The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (12 page)

She was in
Perfect Murder, Perfect Town
(00, Lawrence Schiller); as Queen Cinderella in
The 10th Kingdom
(00, David Carson and Herbert Wise);
The Last Producer
(00, Burt Reynolds);
Blonde
(01, Joyce Chopra);
A Woman’s a Helluva Thing
(01, Karen Leigh Hopkins);
Interstate 60
(02, Bob Gale);
Taxi
(04, Tim Story);
Memory
(06, Bennett Joshua Davlin);
The BreakUp
(06, Peyton Reed);
The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
(06, Michael Lembeck);
The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
(08, Jodie Markell);
All’s Faire in Love
(09, Scott Marshall).

Jean-Jacques Annaud
, b. Draveil, France, 1943
1977:
Noirs et Blancs en Couleur/Black and White in Color
. 1979:
Coup de Tête
. 1982:
La Guerre du Feu/Quest for Fire
. 1986:
The Name of the Rose
. 1988:
L’Ours/The Bear
. 1992:
L’Amant/The Lover
. 1997:
Seven Years in Tibet
. 2001:
Enemy at the Gates
. 2004:
Two Brothers
. 2007:
Sa Majesté Minor
.

Black and White in Color
won the Oscar for best foreign film and was a talking-point movie for people who did not regularly go to the cinema. To this day, Annaud retains a little of that flavor—not so much “international” as coffee table. The fact is that I can hardly recall a thing about
Black and White
, and no more about
Quest for Fire
than the novelty of a movie about Stone Age people. These are ostensibly adventurous choices that soon languish into self-regard. There is a prettiness to the style that attempts to make up for the absence of real stylistic choices.
The Name of the Rose
is an attempt to assert modish cleverness over atmosphere, and a disaster. The best of the films, I think, is
The Lover
, which holds the tricky, narcissistic emotion of the Marguerite Duras novel and allows literary prestige to be a veil to soft-core sex.
Enemy at the Gates
was a laborious, hollow recreation of war-torn Stalingrad to support a trite, old-fashioned story.

Michelangelo Antonioni
(1912–2007), b. Ferrara, Italy
1943–47:
Gente del Po
(d). 1948:
N.U. (Nettezza Urbana
) (d). 1949:
L’Amorosa Menzogna
(d);
Superstizione
(d);
Sette Canne un Vestito
(d). 1950:
La Funivia del Faloria
(d);
La Villa dei Mostri
(d);
Cronaca di un Amore
. 1953:
I Vinti; La Signora Senza Camelie;
“Tentato Suicidio,” an episode in the film
L’Amore in Citta
. 1955:
Uomini in Piu
(d);
Le Amiche
. 1957:
Il Grido/The Cry
. 1958:
Nel Segno di Roma
(codirected with Riccardo Freda). 1960:
L’Avventura
. 1961:
La Notte
. 1962:
L’Eclisse/The Eclipse
. 1964:
Il Deserto Rosso/The Red Desert
. 1965: “Prefazione,” an episode from the film
I Tre Volti
. 1966:
Blow-Up
. 1969:
Zabriskie Point
. 1972:
Chung Kuo
(d). 1975:
The Passenger
. 1980:
Ill Mistero di Oberwald/The Oberwald Mystery
. 1982:
Identificazione di una Donna/Identification of a Woman
. 1995:
Al di là Delle Nuvole/Beyond the Clouds
(codirected with Wim Wenders). 1989: “Rome,” episode from
12 Registi per 12 Città
(d). 2001:
Il Filo Pericoloso delle Cose
. 2001:
Just to Be Together
. 2004:
Eros
(codirected).

Antonioni’s world of sentimental and metaphysical dismay ought to include just such a figure as himself: a man of vast intellectual sensibility and artistic aspiration; a film director capable of stripping people down to fragile skins that can hardly brush against one another without pain; but a visionary of emotional alienation, so morbidly convinced of the apartness of people that he sometimes ends by photographing figures in a landscape. In short, within a brief time span he veered from psychological exactness to abstraction. For if his suspicions of human dissolution are sound, then films are only an absurd response to the fretful human instinct for self-expression. Even if one cannot always share Antonioni’s torment, it was an engrossing, if humorless, prospect to see him gradually immolate himself with doubts. He was his own character, turned away from us, speechless at what has been lost. As Monica Vitti sighs near the end of
La Notte:
“Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.”

