Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ are right, the crystal will unavoidably form. The “seed” in this case is a certain female sensibility that seems open to some form of continuance (sadly lacking in both Mavi and Ida). To the extent that we may view the filmmaker’s quest as his science, Identification of a Woman turns out to be, actually, the sci-fi film that the little boy asks for; a sci-fi film, indeed, about the ultimate making of a sci-fi film, that “new mysticism” (Kelly 42). Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana said to Antonioni, “The little boy asks Niccolò, ‘Why don’t you make a sci-fi film?’ We ask the same question of you.” And he replied to them, “It’s a question a little boy like that can ask, but not you!” (5)

      Niccolò’s search for his character is a voyage with, but also around, women who constitute not only his alien “other” but also his universe, a universe, in the filmmaker’s view, of startling moral discontinuity:

      Today the world is endangered by an extremely serious split between a science that is totally and consciously projected into the future, and a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice or sheer laziness …. Science has never been more humble and less dogmatic than it is today. Whereas our moral attitudes are governed by an absolute sense of stultification …. we have not been capable of finding new ones, we have not been capable of making any head-way whatsoever towards a solution of this problem, of this everincreasing split between moral man and scientific man, a split which is becoming more and more serious and more and more accentuated. (Film Culture 31–32)

      Niccolò’s is likewise a universe that is sure to be changed: “In the future—not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century—these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them” (Samuels 82). Antonioni admitted to Seymour Chatman that he had begun to read more and more about science: “As soon as you talk about the universe, everything is involved” (Chatman, “Interview” 156).

      In the last scene of the film, this link between science fiction, the filmmaker, his world, and his women is apparent. Coming home, he stops to listen through the door of his apartment. Who can he be listening for? What is he thinking? That she is inside. She? Not Mavi, to be sure, because Mavi is with her lover, Mavi has forgotten him. Not Ida, because he has abandoned Ida. He is listening for the sounds—female sounds absolutely—that will identify his world and connect him with it, the sounds of his truest nature, indeed a sound, distinct, that will address specifically and only him. Then we go inside. Jauntily he tosses his coat away. A landscape hangs restfully upon a wall, seen from an acute angle. The door to his study—it is marked with a Greek key—he steps past it, places his hand upon the wall, lets his fingers creep toward the handle. Quickly, without a reflective pause, he opens. No one is in there, but through a beautiful vertical rectangle the window light spreads in, and, far off, a rolling hill is covered with cushions of trees. “In each of Antonioni’s films, especially those in color, there exists a proportionate relationship between the sheer beauty of the images and the terrible reality contained in them” (Kelly 42). He grabs some sunglasses and positions himself in the window. We cut to a close-up of his face as, shielding his eyes a little, he peers outward. Delicate sounds of exploratory music. The sun, informing and blinding, floods in upon him as his voice is heard narrating the story of the asteroid-ship that is his film. Indeed, as his image dissolves away, certain hot spots linger on the screen and become dark green, parts of the space void that the ship haunts. “Individual time accords mysteriously with that of the cosmos” (Antonioni; qtd. in Cardullo 154).

      ATTENTION

      The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him.

      —W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

      Seymour Chatman is neither at ease with Identification of a Woman nor able to escape the temptation to imagine how it could have been improved, when he writes,

      There is no discernable answer to the question that Niccolò writes in the steam on a window of his apartment (in the treatment only): “But why am I so attracted to this woman whom I cannot manage to respect?” It might have been well if the question had been asked in the film. At least it would have helped focus the issue a little more clearly. Whether Milian was not quite up to the subtleties of the role or Antonioni did not provide him with sufficiently explanatory lines and action, the basis for Niccolò’s absorption with Mavi remains unclear. (Surface 225–226)

      Nor when he suggests that “Part of the problem with Mavi’s characterization may lie with the actress who plays her. It is all very well to depict a character whose psyche is chaotic, incompletely formed, inachevée. But clearly the role must be played by someone who is herself clear about what she is doing” (227). Nor when, discussing the notable wordiness of this film in the director’s oeuvre, he remarks, “Too many lines are spent establishing the believability of Niccolò’s erotic charm” (233). Nor when, in regards to the finale, he chides, “It is sad that Antonioni’s budget did not permit him to end the film with the kind of finale that he wanted (and that it seems to need). For if the science fiction sequence had been realized with effects of the caliber of 2001, Star Wars, or Blade Runner, one’s feelings about Niccolò and his situation as an artist might be entirely different” (237). There is never much sense in reconfiguring an artist’s motion picture along the lines of one’s own tastes and predilections—of pretending to be the filmmaker oneself. The only film ever worth studying is the one the filmmaker has put upon the screen—worth studying only because it is in our desire to study it—and our challenge is to understand how all of its aspects cohere beautifully and meaningfully into a statement that might not at first be intelligible to our limited reception. There is no doubt that we can be wrong, in myriad ways, but any other project of the self is ultimately an evasion of the facts. Rather than squabble with a film, we must adjust ourselves to it; and that adjustment is the true adventure of cinema-going. Antonioni told Pierre Billard, “Mistakes are always sincere, absolutely sincere” (Cardullo 51).

      What kind of science—what kind of eroticized science—is Niccolò doing, that we should understand his charm? And his science fiction film, which is certainly not Star Wars or Blade Runner but which offers a stunning, if abrupt, vision and draws the film to a profound conclusion—what about its significance exactly and wholly in its own terms? When Antonioni spoke with Daney and Toubiana, he did not regret that he lacked the funds for making extravaganzas like those American ones, he merely indicated that in Italy filmmaking was done in radically different terms than in Hollywood. Moreover, the asteroid-ship isn’t the true sci-fi figure in this film, Niccolò is. And the glowing sun only signifies the mysterious universe that is thrown up more concretely in the presences that Niccolò confronts.

      Two fascinating features of the film are indeed valuably invoked in Chatman’s critique: the incomprehensibility and vagueness of the world that fascinates our protagonist (to such an extent that one might question the merit of that fascination); and the nexus between fascination and erotic appeal. The world’s incomprehensibility is one thing as regards knowledge and another as regards perception. We have a long history of seeking to apprehend structures and relations that are not immediately given to the senses, and in this respect it can be argued that the quest for knowledge is a continual negotiation with the world’s mystery or incomprehensibility. After the Enlightenment, science of any sort attempts to illuminate, thus to make experience more understandable and to dissipate the darkness: where id was, there shall ego be. But the world as an incomprehensible datum changed at the end of the nineteenth century, with William James’s theory of active perception. Prior to this, philosophers had posited “the mere presence to the senses of an outward order” (James, vol. 1, 402), which in the case of perceptual difficulty implied either a damaged or an improperly attentive perceptual apparatus, absent which the apparent (and complete) СКАЧАТЬ