Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ of the mind are pure products of ‘experience’; and experience is supposed to be of something simply given” (402). James suggests that perception is bound up with attention, and attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” (403–404). He goes on to stipulate that in paying attention, we must accomplish “withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others” (404). Part of what is troubling Niccolò, seen through a Jamesian lens, is the decision, in regard to both Mavi and Ida, as to what he should attend to and what he should disregard. In causing him this trouble these women also spark his concern about other aspects of the world and the decision he must make, always, in seeing. This is why the title of the film is so appropriate. As much as the problem is women, it is also identification, and, indeed, identification of a woman, that spirit so ineluctable and enticing: woman as the motive of science (not in the crass way that scientists, who are frequently men, objectify women and try to control them through knowledge; but in the spiritual way that scientists, who are humans, seek the ineffable knowledge of their own origin, the place of no return).

      One signal consequence of the shift to thinking of active perception, writes Jonathan Crary, “was that the functioning of vision became dependent on the complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer, rendering vision faulty, unreliable, and, it was sometimes argued, arbitrary. Even before the middle of the [nineteenth] century, an extensive amount of work in science, philosophy, psychology, and art involved a coming to terms in various ways with the understanding that vision, or any of the senses, could no longer claim an essential objectivity or certainty” (12).

      Niccolò can err in his calculations and estimations; as can every other character in the film. Language can seem ambiguous. For example, when the girl at the swimming pool acknowledges that on one occasion she and Mavi slept together, it can be totally unclear what, ultimately, she is saying: that Mavi is a lesbian? That circumstances led to a fortuitous experience, once? That Niccolò has no hope with Mavi? That men tend to misunderstand and misrepresent women? The world’s ostensible “incomprehensibility” can result not simply from inaccurate or faulty (that is, correctible) sight of an object that is fully given, but from a biased observer’s position or attitude in the face of an object that takes its form only in being apprehended. But, suggests Crary, the independence of subjective perception comes to be challenged in further ways: “The rapid accumulation of knowledge about the workings of a fully embodied observer disclosed possible ways that vision was open to procedures of normalization, of quantification, of discipline. Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly the other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation” (12). The vision of the discrete observer is thus measurable and quantifiable, and can be schematized, so that perception can be fitted into a broader calculus of hegemonic control and knowledge. Vision could be instrumentalized “as a component of machinic arrangements” (13). To the extent, then, that the visionary act was externalized as a social entity (through the action that eventuated from it), even as a public resource, any act of identification or discrimination could stand obediently to order within a matrix of predictable and exploitable observations and thus gain its place among what Crary calls “the delirious operations of modernization” (13). A move was induced culturally to “discover what faculties, operations, or organs produced or allowed the complex coherence of conscious thought” (15). Perception and knowledge became rationalized as a system of control.

      Looking at attention as “an inevitable fragmentation of a visual field,” Crary cites John Dewey to the effect that the mind is concentrated “in a point of great light and heat. So the mind, instead of diffusing consciousness over all the elements presented to it, brings it all to bear upon some one selected point, which stands out with unusual brilliancy and distinctness” (24). In bringing consciousness to bear this way, moreover, we come to accept the reality of the thing observed, engaging in “belief in a thing for no other reason than that we conceive it with passion,” which commitment of attention and conviction, writes James, Charles Renouvier calls “mental vertigo” (James, vol. 2, 309). In showing Niccolò’s visual field with sharpness and precise illumination, and in showing him wrestling with the problem of attaining focus upon any such “thing,” Antonioni produces a Deweyan escapade, offering us a chance at each moment to see that the selected field of vision is arbitrary and potentially hopeless even as he shows that it is stunning and alluring.

      Erotic sensibility is a potential escape route from the controlling uniformity of rational vision. Crary argues, for example, that socially organized perceptual schemes develop and shift through time, and that “film, photography, and television are transient elements within an accelerating sequence” of changing visual forms (13); this very regularity in perception tends to couch and motivate the sort of critique one finds in Chatman, who bemoans the fact that Antonioni’s Niccolò didn’t have the production funds for a (presumably) authentic—and regular—science fiction film. Filmic forms, such as the science fiction type to which Blade Runner so handily conforms, are only part of the rationalization of public perception, only a result of the operations of measuring, tabulating, regularizing, constraining, filtering, and emphasizing conventional modes of perception. Niccolò’s film, a piece of which we see in a sequence that links the footage directly to his gazing eye—and thus to the personal quality of this vision (its eros)—is his attempt to see independently of the controlling system. Chatman is merely pointing out how deviant Antonioni is. Oddly, writing about the sex in Identification of a Woman, Chatman has no trouble spelling out this same revolutionary stance, noting that Mavi reveals her personal sexual attitude (keeping her underpants on until the last possible moment) “with the confidence of one instructed by her society that every person’s sex is his or her own affair, not subject to moral or psychological evaluation. She is simply explaining her preferences, not excusing herself for having them” (220). (It could also be argued that society did not instruct Mavi, but simply failed to provide instruction in this vital area of experience.) Our society also “instructs” us that the artist’s vision is problematically beyond social instruction: Niccolò’s way of filming is a part of his own erotic life, a part of what he endures that cannot be fully calibrated and regimented through the system. He is scrupulously personal (as is Antonioni), more so than the Ridley Scott who made Blade Runner or the George Lucas who made Star Wars or even the Stanley Kubrick who made 2001, all of whom finally sacrificed their own inner tensions and lacunae, doubts and interruptions to the grammar of a system that could rationalize their address to a diffuse and hungry public.

      It is not because he has taken a vow to maintain principles of searching, labeling, knowing, and illuminating that Niccolò seeks to “identify” a woman as the center of his creative operation. He is neither monk nor bureaucrat. He is not committed a priori to a dispassionate and (officially) scientific gaze. Every step he takes in this film is tied to breathing, hopefulness, anticipation, disappointment, reawakened desire, and movement toward a resolution, and so there is an eros implicit in his very act of looking: not as though he gazes to find a sexual object, but as though his gazing is an absolute form of his sexuality. In his science fiction film Niccolò is finally divorced even from himself, not in the way that Crary, following Deleuze—and also a little eagerly—suggests the perceiver must ultimately be after cinema: “It is precisely the nonselectivity of the cinema eye that distinguishes it from the texture of a human attentiveness” (344), but through a careful and devoted selectivity, an all-absorbing selectivity, that throws him out toward a universe. This, too, is why Niccolò—a human, but also a maker of cinema—is continually ill at ease with the fact of his own gazing, since although he attempts to see the world around the core of a woman’s experience, to focus on a “point of great light and heat,” he knows at the same time that ultimately his film will produce a field, not a point, a field that is bounded, to be sure, yet one in which the depth of his concentration will not find a marker. Baudelaire, writes Sartre, had a similar obsession, with infinity, “something which is, without being given; something which today defines me and which nevertheless will not exist until tomorrow” (37–38).

      NEITHER NIGHT NOR DAY

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