Viewing In The Dark

More Antonioni

Further Discussing his intention and process i would like to dive into his idea of minimalism, abstraction, and nomadism.

In the book Atlas of Emotion, Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film by Giuliana Bruno, these ideas are explored and dissected.

“Described by martin Scorsese as someone who makes films “with the curiosity of an explorer and the precision of a surgeon” this is the filmmaker who once told Mark Rothko; “Your paintings are like my films—they are about nothing…with precision.”

The meticulous hand and mind of Antononi is conveyed coherently in all of his films, and the fact that he compared his films to Rothko’s paintings, is evidence that he is very self aware of his intentions and practice. His use of the landscape is like that of a landscape painter, abstract expressionist, and a sculptor. 

Michael fried explains this with cogency,

“Watching Antonioni’s films, one may at first find it hard to imagine that his cinema is related to landscape painting. Yet it is, for he is a modern landscape painter, grasping ahead for the architectonics of minimalism, which, as the art historian Michael Fried has shown, entails a scenography which space makes “room” for and object hood emerges from the changes views of a mobile beholder.”

His sense of space, architecture and topography is that of painter, and the way he uses the frame of the 35 mm camera is similar to the way a painter uses his canvas. The difference is, is that he evokes the scenography of space and objects in the projection of light, which ultimatley moves and changes the viewers visual and emotion being. 

“Antonioni ventures into this minimalist geography, which is a spatialization of experience. In this sense, the particular mise-end-scene of his paintings expose the texture of his topophilic filmic geography: the “architextural” landscape of his cinema is laid bare on the landscape of the canvas.”

This passage further explores his use of the landscape laid on celluloid, and the experience of watching his films are like that experiencing a textural painting. 

This final passage  really drives my concept and perception of Antonioni’s practice,

“As a filmmaker Antonioni has fabricated an aesthetic based on the filmic anatomy of space. But architectural dissection accompanies geophysic transformation in Antonioni’s films. This is activated mostly by the haptic sense of his female characters, who wander constantly in their psychogeographic journeys. Nomadism, often gendered female, is indeed the “house” in which the films move. They ask us to move with them, through the space of an emotional architecture.”

His fabricated aesthetic is one that i deeply admire and aspire to represent and evoke in my own work. His filmic anatomy of space is very specialized and particular to his practice. His dissection of the landscape and the forms that are found within it, are abstracted, flatted, and accented by his formal filmic techniques and qualities. The exploration of the landscape by his characters are put into place because their presence aids and heightens the awareness of our surroundings and his compositions. The use nomadic or wandering woman in his films, denotes many ideas of search for meaning and confusion. As a passive viewer of films, Antonioni asks us to remain the viewer but also move through the spaces and abstractions he has created for us. His aesthetic vision and concept of space is pushed onto us, which becomes an experience through his eyes. 

Antonioni

In response to reading a few books about Antonionis use of the landscape and his visual language, i have captured all these moments i deemed important to his style and intent. 

In “Art and Film since 1945” by Kerry Brougher she talks about Antonioni’s style and process, 

“Can be described as tending toward the abstract. Narrative, though always present to some extent, is reduced to the simplest of forms, often without beginning, middle, or end, and the visual aspects take on a new weight and importance. Using posed characters that often hug the barren walls of the European industrial landscape, long foal length lenses that reduce depth of ass field and restricting his camera movement to slow horizontal pans, Antonioni achieves a sense of flatness that correlates with issues in the visual arts around the same time.” Pg 77

His sense of space is very particular and individual to him. He flattens the 3d world in the 2d dimension of film, in a way a lot of filmmakers don’t. He uses depth of field, or lack their of to flatten and immerse the human into the landscape. 

His connection to absrtract expression and art informel is evident when we look at his films,

“His works forms a close parallel with painting in the late fifties and early sixties as it shifted from abstract expressionist’s interests in autobiographical gesture and abstract illusionists to impersonal choices based on the structure to the canvas.”

His canvas in this case is the frame of the celliod, and his paint is light. 

“In discussing Il deserto rosso, Angela Dalle Vacche has noted that Antonio may very well have been influenced by European art informel. Although Antonioni work does echo the style of postwar abstraction it also looks forward to Minimalism’s concerns with monochromatic planes and architectonic systems. If, as Michael Fried suggested, Minimalism had an inherent theatricality, that the subject to object relationship was something that took place in time and space, the cinema, with its inherent space-time mechanism, was a readily available medium for Minimalist and structualist concerns despite its ephemeral nature.”

His relationship to painting and sculpture is evident and becomes even more evident when compared to an artist like Donald Judd,

Although Antonioni is often associated with abstract painting, his approach actually might be closer to the work of an artist like Donald Judd. Judd’s early work, in which he embedded objects in the textured surfaces of his paintings, and his early sculpture with its reliance on geometric symmetry and repetition that reject illusionistic space for a physical presence, has the sense that it is nothing more or less than a literal object, something with no history or association—perhaps not from Barthes idea of zero-degree writing. Both art world Minimalism and Antonioni films rely on the physicality and presence. The world reveals itself not in quick flashes but in time as we move around and object or through space.”

The flattening of the 3d world evokes a painterly abstraction as well as strucualy coherent and abstract forms. His work as filmmakers is closley linked with sculpture because of the content he chooses to use, abstract, and combine. 

This idea is explored further in this passage,

“Antonioni’s films exist outside of classic cinematic space and time just at the sculpture of Judd exist outside of the fictive and illusionist space; they requite the observer to apply a new sense of time to comprehend them. Antonioni’s world is presented by maddeningly slow camera moves which reveal rather than the present; his long takes shift classic cinematic time into something closer to real time, and his abandonment of the point of view of a primary character into a freed up multiplicity of perspectives forces the spectator to ass together each part to understand the whole. The landscape is not so much a metaphor for character or an extension of their mental state, as is often suggested, but a physical construct that gives the character meaning by his or her position in space and his or her relationship with the psychical objects of the world, while the psychical elements are given presence through the gaze of the character who wander through and around them. The strange conjoining of vastly incongruous spaces in Antonioni suggests that conscious composition and tableau set up for the camera, while the long takes have the aura of the apparatus hovering around them: it takes too long not to think of the process of the films own making. For example, the slow motion, fragmented, and repeated images of the explosion in Zabriskie Point 1970 not only show Antonioni search from abstraction in a representational medium, but also through the use of slow motion and overlapping repetition call attention the that medium itself”. 

This idea of positioning the character in the psychical and mental state of the landscape or in front of very psychical object, is evident in both Red Desert and Zabriskie Point.

Zabriskie Point

Michelangeleo Antonioni’s 1970 film staring Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin is an epic in the visual realm. Alfo Contini is the director of photography for this film, and really examines the physicality of the landscape and how we artificially mimic the landscape. I have broken up these images into categories of typologies of film that denote different ideas of the landscape.