Antonioni's Orgy
2011; Issue: 84 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Literature and Culture
ResumoLucretius, who was certainly one of the greatest poets who ever lived, once said: Nothing appears as it should in a world where nothing is certain. The only thing certain is the existence of a secret violence that makes everything uncertain. Think about this for a moment. What Lucretius said of his time is still a disturbing reality, for it seems to me this uncertainty is very much a part of our own time. But this is unquestionably a philosophical matter. Now you don't really expect me to resolve such problems or to propose any solutions? --Michelangelo Antonioni. A Talk with Michelangelo Antonioni--answering questions at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia of Rome on March 16, 1961. It originally appeared in the school's monthly periodical Bianco e Nero with the title La Malattia dei Sentimenti and is anthologized in Antonioni's writings in The Architecture of Vision by Michelangelo Antonioni, Marsilio Publishers New York 1995. ...your art consists in leaving the road of meaning open and as if undecided--out of scrupulousness. --Dear Antonioni by Roland Barthes [C] Editions du Seuil Translated by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith The forty year anniversary of Zabriskie Point in 2010 is a welcome time to reassess the film, its effects on the public who first saw it at the beginning of the seventies, and to assess the qualifications of the film's detractors over the years. Zabriskie Point was made in 1969 and released the following year, falling in Michelangelo Antonioni's filmography between Blow-Up in 1966 and The Passenger in 1972. Before Blow-Up there had been Red Desert (1964) a film about the industrial wasteland of Ravenna Italy and the inhabitants who work in the factories and try to adapt to the environment as best as they can. Zabriskie Point can be seen as the uneasy middle film in a desert trilogy of films about literal or figurative deserts alongside Red Desert and The Passenger that was filmed partially in Northern Africa. All three films are about couples that attempt, each in their own way, to adapt to the society they find themselves in. This adaptation, or the failure to achieve it, is what ultimately fascinates Antonioni yet his narratives are by turns enigmatic and melodramatic just as his framing is both tightly organized and meandering. This paradoxical approach often leaves audiences perplexed. In Zabriskie Point these qualities would be taken to new extremes--in a manner not seen outside of avant-garde films--as Antonioni experimented with narrative, framing and editing within the context of the feature film. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Red Desert the woman played by Monica Vitti tries to adapt herself to an industrial, polluted wasteland that she is forced to endure as it is the landscape of her husband's job in a power plant. The men throughout the film seem completely oblivious to the bizarre dystopia they have helped to create and to the resultant alienation Vitti is experiencing. After suffering a nervous breakdown she learns slowly to adapt to the industrial environment and to help her young son do the same. In The Passenger the woman played by Maria Schneider is a young would be architect who is just beginning to play out her passion for architecture by studying the work of Gaudi. The man, played by Jack Nicholson, is a middle aged reporter, burned out from his job, his passion dissipated, he drifts along where his job takes him with little of the enthusiasm that propelled him to want to be a reporter--that is--to uncover the truth --in the first place. He attempts to forge a new identity in the shifting world of post industrial, post-colonial tribal allegiances and international gun running. He succeeds only too well. As the relationship with the young woman architect is on the verge of succeeding because of who he is he is killed for who he is presumed to be. His character is in the right place and the right time (for love) and the wrong place at the wrong time (for death) at precisely the same moment. …
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