcalli, my editor. Then it was still too long, so I cut it by myself again.

BJD: How closely does the edited version reflect what you had in mind when you were shooting?

MA: Unfortunately, as soon as I finish shooting a film I don’t like it. And then little by little I look at it and start to find something. But when I finish shooting it’s like I haven’t shot anything. Then when I have my material – when it’s been shot in my head and on the actual film – it’s like it’s been shot by someone else. So I look at it with great detachment and then I start to cut. And I like this phase.

But on this one I had to change a lot because the first cut was very long. I shot much more than I needed because I had very little time to prepare the film – Nicholson had some engagements and I had to shoot very quickly.

LS: So you didn’t have time before the shooting to cut your screenplay down to size. 

MA: Right. I shot much more than was necessary because I didn’t know what I would need. So the first cut was very long – four hours. Then I had another that ran two hours and twenty minutes. And now it’s two hours.

LS: Do you shoot lip sync – record the sound on location? 

MA:Yes.

LS: What about dubbing?

MA: A little – when the noise is too much.

BJD: The soundtrack is an enormously important part of your films. For ‘L’avventura’ you recorded every possible shading of the sound if the sea. Did you do anything similar for ‘The Passenger’?

MA: My rule is always the same: For each scene, I record a soundtrack without actors.

BJD: Sometimes you make critical plot points by using sound alone. For instance, in the last sequence we have only the sound of the opening door and what might be a gunshot to let us know the protagonist has been killed. Would you comment on this?

MA: A film is both image and sound. Which is the most important? I put them both on the same plane. Here I used sound because I could not avoid looking at my hero – I could not avoid hearing the sounds con­nected with the actual killing since Locke, the killer, and the camera were in the same room.

BJD: You use music only rarely in the film, but with great effectiveness. Can you explain how you choose which moments will be scored?

MA: I can’t explain it. It is something I feel. When the film is finished, I watch it a couple of times thinking only about the music. In the places where I feel it is missing, I put it in – not as score music but as source music.

LS: Who do you admire among American directors?

MA: I like Coppola; I think The Conversation was a very good film. I like Scorsese; I saw Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and liked it very much­ it was a very simple but very sincere film. And you have Altman and California Split – he’s a very good observer of California society. And Steven Spielberg is also very good.

LS: I have the impression from your films that your people tend to just appear full-blown in a particular situation, that there’s not much  of a past to your characters. For instance, we find Nicholson in an alienated place with no roots behind him. And the same for the girl; she’s just there. It’s as though people are just immediately in an immediate present. There’s no background to them, as it were.

MA: I think it’s a different way of looking at the world. The other way is the older way. This is the modern way of looking at people. Today everyone has less background than in the past. We’re freer. A girl today can go anywhere, just like the one in the film, with just one bag and no thoughts for her family or past. She doesn’t have to carry any baggage with her.

BJD: You mean moral baggage?

MA: Precisely. Moral, psychological luggage. But in the older movies peo­ple have homes and we see these homes and the people in them. You see Nicholson’s home, but he’s not tied down, he’s used to going all over the world.

BJD: Yet you seem to find the struggle for identity interesting.

MA: Personally, I mean to get away from my historical self and find a new one. I need to renew myself this way. Maybe this is an illusion, but I think it is a way to reach something new.

RJD: I was thinking of the television journalist like Mr. Locke getting bored with life. Then there’s no hope for anything because that’s one of the more interesting careers.

MA: Yes, in a way. But it’s also a very cynical career. Also, his problem is that he is a journalist – he can’t get involved in everything he reports because he’s a filter. His job is always to talk about and show something or someone else, but he himself is not involved. He’s a witness not a protagonist  And that’s the problem.

LS: Do you see any similarity between your role as a film director and the role of Locke in the film?

MA: In this film it may be yes; it’s part of the film. But it’s different in a way. In The Passenger I tried to look at Locke the way Locke looks at real­ity. After all, everything I do is absorbed in a kind of collision between myself and reality.

