Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
--Karl Marx
I think filmmakers should always try to reflect the times in which they live; not so much to express and interpret events in their most direct and tragic form, but rather to capture their effect upon us, and to be sincere and conscientious with ourselves, to be honest and courageous with others.
--Michelangelo Antonioni, “Making a Film is My Way of Life,” Film Culture, spring 1962
July 30, 2007 was a dark day for the cinema. Not only did Swedish director Ingmar Bergman pass away at age 89, but Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni died at age 94 in Rome, the setting of many of his films, including L’eclisse (1962). It was a particularly depressing day for me because these two men were among the first I discovered as a burgeoning cinephile. I still remember encountering Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) for the very first time and being shocked by its relentless audacity; after all, I had never seen anybody tackle such subjects as death and the meaning of life with such fascinating imagery as that of Death playing chess with a medieval knight. And then there was my introduction to Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), a film so startling that I still find it terribly unfair that it is not mentioned alongside Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in discussions about famous narrative twists.
As the years went by, I came to identify more and more with Antonioni’s films and less and less with Bergman’s. The latter is a master storyteller, if a tad bland, but each and every one of Antonioni’s films is an historic event, a time to reconsider everything we know about the cinema and to have all of these naive assumptions challenged. There is no better example of this than his 1962 modernist masterpiece L’eclisse, arguably Antonioni’s greatest work.
Two years after saying the last word on ennui with L’avventura—so much so that in the aftermath of the film, the term “Antoniennui” was coined—Antonioni decided to tackle the subject yet again, but with a slightly different perspective. Whereas L’avventura concerns itself with the inane activities of a group of affluent people and their world of yachts and spontaneous outings, L’eclisse is a somewhat more down-to-earth tale of a woman, played by Monica Vitti (who also portrayed the central role in L’avventura), trying to find some sort of human connection in the material world she inhabits. This emotional sickness, albeit less severe than the one at the center of L’avventura, is the heart of Antonioni’s endeavor.
L’eclisse opens to the morning after an argument between a distressed couple, Vittoria (Vitti) and her boyfriend Riccardo (Francisco Rabal). In classic Antonioni style, it is shot from a distance, completely detached, more concerned with the compositional framing of the scene than with capturing the emotions of its characters. This technique (often called being a photographer-director, something Antonioni has negatively been called) would be off-putting were it not for the fact that the characters in an Antonioni film are just as detached from their own feelings as Antonioni’s camera. This remarkable scene, in which every cut signals a disorienting shift from the two characters to random objects around the room, ends with Vittoria leaving Riccardo’s apartment; he follows her, but both of them know it is futile. At her door, he has nothing left to say but, “Take care.”
Upset over her breakup, Vittoria goes to find her mother (Lilla Brignone) in Rome’s financial district, but she is too preoccupied with the money she has made that day to listen to her daughter. “So, you’re having lunch with Riccardo?” she finally asks. “Yes… with Riccardo,” Vittoria replies calmly. As the backdrop for this personal agony is the frenzy of the stock exchange, where traders practically fling their hands away buying and selling bonds. Amongst these is Piero (Alain Delon), who works for Vittoria’s mother and seems to get an incredible amount of enjoyment from this environment; in fact, he appears to be the only one smiling in the whole room. A particularly astonishing moment comes when everyone on the floor decides to have a minute of silence for their recently-departed colleague; as the hundreds of men in expensive suits stand there for a whole minute, silent, phones ringing in the background, Piero turns to Vittoria to explain that “a minute here costs billions.” As soon as the minute ends, it is back to the madness, and Antonioni’s camera, positioned on a corner where it can observe everything, captures it all beautifully. It is important to note here that scenes like the one described above are what make L’eclisse such a wonderful film. The sum of its parts does not exactly add up to a coherent narrative; instead, it is a work that breaths in deep silences, more interested in the spaces between its characters than the characters themselves.
After the stock exchange scene, Vittoria encounters Piero time and time again. She welcomes him, but warily, perhaps because she is still wounded by her last unsuccessful relationship, although she never overtly expresses any such feelings. She is certainly out of sorts, but this seems to be caused more by her general disposition and nature than by her failed relationship with Riccardo. Vittoria maintains this air of overwhelming distress and uncertainness through most of this film, with the exception of two satisfyingly blissful scenes.
