Michelangelo Antonioni

Alienation is one of the essential experiences of human life. From the time of infancy to adolescence, each of us is constantly served by a world that is ideologically designed to ensure our well-being: we are made to go to school; our guardians arrange playdates with other children; and perfect strangers go out of their way to remark on how sweet, pretty or handsome we are.

But then, as we enter our teenage years, this network starts to dissipate: we’re no longer required to stay in school. Our parents are no longer responsible for our social lives. And other people start to view us not as a novelty but as a problem. It is now up to the individual child to make sense of things for themselves in an increasingly indifferent world — and at the same time, face more complicated emotions than they’ve ever known before. Everything is suddenly abstract, and unknowable.

Everyone who lives into their adulthood has experienced alienation — but the last three months have given the phenomenon a whole new meaning. Due to the havoc the novel coronavirus has wreaked upon the world, we have gone from being fully-integrated members of society to estranged, isolated souls. At the writing of this essay, the United States government is taking its first measures to stimulate public life and reopen the economy after more than two months in shutdown. But the future of the nation remains uncertain, and many are afraid of whatever setbacks or spikes in infections may lay in store.

For me, it felt like the perfect time to revisit the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, a man who (though bizarrely never drawn to “plague” as a metaphor) was perennially obsessed with the phenomenon of alienation — particularly as a symptom of what he saw as a broader, modern spiritual crisis.

You could say that Antonioni invented social distancing. His most celebrated films — namely, the unofficial trilogy on alienation that includes L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (‘61) and L’Eclisse (‘62) — are characterized by long, aimless passages featuring an actor (typically Monica Vitti, with whom he made five movies) wandering through a deserted landscape. It could be a modern city, a rocky island, a gray-colored factory, or a vast desert: everywhere you turn, you’re the only one there.

Unlike our current moment, however, this distancing occurs organically, without evident or specific cause. One of the more charming ambiguities of Antonioni’s style is whether — as in one’s teenage years, when the boundaries around selfhood suddenly feel both broader and more constricted — characters elect to distance, or merely find themselves in such circumstances.

Indeed, the answer is typically both: Antonioni heroes have a tendency to cry out for their lovers and then promptly shrug them off. Women make love to men they know are cads, and then console themselves among desolate, ancient ruins. It’s as if people, in Antonioni’s view, are unconsciously driven to sabotage their lives for want of anything else to do.

Their logic is equally confused: in L’Eclisse, a man criticizes his girlfriend’s inability to communicate (“You always say, ‘I don’t know’”), while in La Notte, a mistress claims that conversation never gets her anywhere (“Whenever I try to communicate, love disappears”). It’s a vicious cycle of lack-of-effort; I routinely felt, watching these films, a sharp impulse to shout out, “Just try a little!” If I ever meet Monica Vitti, I will surely be filled with the not-unreasonable impulse to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

But it’s inadequate to talk about Antonioni’s work from a purely psychological standpoint. As devoted as he was to the aesthetic of despair, he never missed an opportunity to politicize it. In most of his films, Antonioni poses an abstract socio-political entity as the potential source for modern decay: in La Notte, urban development stands in sharp contrast to the poetic imaginations of its protagonists; L’Eclisse observes the harried, grotesque despotism that colors the Roman stock market; Red Desert (1964 — often considered the fourth film in the alienation “trilogy”) takes place on the fringes of a gray, impenetrable industrial plant; and The Passenger (‘75) traces its hero’s crisis of identity alongside guerrilla warfare and arms smuggling in Central Africa.

Industrialism, capitalism, post-colonialism — all menaces to existential security. And then, with Identification of a Woman (1982), Antonioni tackled a new foe: lesbianism.

He takes his time before arriving at the point. At the beginning of the film, Niccolò (Tomas Milian), a depressed middle-aged filmmaker, is approached by a stranger who threatens him — warning that, if he knows what’s good for him, Niccolò should stay away from the woman he’s fallen in love with. But as the story progresses, and as paranoia afflicts Niccolò and his young lover, Mavi (Daniela Silverio), his girlfriend leaves him to begin a relationship with a woman. Originally positioning itself as a low-key thriller about the dark power of romantic insecurity, Identification’s initial intrigue is traded in for a withering estimation of women as unknowable objects of mystery. 

With this film, released in the autumn of his career, Antonioni eliminated all the ideological digressions he’d taken through his years of criticizing “the modern world.” (Though he remains at least somewhat aware of himself: at one point, a young gay woman asks Niccolò why all Italian directors seem paid to be angry at the world. “We’re also paid to laugh at it,” he suggests. “Which is just another way of resisting it,” she replies.) Though he’s ostensibly concerned with the separateness that springs up between couples, a closer reading of the director’s work suggests that his anxiety stemmed from a more biblical precept: the danger of willful women. Indeed, each of his female protagonists are preoccupied with the affections of an elusive, manipulative man — except in Identification of a Woman, where sex between women is a bastardized representation of the effects of feminism and the physically graphic “lovemaking” scenes between Niccolò and Mavi are reflexively hostile attempts by a male filmmaker to claim a queer woman’s body.