LS: Some people think of film as being the most real of the arts and some think it’s purely illusion, a fake, because everything in a movie is still pictures. Can you speak a bit about this in relation to ‘The Passenger’?

MA: I don’t know if I could speak about it – if I could do the same thing with words I would be a writer and not a film director. I don’t have any­ thing to say but perhaps something to show. There’s a difference.

That’s why it’s very difficult for me to talk about my films. What I want to do is make the film. I know what I have to do. Not what I mean. I never think the meaning because I can’t.

LS: You’re a film director and you make images, yet I find that in your films the key people have a problem with seeing – they’re trying to find things or they’ve lost something. Like the photographer in ‘Blow-Up’ trying to find reality in his own work. Are you, as a director working in this medium, frustrated at not being able to find reality?

MA: Yes and no. In some ways I capture reality in making a film – at least I have a film in my hands, which is something concrete. What I am fac­ing may not be the reality I was looking for, but I’ve found someone or something every time. I have added something more to myself in making the film.

LS: Then it’s a challenge each time?

MA: Yes! I fight for it. Can you imagine? I lost my male character in the desert before the ending of the film because Richard Harris went away without telling me. The ending was supposed to be all three of them – the wife, the husband, and the third man. So I didn’t know how to finish the film. I didn’t stop working during the day, but at night I would walk around the harbor thinking until I finally came up with the idea for the ending I have now. Which I think was better than the previous one – for­tunately.

BJD: Have you ever wanted to make an autobiographical film?

MA: No. And I’ll tell you why: Because I don’t like to look back; I always look forward. Like everyone, I have a certain number of years to live, so this year I want to look forward and not back – I don’t want to think about the past years, I want to make this year the best year of my life. That is why I don’t like to make films that are statements.

BJD: It’s been said that in a certain sense a director makes the same film all his life – that is, explores the different aspects of a given theme in a variety of ways throughout his pictures. Do you agree with this? Do you feel it’s true for your work?

MA: Dostoevsky said that an artist only says one thing in his work all through his life. If he is very good, perhaps two. The liberty of the para­doxical nature of that quotation allows me to add that it doesn’t com­pletely apply to me. But it’s not for me to say.

– ‘Antonioni Discusses The Passenger’ in The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema. University Of Chicago Press (2007).

  

Antonioni on ‘Blow-Up’

Blow-Up (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni transplanted his existentialist ennui to the streets of swinging London for the Italian filmmaker’s first English-language feature. Blow-Up takes the form of a psychological mystery, starring David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park.

In Blow-Up an established photojournalist (David Hemmings) is confronted by a beautiful young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and an older gentleman (Ronan O'Casey) in a park and stealthily photographs them. According to Antonioni's plot outline and the released English script, Thomas and Jane are the only characters who have names in the film. The film was based on a story by Cortázar in which Michel, who is constantly described as having a propensity for creating fictions or making up fictions, and who is said to do this by projecting his own opinions and ideas onto what he sees, Antonioni's photographer only seeks to take photos of the scene in front of him and to frame the couple by manipulating the angle within the confines of the park.

The only time he notices specifics is when he adds on and edits the photos. It is only then that he sees the scene's meaning. And like a detective or forensic scientist, he creates what seems like a murder with a ruler and magnifying lens. 

In Blow-Up, it is the two sequences of the processing and study of the images that act as the structural focus of the plot. Antonioni broadened the scene where the discovery of the crime is discovered through pictures in order to "stir the reader's interest in the hunt for a mystery." This particular segment lasts eleven minutes and is driven by the absence of conversation, except for one brief telephone conversation, as well as the lack of music. 

To both the photographer and the viewer, the inspection of the images takes on an absorbing quality. Once the first set of enlargements is finished, the photographer feels his presence at the park kept someone from being murdered. After the second set, however, he realises this was not the case. This alteration in the story brings about a notable shift in the protagonist's situation, causing him to lose his bearings.