The first comes when Vittoria and her neighbor Anita (Rossana Rory) go visit Marta (Mirella Ricciardi), a woman from Kenya. Her apartment is adorned with such objects as rifles, elephant trucks, and bearskin rugs; Vittoria suddenly finds herself covered in paint, wearing African jewelry, dancing frantically to tribal music. Marta watches from a distance, somewhat troubled by the entire spectacle. Vittoria seems truly ecstatic for the first time in the film, until suddenly Marta stops the music and says, “Okay, that’s enough, let’s stop playing Negroes.” She herself, however, goes on explain that she considers the 6 million “monkeys” in Kenya unable to expulse the 60,000 whites who also live there (Marta’s family among them, of course). The second harmonious scene is less guilt-ridden than the first; Anita’s husband, a pilot, lets them tag along as he delivers a plane to a nearby town. In the air, Vittoria seems happy and calm; she asks questions about the clouds and looks out of her window wide-eyed and amazed. After they land, she continues to look up to the sky and to the planes that are departing. It is a lovely moment which, in retrospect, only highlights the profound grief of the rest of the film.
The latter part of L’eclisse concerns itself with the burgeoning courtship between Vittoria and Piero. These scenes are clearly the highlight of the film, as Vitti and Delon exhibit the kind of on-screen magnetism that the cinema was made for. Her breathtaking beauty and his energetic movements give their scenes a musical lift quite unlike anything else in L’eclisse. Vittoria and Piero are alike in that they are both trying to reach out and touch something, not just in the physical sense (although erotic attraction does drive all of the scenes between them) but also on another, metaphysical level. They ultimately find it unable to do this, as they are both constrained by the shackles of a materialist world, more so Piero than Vittoria in this respect. There are, however, scenes as tinged with sweetness as the one where they are kissing on the couch, and they find doing this charmingly difficult because of the size of the couch and the length of Vitti’s arms. In these scenes, the corporal movements of the actors are as important, if not more so, to what Antonioni is trying to say as the words his characters use.
Perhaps Antonioni’s most brilliant move in L’eclisse is ending it on the most unsettling note imaginable. The last time we see Vittoria and Piero they promise to meet at their usual place, a street corner where we have seen them together several times throughout the film. Suddenly, the audience is thrown into an iconographic account of the nearly two hours that precede the film’s closing montage. It is a series of 57, mostly static shots that track the progression of the narrative. We see the desolate street corner, the park where Vittoria and Piero walked around, Vittoria’s apartment, and even people who remotely resemble Vitti and Delon; this is Antonioni toying with his audience, challenging what we all expect from the movies. The film ends with a streetlight flickering, looking almost like an eclipse (the film’s English title). It is worth noting that, throughout L’eclisse, objects seem to overshadow all human aspects of life; now, at the end of the film, even something as cosmically unsurpassed as an eclipse is replaced by a streetlight, and it is a striking image and the best way Antonioni could have ended this most materialist of films.
The Italy portrayed in L’eclisse is one of a growing, post-Marshall Plan economy. It is telling that at the beginning of his career, Antonioni found himself at the center of the neorealist movement, wherein a group of directors tried to come to grips with the devastating physical and psychological effects of World War II. Most of these works often recognize material wealth (or lack thereof, more appropriately) as the source of their characters’ misery, but, ultimately, they all find that the good in the human heart is worth all of the money in the world. This is not to say Antonioni’s films from the 1960s abandon this idea completely, it is just that, now that Italy was on its way to being a wholly developed, first world country (it was one of the founding members of the European Union in 1957, five years before the release of this film), it was up to filmmakers to tackle other issues such as, in Antonioni’s case, the impossibility of love in an increasingly money-driven world. Using the city of Rome as the backdrop for his startlingly modern film, Antonioni echoes Marx’s response to the claim that he “turned Hegel on his head.” Hegel was already on his head, and Marx, like Antonioni, is only turning him, and the world, right side up again.