He graduated from the University of Bologna—in economics and business, because a girlfriend was studying those subjects. Writing stories and working in the theatre, he became film critic for
Il Corriere Padano
and made his first amateur films. He edited
Cinema
, but was fired because he was too leftist for the Fascists. After a short period at Centro Sperimentale, he worked on the scripts of
Un Pilota Ritorna
(42, Roberto Rossellini) and
I Due Foscari
(42, Enrico Fulchignoni). The same year, he went to France to assist Marcel Carné on
Les Visiteurs du Soir
. In the years after the Liberation, he continued as a critic and worked intermittently on
Gente del Po
, a realist documentary on an area of Italy that he would return to for
Il Grido
.

It also inaugurated the feeling for social breakdown that has permeated his work, and that gave a subtly becalmed quality to the realism of his early documentaries. Despite left-wing sympathies, Antonioni’s rural and urban documentaries tend to bypass the immediate problems of their subjects to identify a more profound unease. Thus,
N.U.
—about garbagemen—states facts and makes claims that pale beside the listless effect of gray streets. Whatever the verbal message, the visuals had the melancholy of Carné and of German cinema. However, even as this urban alienation grew into a disillusion with all communicative processes, Antonioni has never lost an interest in precise social events. The films with Monica Vitti do constitute a critique of modern Italy;
Blow-Up
is interested in the trite ethics of swinging London, and
Zabriskie Point
springs out of Californian student discontent. It is important to see that in all cases Antonioni’s social awareness is based on a cliché view that is easily absorbed into his private lament for breakdown and that is easily diverted into extraneous visual grace. Like Thomas in
Blow-Up
, his later films tastefully ignore the complexities of situations and prefer to photograph the unreliable charm of their surroundings. Thus the eerie park in
Blow-Up
and the desert of
Zabriskie
loom over the human stories.

But the period from
Cronaca di un Amore
to
Il Grido
is triumphant. In those years he managed to discover a fluid, cinematic language to demonstrate the wounding aftermath of love affairs that was more in line with Renoir than Carné and that, incidentally, was the first new demonstration of Astruc’s
la camérastylo
theory. These films are kept from being morbid by the tender rigor with which the camera traces feelings through actions. They combine a spontaneity of behavior and precision in observation that in
Le Amiche
is masterly. Here is Antonioni’s account of how his style evolved out of the creative realization of behavior:

My habit of shooting rather long scenes was born spontaneously on the first day of filming
Cronaca di un Amore
. Having the camera fixed to its stand immediately caused me real discomfort. I felt paralysed, as if I were being prevented from following closely the one thing in the film that interested me: I mean, the characters. The next day, I called for a dolly, and I began to follow my characters till I felt the need to move on to another exercise. For me, this was the best way to be real, to be true.… I have never succeeded in composing a scene without having the camera with me, nor have I ever been able to make my characters talk in accordance with a pre-established script.… I needed to see the characters, to see even their simplest gestures.

That vitality of gesture ebbed away in the next period, constrained by the tragic posture of love. As Antonioni generalized the failure of love, so he idealized the forlorn woman—embodied in four films by Monica Vitti—and made her increasingly static and abstract.
L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse
, and
Il Deserto Rosso
become less moving the more urgently Antonioni himself cries out at their plight. They are dispirited films in which the urge for expression is distorted into pictorialism and lethargic compositions of entropy and in which an overall feeling of regret is oddly spiked by a type of visual lust. In
La Notte
, for instance, Jeanne Moreau walks aimlessly through Milan, witnessing the proof of social, emotional, and intellectual disarray. Yet that walk is erotic in the way it restricts her to the status of object. In all those films, but in
La Notte
especially, there is a relentless but hopeless advance on sexual intercourse as the last human action that can be taken. They are brilliant but despondent films, as if Antonioni had extended Renoir’s “everyone has their own reason” to “everyone is their own justification.” There is a constant, but unacknowledged, conflict between the senselessness of physical things, the elaborate, moribund beauty of the camera movements, and the radiance of Vitti.

