Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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      Beyond the Clouds, a “box-office smash” in Italy (Rosenbaum), found a more rational appreciation among the American critics. Jonathan Rosenbaum noted “a lot of beautiful things” in the film, saying that it “isn’t so much sexy as erotic … every bit as involved with the erotics of place as with the erotics of flesh” yet does not manage to get beyond desire (“Return”). In The New York Times, Michael Holden wrote—enthusiastically but also without the clarity that comes with conviction—that “you are all but transported through the screen to a place where the physical and emotional weather fuse into a palpable sadness” and also that the vignettes “portray characters caught up in romantic obsessions presented as metaphors for the artist’s pursuit of an elusive truth” (“Transformed”). But the central glory of Antonioni, after all, is that in his films truth is not elusive, that he depicts a truth quite clearly, although it is perhaps a far more complex truth than we crave in an era of uncommitted movement, promise, pulse, and surface.

      Much as when we fly above the clouds we sense ourselves to be “beyond” the society churning below, out of touch and in fact hopelessly, if also deliriously, unable to make contact; and sense that our movement is dependent on our status as outsiders; so all of the characters in the four stories Antonioni has filmed for Beyond the Clouds are separated from one another and, thus, from shared direct presence and experience. All of them are, in some deep and evocative sense, alone. It is perhaps the case that in this, they resemble and even mirror the condition of every person, always, trapped on one or the other side of some barely substantial essence that keeps people away from the human race. We cannot fully know the world, even though we can recognize its surfaces, and so the surfaces become the world: a thematic that Seymour Chatman attributes to Antonioni’s filmmaking. Gilberto Perez very perceptively writes of a kind of separation in Antonioni’s camera’s vision, to the extent that “we observe the man and the woman from the point of view of a stranger who somehow has come upon them” (367). But it is not this that I have in mind when I invoke separation, since strangers, too, have homes, and all strangers can imagine a country in which they are neither separated from those they watch nor set apart from the rituals of the flow of life. I have in mind, much more, a kind of nostalgia for an irrevocable but unforgettable past, such as was felt by a diarist Sebald quotes, who is remembering a “distinctly creepy” house to which her family moved: there, she writes, “I leafed through a page or two of the blue velvet postcard album which had its place on the shelf of the smoking table, and felt like a visitor” (Emigrants 210). In Beyond the Clouds, it is exactly as though, in some “distinctly creepy” place, and looking at images of some irrevocable but unforgettable past, we have become visitors, arbitrarily and knowingly accelerating out of that familiar orbit from which we might see a world presented in its telling details, so that, moving more quickly than our souls can move, we stand outside ourselves and look back with the eyes of some well-meaning inconnu. All this horribly sweet turmoil is artfully measured and evidenced in Silvano almost touching Carmen while not touching her; in the director and the girl making love with movement and tension, with drive and hunger, while yet seeming to be on different planets, their bodies unaware that they are gliding against one another in our view as we busily note (to quote Durrell again) not them exactly but the act in which they are engaged; in Carlo and Patrizia navigating through the waters of the memory of their marriages, their lost furniture, their betrayed dreams; in Niccolo running away from someone who is also running away, in Aix. In all of this, the relation of touch, which is the oldest relation, and the one that confers upon objects their identity as “things” (see Ortega) has long dissipated in favor of promise, which is also that glint in the eye with which we detect the periphery of a world in its continual unfolding and a voice that rushes like water and says, “I search.”

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      Al di là delle nuvole (1995), photographed by Alfio Contini (and, for sequences by Wim Wenders, by Robby Müller) in the 1.66: 1 format at Ferrara, Aix-en-Provence, and Portofino and printed as an Eastmancolor positive; 104 m. Released in the United States as Beyond the Clouds, October 8, 1999.