Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ to the loss of material stability implied by the relentless motion of bourgeois life under capitalism, is a sharp discontinuity with classical visual forms, in which the “proximate vision” that Ortega places at the center of optical experience in the Quattrocento finally submits to revolution, as it were. Whereas in Giotto, for example, we had seen “‘in bulk,’ convexly,” by the time of the Impressionists an object “placed farther away, for distant vision, loses this corporeality, this solidity and plenitude. Now it is no longer a compact mass, clearly rotund, with its protuberance and curving flanks; it has lost ‘bulk,’ and become, rather, an insubstantial surface, an unbodied spectre composed only of light …. In passing from proximate to distant vision an object becomes illusory” (Point of View 111). Thus, by the time he had come to a thorough repudiation of classical techniques through which space and material bodies were rendered with discreteness and depth, the painter of “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte” (1884) found himself giving “an illusion of deep space” by placing the spectator “in a foreground of deep shadow” and by drawing the eye into the picture “stage by stage, in a dark-light progression that gradually leads into a light, bright distance” (Thomson 108); all this using his pixillating brushstrokes that laid upon the canvas not the lines and planes that were elements of a classical form but a vast field of explosive luminous punctuations, an atomic theory of vision. Nor did Georges Seurat stand alone in his fascination with light, its play, its changes, and the way it affected color and surface when examined for itself. Louis Émile Edmond Duranty remarks with delight on a sort of social abrasiveness the impressionists manifested as, following the likes of Whistler, they began to use a “highly personal palette,” and to produce “the most daring innovations” as they worked “with color variations of infinite delicacy—dusky, diffused, and vaporous tints that belong to neither night nor day” (42). Indeed, Duranty reveals that for the impressionists, who were at the center of modern life, a particular use of paint could have one particularly astonishing effect on our observation of the world as objective and corporeal, namely to fragment and dissipate it: “They are not merely preoccupied by the refined and supple play of color that emerges when they observe the way the most delicate ranges of tone either contrast or intermingle with each other. Rather, the real discovery of these painters lies in their realization that strong light mitigates color, and that sunlight reflected by objects tends, by its very brightness, to restore that luminous unity that merges all seven prismatic rays into one single colorless beam—light itself” (42, italics mine). “La grande lumière décolore les tons.” Invoked in impressionism, then, is the potentiality for a disintegration of objective reality, for that limiting condition in which bourgeois existence, riddled with motion and substantiated by glancing visions—Ortega notes that in impressionism one sees out of the corner of the eye, as though seizing a vision while moving through space—comes to make the world of experience an ultimate challenge for the now outdated sensibility that wishes to seize and fix objects, find a center, penetrate an interest, develop for things and places a history and biography that is unique.

      THE MODERN SELF

      Mirrors are subject to the defects of the individual substances of which they are made and react the way they really and truly want to.

      —Julio Cortázar, “The Behavior of Mirrors on Easter Island”

      Much of the relatively meager critical appreciation of Identification of a Woman concentrates seriously on Mavi and Ida, even debunking Niccolò as merely an “absent-minded fellow” (Chatman, Surface 216), as a “zombie-like” male who must constitute “a critique of the modern world” (Sarris), or as “the most ethically disoriented of the film’s major characters” (Kelly 38). Andrew Sarris finds the film revolting if not nonsensical: “Antonioni has always been up there on the screen, but we tended to mistake his reflection for a portrait of Modern Man with all his wires disconnected. Yet now that the director stands at last nakedly before us, the absence of a plausibly compelling narrative drains his confessional film of the necessary tension to sustain our interest. And the cryptic intimations of rampant feminism, lesbianism, and even masturbatory solipsism seem overly tentative and dilettantish.” Narrational penis too small, in other words: doesn’t “sustain our interest.” A serious viewer of the film might well disagree, since serious viewing recapitulates that “naked” director as a field in which multiple engagements and intentionalities intersect and work to blossom. As to the solipsism of masturbation: the young woman at the swimming pool who discusses her fondness for self-manipulation doesn’t strike the eye or the intelligence as solipsistic at all, especially given her extremely civil, even modest, reactions to Niccolò; nor, in her desperate self-reflections alternated with pregnant philosophical comments, does Mavi. In Sarris’s rejection, we can see a persistence of Enlightenment assumptions about the masturbatory act, as summarized by Thomas Laqueur:

      Three things made solitary sex unnatural. First, it was motivated not by a real object of desire but by a phantasm; masturbation threatened to overwhelm the most protean and potentially creative of the mind’s faculties—the imagination—and drive it over a cliff. Second, while all other sex was social, masturbation was private, or, when it was not done alone, it was social in all the wrong ways: wicked servants taught it to children; wicked older boys taught it to innocent younger ones; girls and boys in school taught it to each other away from adult supervision. Sex was naturally done with someone; solitary sex was not. And third, unlike other appetites, the urge to masturbate could be neither sated nor moderated. Done alone, driven only by the mind’s own creations, it was a primal, irremediable, and seductively, even addictively, easy transgression. Every man, woman, and child suddenly seemed to have access to the boundless excess of gratification that had once been the privilege of Roman emperors.

      Masturbation thus became the vice of individuation for a world in which the old ramparts against desire had crumbled; it pointed to an abyss of solipsism, anomie, and socially meaningless freedom that seemed to belie the ideal of moral autonomy. It was the vice born of an age that valued desire, pleasure, and privacy but was fundamentally worried about how, or if, society could mobilize them. It is the sexuality of the modern self. (210)

      And the feminism—by which Sarris must mean the presence of women—is hardly rampant, the lesbianism indeed virtually enshrouded. At any rate, Sarris’s comment is a beautiful example of the denigration of Niccolò. And the descriptions of Seymour Chatman give an equally pointed elevation to the principal females. “Mavi, a trendsetter, tends to represent the attitudes of an entire generation,” writes he, “She has a restless need to experiment” (219, 220). As her masseur—in one scene, after she accuses him of needing her rather than loving her, he offers an extended pudendal friction through her underwear—“Niccolò … is very much the servant of Mavi’s imperious sexual needs. And her ‘right’ to so elaborate a sexual life seems guaranteed in some sense by her membership in the leisured class” (226). Some, following D. H. Lawrence, would postulate that the poor experience an authentic, vigorous, bawdy sexuality while the etiolated rich are too self-conscious even for the depths of pleasure. Ida, for her part, “is fresh, frank, and, though young, level-headed and warm” (215); “healthy, down-to-earth, direct, sincere, in every way estimable, indeed to a fault: one cannot imagine why Niccolò would want to give her up” (227). Perhaps Niccolò does not want to give her up; mercifully, this issue doesn’t get explored. Vincent Canby waved the film off as “excruciatingly empty,” but could not forbear from finding Mavi an “enigmatic young woman … who makes love with a furious abandon that is about the only thing in the film that works.”

      Niccolò does give Ida up, however, it being a repeated truth that he looks for a creature he has not found. That fact is central to the film’s structure. He gives up Mavi, too, once it becomes clear to him she does not wish to be found, will not permit it. In the end, he has given everyone up.

      The way Sam Rohdie sees the film, the camera “is always with Niccolò … beside him as it were, looking as he looks, encountering as he encounters, like him facing the exact same problems of identification, of sorting out reality from its simulacrum, desire from СКАЧАТЬ