Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ of the self, because in this act we struggle to believe in the existence of the qualities we admire. We elevate art, but not without the expenditure of effort that also produces an elevation of the self. To see the world clearly, as Cézanne saw it, is to diminish the self to a point, but in order to admire someone else’s vision of the world one lifts it onto one’s shoulders. One is working, after all, to convince oneself that this is an Original—special, worthy of considered attention—but then suddenly, as though on the opening of a door into a grand arena, one sees or hears all of it with a new and surprising clarity, and it is all present and accounted for, effortless, pristine, full, in a flash, and then originality disappears as a consideration, becomes trivial in the face of what the work actually is. Yet is this vision or this audition not something like what occurred for and to the artist at work? For an instant we have the opportunity to share that vision or audition by performing it again, by repeating history. (In the brief interlude directed by Wenders, when Mastroianni painting the Mont Sainte-Victoire is interrupted by Moreau stepping up to converse with him, this is what he tells her, too: that the meaning for him in copying the original Cézanne resides in trying to experience what the painter experienced, and this is not copying.) The artist, it is certain, labors with the conviction that such an audition, such a perception, is possible, surely for the artist who regards the world but also for those who come to the work of art. He shows or perhaps sings the world in such a way that others can know how he saw it, or heard it open itself and sing to him, through the obstruction of daily life—and not just obstruction but continual obstruction and darkness, that rent to be paid, the paint dry upon the palette, the bon mot slipping away into those moist blue recesses of the absurd and the undiscovered. Or the opinions of the strangers standing next to one’s elbow, always too informed. The world must finally vibrate so that it rises off the map: Mont Sainte-Victoire ceases to be that stalwart lump at 43° 32' N, 05° 39' E and becomes an ineffable presence. If one listens carefully to a choir in a church, if one gives oneself entirely to each voice and the combination of voices, one can also hear the stones from which the vibrations of these voices are recoiling. It is the stones, as much as the music, that have the power to put one to sleep, since by way of those who sing the stones themselves have voice, just as by way of the painter the mountain speaks or as by way of the filmmaker the space of the urban intérieur (which Walter Benjamin described, “furnished and familiar” [Gunning 106]), its cherished objects or its lack of things, its paintings even standing upon the floor, its plate glass partitions, is permitted to enunciate the world.

       Voices

      It is rather evident to the eye, even disturbingly so as we watch, that as they walk through the city, the girl almost never looks at the young man. Speaking through the voice of an off-camera narrator in To Make a Film Is to Be Alive, a documentary about the making of Beyond the Clouds that is published on the DVD, Antonioni explicitly draws attention to the fact. She needs, says this narrator, “no reassurance from him. Security is not what she needs. A serenity verging on indifference seems to pervade her.” This is surely difficult, if only because serenity is sacred while indifference is mundane. The girl is unruffled, but she is also a little stiff, as though the force of attraction exercised by his hungry ministrations and gaze has made her capable of falling from a kind of pedestal that is gliding beneath her. The boy certainly thinks she occupies a higher plane, perhaps because her lips are the precise Iranian pink of a Gloire de Guilan rose. She tells him she wants to escape from her body, and at that he pauses to slake his thirst. By easily satisfying his body, has he escaped from it? Is she trapped in the fact that she insists on denying herself? What Antonioni typically wishes to escape from is the prison of rationality, the abject quotidian use of intelligence, or at least the use of words that, “more than anything else, serve to hide our thoughts” (Cottino-Jones 21). Her self-contentment, her private love—these are not rational. Later, this narrative voice that is both Antonioni and not-Antonioni mentions the sound of the water running in the fountains as a voice, gives evidence that he hears voices everywhere, a voice but not mere words. “The voice is a ‘noise’ which emerges with other noises in a rapport” (Cottino-Jones 49). The voice is the expression of the spirit of the moment through the fact of the body, and what is said, the message to which words are tantamount, does not summarize the voice but merely localizes it. The voice, indeed, is presence and fullness of the act of speaking itself. Goodman says, “When speaking intervenes in the world and shapes experience, it often is, or is taken as, a direct action in the environment, an energy or even a physical thing, rather than the use of the common code for communication” (19). Speaking itself is the voice. In this part of the film, for example, the boy and girl speak to one another, from the moment of their meeting until the moment of their parting, rather as though at cross purposes, and certainly following two apparently discreet lines of intent that do not promise to intersect. Yet here, as in the story of Carmen and Silvano, the voices of two human beings gradually approximate to one another, just as the rationales upon which they insist on basing their lives move apart. Does one follow the voice or the message?

      “This Body of Filth” is the name of the little story from which this segment of the film is taken. It has an interesting ending:

      Only now does he notice her strong sensuous figure. It seems to him that he’s never felt so intense a desire to possess a woman. But it’s a different desire, with a certain tenderness and respect. It’s ridiculous, he thinks. And yet there’s a quaver in his voice, and he can’t help it, when he says,

      “Can I see you tomorrow?”

      She keeps on smiling in the few seconds of silence that precede her reply. And her voice is devoid of all emotion when she speaks.

      “I’m entering a cloistered convent tomorrow.”

      What a stunning opening for a film. But for me it’s a film that ends here. (Tiber 35)

      And we can imagine it, indeed, ending precisely there. On that top landing of the flat of apartments in which she lives. The angelica green, so dense and sweetly gummy one feels the color warping through one’s flesh, and the wine red carpet, red as sacrificial blood, transubstantial, interior. She at her door, looking directly into him, then the door closing. Fade to black.

      But onscreen this is not how Antonioni ends his story at all.

      We cut to Niccolo frozen in place, his mouth open in shock or amazement, in disappointment or incomprehension, his eyes trained upon her door. Then clumsily he turns, makes his way to the stairwell, and we look down the opening to see him pass all the way to the bottom level—Orfeo searching for Eurydice in the nightmarish bureaucracy in Orfeu Negro (1959), where papers fall down such a stairwell like snow, or Antoine Doinel running away from Fabienne Tabard in Baisers volés (1968)—and stride out of the building. Down the golden street he goes, golden after the rains have washed the sandstone buildings, the street studded with golden light, and walks faster, and breaks into a run. Perhaps, stunningly, he has decided that she is altogether not the person he hoped she would be, that the voice she had kept hidden deep inside, the voice of all truths, the voice he hears only at the end, is a radically strange, even inimical, voice. He is running to save himself. Or he has accepted the impossibility of his love in the face of the definitiveness of hers for something beyond the mortal, and he runs now in freedom, having released—perhaps not her but—the hope of her that he has cherished and targeted. Or else that hope of her has chained him to the rocks, his gaping wound open to the sky.

      It doesn’t matter, because also possible is that she has not yet spoken with her truest voice, that she has only made a little speech to fill in the map of her days, to put him off a little, to suspend him. She may well be bypassing both her feelings and what she wants. And this boy: perhaps at her doorway he could have stepped forward instead of remaining in place, extended himself across the gap. So it is that the final moment of Antonioni’s film, in which Niccolo scampers down the street, perhaps singin’ in the rain, is full of optimism and hope, not a moment of closure at all, since both of them may yet find the voice that speaks a companionship. He may stop, just after we can no longer watch, СКАЧАТЬ