In the following extract Antonioni discusses the making of Blow-Up, the creative process and its inspirations.

My problem with Blow-Up was to recreate reality in an abstract form. I wanted to question ‘the reality of our experience.’ This is an essential point in the visual aspect of the film, considering that one of its main themes is to see or not to see the correct value of things.

Blow-Up is a performance without an epilogue, comparable to those stories from the twenties where F. Scott Fitzgerald showed his disgust with life. While I was filming, I was hoping that no one in seeing the finished film would say: ‘Blow-Up is a typically British film.’ At the same time, I was hoping that no one would define it exclusively as an Italian fIlm. Originally, Blow-Up’s story was to be set in Italy, but I real­ized from the very beginning that it would be impossible to do so. A character like Thomas doesn’t really exist in our country. At the time of the film’s narrative, the place where the famous photographers worked was London. Thomas, furthermore, finds himself at the center of a series of events which are more easily associated with life in London, rather than life in Rome or Milan. He has chosen the new mentality that took over in Great Britain with the 1960s’ revolution in lifestyle, behavior, and morality, above all among the young artists, publicists, stylists, or musicians that were part of the pop movement. Thomas leads a life as regulated as a ceremonial, and it is not by accident that he claims not to know any law other than that of anarchy.

Before the production of the film, I had lived in London for some weeks during the shooting of Modesty Blaise, a film by Joseph Losey star­ ring Monica Vitti. In that period I realized that London would be the ideal setting for a story like the one I already planned to do. But I never had the idea of making a film about London.

The same story could certainly have been set in New York or in Paris. I knew, nevertheless, that I wanted a gray sky for my script, rather than a pas­tel-blue horizon. I was looking for realistic colors and I had already given up, for this film, on certain effects I had captured in Red Desert. At that time, I had worked hard to ensure flattened perspectives with the telephoto lens, to compress characters and things and to place them in juxtaposition with one another. In Blow-Up, I instead opened up the perspective, I tried to put air and space between people and things. The only time I made use of the telephoto lens in the film was when I had to – for example in the sequence when Thomas is caught in the middle of the crowd.

The greatest difficulty I encountered was in reproducing the violence of reality. Enhanced and ultra-soft colors often seem to be the hardest and most aggressive. In Blow-Up, eroticism occupies a very important place, although the focus is often placed on a cold, calculated sensuality. Exhibitionistic and voyeuristic trends are particularly underlined. The young woman in the park undresses and offers her body to the photogra­pher in exchange for the negatives she wants so much to retrieve. Thomas witnesses a sexual encounter between Patrizia and her husband, and his presence as spectator seems to increase the young woman’s excitement.

The risque aspect of the film would have made filming in Italy almost impossible. Italian censorship would never have tolerated some of those images. Let’s not forget that, even though censorship has become more tolerant in many countries in the world, Italy remains the country of the Holy See.

In the film, for example, there is a scene in the photographer’s studio where two twenty-year-old women behave in a very provocative way.

Both are completely naked, although this scene is neither erotic nor vul­gar. It is fresh, light, and, I dare hope, funny. Certainly I cannot prevent viewers from finding it risque. I needed those images in the context of the film, and I did not want to give them up only because they might not meet with the taste and morality of the audience.

As I have written other times in reference to my films, my narratives are documents built not on a suite of coherent ideas, but rather on flashes, ideas that come forth every other moment. I refuse, therefore, to speak about the intentions I place in the film that, at one moment, occupies all my time and attention. It is impossible for me to analyze any of my works before the work is completed. I am a creator of films, a man who has certain ideas and who hopes to express them with sincerity and clarity. I am always telling a story. As far as knowing whether it is a story with any correlation to the world we live in, I am always unable to decide before telling it.

When I began to think about this film, I often stayed awake at night, thinking and taking notes. Soon this story, with its thousands of possibil­ities, fascinated me, and I attempted to understand where its thousands of implications would take me. But at a certain point, I told myself: let’s start making the film – that is to say, let’s try, for better or for worse, to tell the story and, then.... Today I still find myself at this stage, even if I am near­ly finished filming Blow-Up. To be frank, I am still not completely sure of what I am doing, because I am still in the ‘secret’ of the film.

