> By MARTIN SCORSESE
> Published: August 12, 2007
> NINETEEN-SIXTY-ONE ... a long time ago. Almost 50 years. But the
> sensation of seeing "L'Avventura" for the first time is still with me,
> as if it had been yesterday.
>
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> Michelangelo Antonioni
> Related
> Michelangelo Antonioni, Bold Director, Dies at 94 (August 1, 2007)
> DVDs: A Director Also Elusive on Home Video (August 1, 2007)
> Filmography: Michelangelo Antonioni
>
> Filmography: Martin Scorsese
>
> Times Topics: Michelangelo AntonioniWhere did I see it? Was it at the
> Art Theater on Eighth Street? Or was it the Beekman? I don't remember,
> but I do remember the charge that ran through me the first time I
> heard that opening musical theme - ominous, staccato, plucked out on
> strings, so simple, so stark, like the horns that announce the next
> tercio during a bullfight. And then, the movie. A Mediterranean
> cruise, bright sunshine, in black and white widescreen images unlike
> anything I'd ever seen - so precisely composed, accentuating and
> expressing ... what? A very strange type of discomfort. The characters
> were rich, beautiful in one way but, you might say, spiritually ugly.
> Who were they to me? Who would I be to them?
>
> They arrived on an island. They split up, spread out, sunned
> themselves, bickered. And then, suddenly, the woman played by Lea
> Massari, who seemed to be the heroine, disappeared. From the lives of
> her fellow characters, and from the movie itself. Another great
> director did almost exactly the same thing around that time, in a very
> different kind of movie. But while Hitchcock showed us what happened
> to Janet Leigh in "Psycho," Michelangelo Antonioni never explained
> what had happened to Massari's Anna. Had she drowned? Had she fallen
> on the rocks? Had she escaped from her friends and begun a new life?
> We never found out.
>
> Instead the film's attention shifted to Anna's friend Claudia, played
> by Monica Vitti, and her boyfriend Sandro, played by Gabriele
> Ferzetti. They started to search for Anna, and the picture seemed to
> become a kind of detective story. But right away our attention was
> drawn away from the mechanics of the search, by the camera and the way
> it moved. You never knew where it was going to go, who or what it was
> going to follow. In the same way the attentions of the characters
> drifted: toward the light, the heat, the sense of place. And then
> toward one another.
>
> So it became a love story. But that dissolved too. Antonioni made us
> aware of something quite strange and uncomfortable, something that had
> never been seen in movies. His characters floated through life, from
> impulse to impulse, and everything was eventually revealed as a
> pretext: the search was a pretext for being together, and being
> together was another kind of pretext, something that shaped their
> lives and gave them a kind of meaning.
>
> The more I saw "L'Avventura" - and I went back many times - the more I
> realized that Antonioni's visual language was keeping us focused on
> the rhythm of the world: the visual rhythms of light and dark, of
> architectural forms, of people positioned as figures in a landscape
> that always seemed terrifyingly vast. And there was also the tempo,
> which seemed to be in sync with the rhythm of time, moving slowly,
> inexorably, allowing what I eventually realized were the emotional
> shortcomings of the characters - Sandro's frustration, Claudia's self-
> deprecation - quietly to overwhelm them and push them into another
> "adventure," and then another and another. Just like that opening
> theme, which kept climaxing and dissipating, climaxing and
> dissipating. Endlessly.
>
> Where almost every other movie I'd seen wound things up, "L'Avventura"
> wound them down. The characters lacked either the will or the capacity
> for real self-awareness. They only had what passed for self-awareness,
> cloaking a flightiness and lethargy that was both childish and very
> real. And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the
> most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realized something
> extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.
>
> "L'Avventura" gave me one of the most profound shocks I've ever had at
> the movies, greater even than "Breathless" or "Hiroshima, Mon
> Amour" (made by two other modern masters, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain
> Resnais, both of them still alive and working). Or "La Dolce Vita." At
> the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film
> and the ones who liked "L'Avventura." I knew I was firmly on
> Antonioni's side of the line, but if you'd asked me at the time, I'm
> not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini's
> pictures and I admired "La Dolce Vita," but I was challenged by
> "L'Avventura." Fellini's film moved me and entertained me, but
> Antonioni's film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around
> me, and made both seem limitless. (It was two years later when I
> caught up with Fellini again, and had the same kind of epiphany with
> "8 ½.")
>
> The people Antonioni was dealing with, quite similar to the people in
> F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels (of which I later discovered that
> Antonioni was very fond), were about as foreign to my own life as it
> was possible to be. But in the end that seemed unimportant. I was
> mesmerized by "L'Avventura" and by Antonioni's subsequent films, and
> it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense
> that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries - or rather the
> mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to
> time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the
> mysteries of the soul. That's why I kept going back. I wanted to keep
> experiencing these pictures, wandering through them. I still do.
>
> Antonioni seemed to open up new possibilities with every movie. The
> last seven minutes of "L'Eclisse," the third film in a loose trilogy
> he began with "L'Avventura" (the middle film was "La Notte"), were
> even more terrifying and eloquent than the final moments of the
> earlier picture. Alain Delon and Ms. Vitti make a date to meet, and
> neither of them show up. We start to see things - the lines of a
> crosswalk, a piece of wood floating in a barrel - and we begin to
> realize that we're seeing the places they've been, empty of their
> presence. Gradually Antonioni brings us face to face with time and
> space, nothing more, nothing less. And they stare right back at us. It
> was frightening, and it was freeing. The possibilities of cinema were
> suddenly limitless.
>
> We all witnessed wonders in Antonioni's films - those that came after,
> and the extraordinary work he did before "L'Avventura," pictures like
> "La Signora Senza Camelie," "Le Amiche," "Il Grido" and "Cronaca di un
> Amore," which I discovered later. So many marvels - the painted
> landscapes (literally painted, long before CGI) of "Red Desert" and
> "Blowup," and the photographic detective story in that later film,
> which ultimately led further and further away from the truth; the mind-
> expanding ending of "Zabriskie Point," so reviled when it came out, in
> which the heroine imagines an explosion that sends the detritus of the
> Western world cascading across the screen in super slow motion and
> vivid color (for me Antonioni and Godard were, among other things,
> truly great modern painters); and the remarkable last shot of "The
> Passenger," where the camera moves slowly out the window and into a
> courtyard, away from the drama of Jack Nicholson's character and into
> the greater drama of wind, heat, light, the world unfolding in time.
>
> I crossed paths with Antonioni a number of times over the years. Once
> we spent Thanksgiving together, after a very difficult period in my
> life, and I did my best to tell him how much it meant to me to have
> him with us. Later, after he'd had a stroke and lost the power of
> speech, I tried to help him get his project "The Crew" off the ground
> - a wonderful script written with his frequent collaborator Mark
> Peploe, unlike anything else he'd ever done, and I'm sorry it never
> happened.
>
> But it was his images that I knew, much better than the man himself.
> Images that continue to haunt me, inspire me. To expand my sense of
> what it is to be alive in the world.
>
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> Past Coverage
> BELIEFS; Bergman, Antonioni and the Religiously Inclined (August 4,
> 2007)
> Michelangelo Antonioni, Bold Director, Dies at 94 (August 1, 2007)
> AN APPRAISAL; A Chronicler of Alienated Europeans in a Flimsy New
> World (August 1, 2007)
> DVDS; A Director Also Elusive on Home Video (August 1, 2007)
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