But Antonioni was in the process of escaping “mere” melodrama. There is nothing more challenging in
L’Avventura
than the notion that a mystery does not need solving, that the young woman has gone away. A hole has formed in “story” so that life’s formless air may seep in. Equally, in
La Notte
and
L’Eclisse
, we feel that there is some gentle force in the city and the world ready to wash over the characters, freeing us from the arid preoccupations of small, private stories. It isn’t faith—Antonioni is an anxious unbeliever. Call it light, or continuity. The conclusion of
L’Eclisse
—with the meeting missed and the urban intersection carrying on regardless—is one of the seminal passages in modern cinema. Alas, it makes so much else seem old-fashioned.

There is a suicidal element in these films happily dispelled in
Blow-Up
, the nearest Antonioni ever came to humor and a film that shifted his view of human separateness to photography itself—something hinted at in
La Signora Senza Camelie. Blow-Up
remains a cold, academic film, but it is lucid and very gripping in the central “darkroom” sequence. It had a bizarre commercial success that enabled Antonioni to make
Zabriskie Point
, his most beautiful inspection of emptiness. Whereas Renoir’s films throb with brief understanding and misunderstanding between people,
Zabriskie Point
is a quietist contemplation of figures in a landscape, superbly filmed but as if by one of Don Siegel’s body-snatchers. Its people are objects, either relics of a doomed humanist culture or the prelude to a new society in which people regress to the primitive energy of desert creatures. If only because
Zabriskie
is so cool, it demands attention. Indeed, there is a sly comparison between the “blow-ups” in
Blow-Up
and
Zabriskie Point
. In the first, the enlarged photographs illustrate the way human beings impose their instinct for meaning on external reality. While in the latter, the repeated explosions of the desert home—deprived of the violence by silence—speak for the helpless sterility of material things: not just of material goods, but the irrelevant accumulation of things that have no interior significance.

The desert is a philosophy in
The Passenger
, one of the great films of the seventies. Melodrama and regret are replaced by the serene faith in a world of light, space, and providence. The steady attempt of the camera to move away from people seems a truly mystical claim.
The Passenger
leaves no doubt about Antonioni’s mastery, and radically advances on the earlier disquiet. The final sequence at the Hotel de la Gloria is the affirmation toward which Antonioni was always traveling. It inhales a warm, idle universe beyond intrigue, as if the movie were about space travel.

The Oberwald Mystery
was shot on video, allowing for many experiments with color; it was both an adaptation of Cocteau’s
L’Aigle à Deux Têtes
and a vehicle for Monica Vitti.
Identification of a Woman
deals with a movie director in search of both a wife and a new female character: it has elements of psychological thriller, and it is Antonioni’s most overtly erotic film, but it is also an extension of his series of films that question identity in the modern world and that seem to hover on the brink of some ultimate memory loss. Few directors have been more affected by the nature and capacity of the camera.
Identification
has moments of oversolemnity, but it is the work of a great director, and seemingly his last—for Antonioni’s future projects came to nothing, and now he was beset by the effects of a stroke. Yet again, the predicament of the world’s greatest living filmmaker unable to work is a fit subject for one of his meditations. Only Bertolucci or Angelopoulos could attempt it.

The enigmas in Antonioni’s work are as subject to time as monuments are to erosion, and the achievements of some films can offset or explain the apparent, or early, limits of others. For example,
The Passenger
helped us see the longing for escape and space in
L’Avventura
, and illumined the persistence of life at the end of
L’Eclisse
. I suspect that Antonioni’s best films will continue to grow and shift, like dunes in the centuries of desert. In that process, if there are eyes left to look, he will become a standard for beauty.