I believe my work depends on both thought and intuition. For example, just a few minutes ago, I was all by myself, thinking about the next scene, and I tried to put myself in the shoes of the main character at the time when he finds the body. I stopped in the shade of the English lawn; I paused in the park, in the mysterious clarity of the London neon bill­ boards. I approached this imaginary corpse and I totally identified with the photographer. I strongly felt his excitement, his emotion, the thousands of sensations that were released in my ‘hero’ by the corpse’s discov­ery. And then I experienced his way of coming back to his senses, of thinking, and reacting. All of which lasted only a few minutes, one or two. Then the rest of the cast joined me and my inspiration, my sensations, vanished.

–  ‘E nato a Londra ma non e un film inglese’, from Corriere della Sera, 12 February 1982. Translated by Allison Cooper.

Michelangelo Antonioni: A Study in Color

Red Desert (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni) 

Red Desert (1964) was Antonioni’s first color film: a bold experiment in tone and design which often borders on the abstract. 

Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is a young mother recovering from a nervous breakdown. Her emotional insecurity propels the film’s journey through Antonioni’s preferred psychological terrain: the isolation, withdrawal and anxiety associated with life in a society where no one really belongs. 

With her engineer husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) absent, Giuliana forms an attachment to businessman Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris). It’s a relationship conducted against the bleak industrialised landscape of the Ravenna valley, a foggy, empty no-man’s land over which cranes and pylons loom like alien installations. 

It’s this nightmarish vision of the future that fascinates Antonioni – a landscape that almost deprives his characters of possibility. As the director once said, it was always the people, not the machines, that were broken in his films. 

Red Desert is the purest articulation of Antonioni’s cinematic vision. It’s a film in which the characters’ alienation is mirrored by an environment which is both forbidding and alluring in its detachment. ‘There’s something terrible in reality,’ says Giuliana at one point. ‘And I don’t know what it is.’ Antonioni’s images exist in a strange realm of their own. 

At times Red Desert feels like it has more in common with modern art than it does with traditional cinematic narrative. Antonioni once said of a Mark Rothko painting, ‘It’s painted anxiety’ – an apt description of Red Desert’s visual landscape. 

For all its formal virtuosity Red Desert is a poignant and compelling journey into a woman’s fractured state of mind. 

Michelangelo Antonioni gave an insight into his cinema and working methods in an interview with Pierre Billard in 1965:

In general, where does the original idea for your films come from? 

It seems to me that no one engaged in creative activity can answer that question in good faith. Lucidity is not one of my outstanding qualities. I look at everything, avidly, and I also think I listen a great deal. One thing is certain: ideas come to me unexpectedly. But I’m not really interested in getting to the bottom of such a question.

What does the writing of the scenario mean for you: clarifying the dramatic line, making the visual aspect of the film more specific, familiarizing yourself with the characters? 

To me, the visual aspect of a film is very closely related to its thematic aspect in the sense that an idea almost always comes to me through images. The problem lies elsewhere. It has to do with restricting the accumulation of these images, with digging into them, with recognizing the ones that coincide with what interests me at the time. It’s work done instinctively, almost automatically, but it involves a great deal of tension. One’s whole being is at stake: it is a precise moral choice. What people ordinarily call the ‘dramatic line’ doesn’t interest me. One device is no better than another, apriori. And I don’t believe that the old laws of drama have validity any more. Today stories are what they are, with neither a beginning nor an end necessarily, without key scenes, without a dramatic arc, without catharsis. They can be made up of tatters, of fragments, as unbalanced as the lives we lead. Familiarize myself with characters? But the characters are not strangers that I may or may not be on intimate terms with; they emerge out of me, they are my intimate inner life.

What does the fact that you work in collaboration with others on your scenario mean to you?