For Antonioni, it is self-agency and independence in women, not geopolitics, which herald the end of the world; for a man who spent years chasing after every cliché in the book of liberal ennui, he never realized that he was skimming over the real culprit all along: the white male ego.

As with the work of directors like Alfred Hitchcock or Louis Malle, when we reexamine Antonioni’s films through the lens of misogyny, it is hard not to ultimately classify them as lazy, unprincipled and evasive. Their visual attractiveness — elegant, minimalist tableaux featuring beautiful Italian and French actors — has long distracted audiences from the caustic, unyielding soul that lies beneath. Prettiness and technical proficiency are not adequate arguments against the films’ more sinister deficits in ethics or humility, and as expressive as films like L’Ecclisse and The Passenger are of a compulsively unhappy mind, we cannot ignore that they are also devoid of substantive emotional revelation.

The only film that comes close to being the opposite is La Notte — perhaps because it is the least gimmicky of Antonioni’s works. It begins with a couple, Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) and Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) visiting their dying friend. As the friend talks to them of his ensuing demise, Lidia becomes overwhelmed and steps outside; meanwhile, as he leaves his friend’s room, Giovanni is accosted by an unstable, promiscuous female patient in the hall — a “hysterical” woman, of whom he takes advantage before a group of nurses intervene. (Of course, the nurses start beating their patient while Giovanni slips out of the room, unbothered.)

This pair of incidents set the atmosphere for the entire day, as Giovanni and Lidia drive to a gathering celebrating the release of his new novel and then, at night, join another party at the home of a powerful industrialist. (The film’s most eloquent passage comes when the industrialist — played by Vincenzo Corbella in a vital yet quietly apathetic performance — bends down in his garden to pick one of his prized roses.) It’s at the nighttime party that they’re introduced to a young woman named Valentina (Vitti), who becomes the third point in an obtusely romantic triangle — prodding both partners to reflect more openly on the nature of their marriage.

Coming as it does in the middle of the alienation trilogy, La Notte locates a sense of loss that is generally recognized but rarely felt in any of Antonioni’s other films. In his movie from the previous year, L’Avventura, Antonioni made the brilliant decision to present a lead character, Anna (Lea Massari), who disappears after thirty minutes, and is then never found; indeed, it is never even learned why she vanished. Her inexplicable absence becomes a catalyst for other characters to confront the void of their own existences — but what’s so heartbreaking about La Notte is the fact that while no one disappears, something far more delicate and precious is lost: marital love.

Unlike L’Eclisse or Red Desert, in which a locale or celestial event is tacked on as a loose metaphor for its characters’ despair, La Notte uses a single day’s descent into darkness (and its ensuing dawn) as a measured, sensitive extension of Lidia and Giovanni’s tough, uncompromising emotions. The couple’s exquisitely-designed, bourgeois environs — paired with low, inky lighting and the actors’ own lean, shade-like figures wandering past the camera — amount to a kind of philosophical-aesthetic elegance. It is the only time in Antonioni’s later filmography when, throughout an entire two hours, content matches form for subtlety and depth. In other words, La Notte earns its right to despondency.

Overall, though, the films of Michelangelo Antonioni are representative of an immature worldview — one that identifies alienation as the fundamental quality of modern life, and thus avoids a more comprehensive estimation of “modernity.” He fails to admit to any greater idiosyncrasies in human behavior and shirks the responsibility of a more pointed interrogation of his own prejudices. Granted, there is much about the world we live in today that would only expound Antonioni’s pessimistic opinion, if he were alive to see it. (Just think of what he’d make of cellphones and Snapchat.) Yet one of the revelations I’ve had during this pandemic is not unlike one that young adults discover upon striking out on their own for the first time: that people, despite all precepts, are inclined to show up for each other.

To witness how persistently people have striven to reinforce community as of late — through Zoom calls, streamed musical performances and local volunteer efforts — is to realize that, on a broad scale, individuals have a way of adapting to crises in unexpected, heart-swelling ways. It makes pessimism a difficult outlook to maintain; the films of Michelangelo Antonioni are ultimately unconvincing, as much for their uninspired solemnity as for their antiquated politics.

To watch Red Desert or The Passenger or even La Notte today is to wonder how, if it died sixty years ago, the human spirit has possibly managed to persist. The answer to that question is Antonioni’s undoing.