Page 54 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

44 Alison Ross

in the dissonant rhythm Antonioni's work charts between the pace of
technological life with its new urban architectures, new workplaces and
the itinerant populations they require, and the old beliefs that sit uneasily
in these environs. It is in this sense of a "contemporaneous anthropol-
ogy" 9 that the famous scenes of Antonioni's work from the 1960s—such
as the long concluding takes in L'eclisse, in which the main characters are
absent from the scenography of their urban environment, or the contrast
between the bold, primary colors of the factory and the blank expanse of
wall that Antonioni uses to dramatize the emotional state of Giuliana in
77 deserto rosso—need to be seen.
For Antonioni the disequilibrium between science and morals frames
forms of experience. Whereas science entertains theses and installs prac-
tices that are easily dispensed with when they become outdated, moral
beliefs and values constitute a fatality for human life insofar as they orient
a path of action at odds with the brute fact of our existence as historical
creatures and therefore with the field of human possibilities for action.
Put in Heidegger's vocabulary, the rift between science and morals installs
the dissonance between what humans "are" in their historical being and
the beliefs that attempt to stylize existence in relation to "values." 10 For
Antonioni the drive for security, which is the motive force of moral belief,
is incompatible with the historical constitution of human life. In the film
Lavventura Antonioni tries to show the elements that characterize "sick
Eros" as a binding pattern of meaning. In this context it is significant that,
as Antonioni stated at his press conference for the opening of Lavventura,
simply analyzing "sick Eros" or confronting this code in a reflective man-
ner, as the character played by Gabriele Ferzetti does, is not sufficient to
be free of it:

Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical
shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But
this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy,
that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy,
something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but
he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy.
The tragedy of Lavventura stems directly from an erotic impulse of this
type—unhappy, miserable, futile. To be critically aware of the vulgarity and the
futility of such an overwhelming erotic impulse, as is the case with the protagonist in
Lavventura, is not enough or serves no purpose. And here we witness the crumbling
of a myth, which proclaims it is enough for us to know, to be critically conscious