Every time I have tried to let others write parts of a rough script, the result, even if it was excellent from an objective point of view, was something foreign to me, something close to what I wanted without ever coinciding with it exactly. And that gave me a terrible sense of impotence. Then began the great task of selecting, correcting, even adapting work that was as difficult as it was useless, because it inevitably led to compromise. I can never manage to be objective when I judge the work of my collaborators. The film stands between me and them. So, after trying this a few times, I ended up writing almost all the shooting scripts of my films myself. However, I haven’t ruled out collaborations altogether. I don’t choose my collaborators on the basis of our affinities, but for the opposite reason. I need to have people who are very different from me around me, people with whom there can be animated, lively discussions. We talk, we discuss things for months before the film. We talk about a lot of things. Sometimes we also talk about the film, but not necessarily. What I say ricochets off them, comes back to me in the form of criticism, commentary, suggestions. After a certain time, the film becomes clear. It is only then that I begin to write the rough script. I work many hours a day, often beginning at dawn, until I’m completely exhausted.

What form does your script take in its final phase? 

The shooting script is never definitive for me. It’s notes about the direction, nothing more. There are no technical notations such as used to be made. The placing of the camera, the use of various lenses, the movements of the camera, all concern the phase in which the film is shot, not that in which the script is written. I would say the same thing about dialogue. I have to hear the dialogue in the living voices of the actors, that is to say of the characters, within the scene, to decide whether or not it’s right. And then there’s another factor. I believe in improvisation. None of us has the habit of preparing for a meeting to further business, love, or friendship; one takes these meetings as they come, adapting oneself little by little as they progress, taking advantage of unexpected things that come up. I experience the same things when I’m filming.

Can the choice of locations or actors influence the scenario, and if so, how? 

In general, I decide upon the outdoor locations before writing the shooting script. In order to be able to write, I need to have the surroundings of the film clearly in mind. There are times too when an idea for a film comes to me from a particular place. Or more precisely, when certain locales come to mind because of the themes or characters running through my head. It’s sometimes a rather odd series of coincidences.

What possibilities for improvisation do you allow for while you’re filming? 

Speaking of improvisation, I must add something to what I said before. If I think of the past, it’s possible for me to say that I have always lived minute by minute. It’s the way I live even today. Every moment of the day is important to me, every day is a new experience. And this doesn’t change when I’m shooting. On the contrary, the pull of reality increases during shooting, because you’re in an extremely receptive state, and because you’re making new contacts, you’re establishing often unexpected relationships with the crew, and these relationships are constantly changing. All that has a definite influence on my work, and leads me to improvised decisions, and even to radical changes. This is what I mean by improvisation.

How are your relations with the crew? 

Excellent. I try to create a cordial atmosphere. I like to have people laughing and joking around me. People who seem to have no problems. It’s quite enough that I have problems. I admit, however, that I am very demanding. I don’t allow anybody around me to show that he doesn’t know his business. Or that he’s unwilling to work. There is a certain laziness about crews, it’s natural, inevitable. But it’s what I dislike most. When I happen to scream at someone (as all directors do, it seems), I’m railing against this sort of indifference.

What are your relations with the actors? 

I’ve always had excellent relations with actors sometimes too good. Hearing me say that may seem odd, but it’s true. Even with Jeanne Moreau, who claims the opposite, I have never I repeat never had arguments during filming. I know, however, that actors feel somewhat uncomfortable with me; they have the feeling that they’ve been excluded from my work. And as a matter of fact they have been. But it is precisely: this form of collaboration, and no other, that I ask of them. Only one person has the film clearly in mind, insofar as that is possible: the director. Only one person fuses in his mind the various elements involved in a film, only one person is in a position to predict the result of this fusion: the director. The actor is one of these elements, and sometimes not even the most important. There is one thing the actor can’t do, and that is to see himself in the view-finder; if he could, he’d come up with a number of suggestions regarding his acting. This privilege is reserved to the director, however, who will thus limit himself to manipulating ‘the actor element’ according to criteria and exigencies known to him alone. There are various ways of getting certain expressions from actors, and it is of no interest to know whether or not there is a corresponding mood behind these expressions. I have often resorted to foreign actors for practical reasons: agreements with distributors, unavailability of Italian actors, and so forth. But sometimes it was because I thought actors were better suited to the roles than those at my disposal here.

