Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the images predict the behavior that we see, or have the characters, living long with these images, learned to imitate them? Film, however, passes by and does not linger to haunt us as these framed pictures and forms do. We move through film much as these characters move through the city, through their time with one another. Time is “nothing but a disquiet of the soul” (Sebald, Emigrants 181).

       Un Feu

      It is not so much that feeling is impossible during the rush of modern experience, as that only feeling is possible, feeling but not the awareness of feeling, feeling but not the ability to speak of it. So, Carlo, Patrizia, her husband, and his lover make utterances that are notoriously practical—“I have come about renting the apartment”—or feverishly displaced—“For three years you have been bringing her smell here”—but in any event inarticulate about the true state of affairs overwhelming the inner world. Patrizia and her American husband straining to kiss through the plate glass partition of the shower stall, the partition that distends the lips and darkens the faces: what is this doomed project but an icon of the separation of men from their gods (who reside, of course, inside the creatures they serve)? Eager to negotiate and map territory, identity, position, possibility, miscalculation, the modern personality cannot connect with its own primitive hunger. The second glass partition in Carlo’s apartment: through it, a sighting takes place of moving personalities one and the other, a vacancy and an image where there might be a fire.

      Let us imagine as we see them on both sides of this thick glass that Carlo and Patrizia will finally meet—meet, that is, after the few moments of preamble we have been entitled to see—and that they will remain in one another’s company, perhaps married, but certainly together in life, for a long time, a very long time by comparison with the abbreviated sentences which have filled the scenes so far, so that in the end, looking at the gross field of their lives and experiences, everything in this little filmed story will turn out to constitute only a caesura, a pause, a pit stop. Perez notes that L’eclisse begins at the end (367), so why might not this story, in an equally adumbrated fashion, present only the beginning, a beginning that is like an end? It becoming necessary for Carlo to explain to friends how he met Patrizia, he recounts this whole story, all of it given, no doubt, by her recountings to him of what she remembers—the twisting urgencies upon the bed, the smashed celadon, the repeated questions never answered—and her traumatic, exaggerated imaginations of the scenes she cannot possibly have witnessed. In the event, Carlo and Patrizia are a perfect couple, handsome, professional, businesslike, matter-of-fact, attuned to the moment, well-balanced (if precariously positioned), sane if not happy in their matching expensive suits—his the blue of midnight, hers the color of ice cream in the Tuileries—standing face to expressionless face, his darkness absorbing her brightness, his hopeless calm drinking in her sad frenzy. He speaks, this Carlo of the future, of what she recounted to him, but it is all a vision: the craven little mistress who dresses for seduction, invents improbable stories, desires endlessly, enacts jealousy with a fury in her blue apartment upon her green sofa in her red chemise; and the husband who plays something not quite Bach on the dark polished piano, who says almost nothing when the moment for speaking has come.

      Each of these persons is a stranger to the others even—perhaps especially—during lovemaking. Modern life brings us close to distance, surrounds us with people we recognize but do not know. “Was [Antonioni] just fashion?” Michael Atkinson wondered with youthful irritation in The Village Voice, describing the film’s episodes as “dreamy, pretentious fickle-finger-of-fate mini-tales” containing “preposterously casual … sex” that “seems only to invoke an itch the 83-year-old film-maker can perhaps no longer scratch” (“Snoozes”). Antonioni is showing how lovemaking is the most distant act of all, a fact the young are too distracted by the promise of pleasure to apprehend.

       On the Boulevard

      That cozy, colorful, well-lit café (the clean, well-lighted place) in which at the beginning of this episode the husband meets the girl who will become his lover (the prowler, the mover), is on or near one of the great boulevards of Paris, magnificent post-Haussmannian thoroughfares that through the nineteenth century, as Hazel Hahn writes, housed those sententious organs, the newspapers and were thus made into “a centre for news and communications that reached its peak at the fin de siècle”:

      The newspapers themselves not only reported in minute detail on events on the Boulevards, but were read in the cafés along the street so that much of what was advertised was available just around the corner. The proximity of the places where newspapers were read to the boutiques, department stores, theatres and café-concerts advertised in their pages underscored the centrality of information and consumption to life on the Boulevards. (156)

      A particular urbaneness must have characterized the denizens of the café, an openness to advertisement as a mode of speech and a vulnerability to strangeness and the exotic. Not only is the habitué of the café continually on the make, shuffling along beside the traffic, meandering through the crowds, entering and exiting shops for a relatively brief sojourn and experience; but he is also continually prone to being influenced by a world brought from afar, an imported universe, for that is what the newspaper offered on a consistent basis. While the girl’s reaction to the story of the Mexican porters is surprise, the fact that she is surprised does not surprise her, since surprise is precisely the fruit of the sort of casual encounter one has through reading in a spot like this.

      Nor can her surprise at the punch line of the story—that the porters felt they were moving so fast their souls had not caught up with them—fail to indicate the intensive degree to which, as an inheritor of the culture of the nineteenth century and an inhabitant of Paris in its stage of hypermodernization, she casually takes her own motion for granted and does not quite see in her own jittery dispensation the same tendency to displace an inner and more ancient world, even though she points, with a certain slack liberalism, to the “peril” of losing her own soul. It is clear if we look carefully at her open, but also modulated and articulately controlled, features when she speaks to the man; and at his guarded, but also unreservedly eager, features when he responds, that more than experiencing interest and fascination, these two are advertising availability to one another, playing skillfully where the presentation of a claim is an expected immediate feature of the environment. They are like posters for a pretense, and, like what is reproduced upon the typical French poster of the fin de siècle, neither face, as it will turn out, has a “direct link” with the “announced object” (Hahn 169). That here and throughout the episode the girl wears relatively bright colors hardly mitigates against our interpretation of her as a spectacle offering itself to a view.

      The same publishing industry that brings the husband and his lover together at the beginning has the responsibility for linking Patrizia and Carlo at the end, since she discovers him only because in the want ads she has discovered the apartment in which he lives (and from which he, apparently with too much frequency, travels). No less than the other two, Patrizia and Carlo are thus gullible to advertisement and committed to a lifestyle in which claims and presentations, traveling at the speed of newsprint, take precedence over feelings. The intent of the Haussmannian boulevard, first and finally, was to make possible a great urban fluidity, to let the masses shift position from one neighborhood, horizon, and perspective to another; it worked to link—as Wolfgang Schivelbusch shows in The Railway Journey—the new railroad transportation with the transactional domain of the department store. The café in which this tale begins is suffused with the atmosphere of the boulevard, designed to facilitate this motion and structured as a business enterprise to encourage both the quick conversations that epitomize rational calculation and the quick transactions that make for uncontaminating profit. Movement was inexorably bound with shopping, and shopping bound with the glance. What the characters are engaged in here: a shopping spree.

NICCOLO IN AIX

       The Pathway

      A young hopeful, Niccolo (Vincent Perez), emerges from an architect’s office in an apartment building СКАЧАТЬ