Page 51 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Michelangelo Antonioni 41

Antonioni's cinema belongs, I think, in this third category. Unlike
Lynch, however, whose aesthetic vocabulary includes the use of estrange-
ment techniques and thus operates to some extent within the second cat-
egory, in Antonioni s cinema a received pattern of meaning is confronted
only as an aftereffect of its aesthetic treatment. In this respect the treat-
ment of political execution and torture {The Passenger), institutional vio-
lence (in the photographers planned use of scenes from a doss-house for
his book in Blow-Up), public art, and political demonstrations or dis-
sent (in the clowning scenes in Blow-Up, the strike outside the factory
in 77 deserto rosso, or the imagined destruction of the luxurious house in
Zabriskie Point) function primarily as occasions for aesthetic exercises
rather than as a content with which his cinema deals. 1 It is important to
be clear about the limitations that follow from such aesthetically driven
cinema: it is not the case that Antonioni uses film as a vehicle to advocate
2
political positions or to contest calcified habits or experiences. Antonio-
ni's cinema explores the technical possibilities of film. 3 It is this aesthetic
concern with the technical elements of presentation over narrative content
that makes his work a potent medium for the presentation of ideas that
would be otherwise obtuse to experience.
Let me be clear: in using this schematic differentiation, I do not
want to suggest that Antonioni is only interested in the evocative qualities
of a well-constructed scene or a beautiful face; rather, the emphasis in his
films on these elements makes available themes that would not otherwise
be accessible. These themes do offer a critical commentary on the con-
temporary world, but one should not view the treatment of these themes
exclusively in the perspective of a critical intention. In other words, an ad-
equate appreciation of Antonionfs films cannot limit itself to expounding
only the critical commentary that he presumably wishes to make on the
contemporary world. The critical intention neither exhausts nor motivates
in their concrete forms his techniques and aesthetic renditions.
First of all, I would like to emphasize that it is in the modes of
cinematic presentation that the confrontation Antonionfs cinema stages
with received patterns of meaning occurs. But I would like to make this
clearer by making it more specific and suggesting that the aesthetic forms
forged in his cinema confront received patterns of meaning by giving
4
sensible form to abstruse ideas. Taking up this hypothesis of the primacy
of aesthetic concerns in Antonionfs cinema, I will examine the differ-
ent ways that the use of a number of cinematic devices in The Passenger