Do you prefer to record the sound on the set or to dub it afterwards? 

When I can, I prefer recording on the set. The sounds, the noises, and the natural voices as picked up by microphones have a power of suggestion that can’t be obtained with dubbing. Moreover, most professional microphones are much more sensitive than the human ear, and a great many unexpected noises and sounds often enrich a soundtrack that’s been made on the set. Unfortunately, we are still not advanced enough technically to be able to use this system all the time. Shooting indoors it’s hard to get good sound. And dubbing also has its advantages. Sometimes I find that the transformation of a noise or of a sound becomes indispensable for certain special effects. Thus in certain cases it is necessary to change the human voice.

Who decides on the exact framing and the camera movements? 

I can’t imagine a director who would leave that up to other people. Excluding or including a detail, even an apparently secondary one, in the film image, choosing the angle of the shot, the lenses, the camera movements, are all decisions essential to the success of a film. Technique is not something that can be applied from outside by just anybody. Practically speaking, technical problems don’t exist. If style is there, it permeates technique. If style is missing, the problem disappears.

Do you shoot any sequences from several angles so as to have greater freedom when you edit? 

Until Red Desert, I always filmed with a single camera, and thus from a single angle. But from Red Desert on, I began using several cameras with different lenses, but always from the same angle. I did so because the story demanded shots of a reality that had become abstract, of a subject that had become color, and those shots had to be obtained with a long­ focus lens. Obviously I have the editing of the film clearly in mind during shooting. And it is only when I am led by circumstances to improvise, and consequently to shoot quickly, that I try to accumulate protection takes.

How much do you have to do with the cutting of your films? 

I have always had an editor at my side on all my films. Except for Story of a Love Affair, this editor has been Eraldo da Roma. He is an extremely able technician with vast experience, and a man who loves his work. We cut the films together. I tell him what I want as clearly and precisely as possible, and he does the cutting. He knows me, he understands immediately, we have the same sense of proportion, the same sensibility concerning the duration of a shot.

What is the role of music and the soundtrack in your films? 

I have always opposed the traditional musical commentary, the soporific function ordinarily assigned to it. It’s this idea of ‘setting images to music,’ as if it were a question of an opera libretto, that I don’t like. What I reject is this refusal to let silence have its place, this need to fill supposed voids. The only way to accept music in films is for it to disappear as an autonomous expression in order to assume its role as one element in a general sensorial impression. And with color films today this is even more necessary.

Do you concern yourself with the public and its possible reactions at any stage of making your films? 

I never think of the public. I think of the film. Obviously, you’re always speaking to someone, but this partner in the conversation is always an ideal one (perhaps another self). If this weren’t true, I wouldn’t know what to base my work on, since there are at least as many publics as there are continents or human races not to mention nations.

What phase of making a film presents the most difficulty, requires the most effort?  

Each film has its own history. One will demand inhuman efforts during shooting, another intellectual tension at the scripting stage, another an iron will during the cutting or the dubbing, when you’d swear that the material you have on hand is completely different from what you wanted. And then we each have our private lives which are not broken off during filming; on the contrary, they acquire new point and bite, giving our work a function that is sometimes stimulating, sometimes debilitating, sometimes calming, and so forth.

Do you feel that the language of film has evolved, and to what extent do you think you have contributed to this evolution? 

My contribution to the formation of a new cinematic language is a matter that concerns critics. And not even today’s critics, but rather those of tomorrow, if film endures as an art and if my films resist the ravages of time.

– PIERRE BILLARD From Cinema 65 100, November 1965. Originally translated in L’avventura. A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969.