Michael Antonioni: The Late Years
1997; Issue: 42 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
AutoresFlorence Jacobowitz, Richard Lippe,
Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoTHE EUROPEAN CINEMA, FROM ITS EARLY DAYS, WAS ROOTED in avant-garde modernist movements which continued to influence and inform the development of what was later termed the European art film. Michelangelo Antonioni's cinema is part of the post-World War II questioning and rethinking of narrativity, modernism, the directorial voice, the importance of environment and setting, and the viewer's positioning. These concerns belong to a European tradition that considered cinema a unique forum for exploring ideas regarding class and social relations, and the notion of the artist's responsibility to function as a social critic is a longstanding aspect of its culture. The European art film and the challenges it presented to mainstream, studio-produced filmmaking was particularly potent in the 1960s and early 1970s with the director's vision and self-expression fully celebrated. This concept of the filmmaker/auteur and the camera-stylo allowed for the elaboration of a signature use of such elements as style, performance, thematic concerns and preferred actors; its significance was enhanced by the politicized revaluations of contemporary social politics then taking place after the war and the changing attitudes towards the function of art and entertainment. In the last decade it has become increasingly difficult to claim this cinema to be of value. It has been labelled the product of a white middle-class hegemony and worse, it is now viewed as being intrinsic to the `dominant' cinema. As such, it is considered over-valued and in its place there has been a shift toward the promotion of marginalized voices--the Third World, Asia, Cuba, Africa. The acknowledgment and highlighting of these cinemas is certainly valid and necessary but it is absurd and misdirected to dismiss the tradition of the European art film and deny its validity and value as a consequence. In the department of cinema studies in which we teach it has been intentionally overlooked within curricular offerings. Somehow this policy is meant to redress the imbalance and rectify past sins; however, the result of this neglect is the suppression of the history necessary to understand contemporary social experience and forms of representation, as well as the denial of the correspondences and crossover influences between, for example, Fernando Solanas/Octavio Gettino and Jean-Luc Godard. There are, in fact, various threads complicating the problem and one is the fall of authorship. It is fashionable to look at a work as a post-modern product of contemporary culture, not as the sustained vision of an artist. In part, this banishment of the author is a result of shifting academic tastes. On a more practical note, it has become increasingly difficult to see the later work of many major European directors because distributors are no longer willing to gamble on a product which lacks sure commercial viability. The works of established directors such as Claude Chabrol, Margarethe Von Trotta and Bertrand Tavernier are inconsistently distributed, and their availability is primarily restricted to the rounds of international film festivals and cinematheque retrospectives. (1) The less challenging films, like Cinema Paradiso, do attain distribution because they often parallel the commercial Hollywood product, providing similar sentimental and reassuring gratifications. Another trend has been to redefine the art house film through the British cinema's appropriation of the 19th century novel in the conservative tradition of television's Masterpiece Theatre. The late works of Antonioni have not evoked critical interest and have failed to receive distribution. Despite his recently receiving an honorary Academy Award, Antonioni's films no longer meet the standards of contemporary tastes and the intellectual former left-wing critic/academic contingent snub him. The situation brings to the fore questions not spoken: What criteria are being used to judge these works? …
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