what films make allusion to the final montage in leclisse

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI'Southward Fifty'ECLISSE
a broken slice of wood, a matchbook, a woman, a man

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I. THE BEGINNING OF THE Terminate

Strange now to think of you, gone .  .  .
"Kaddish"
Allen Ginsberg

50'eclisse (The Eclipse; Pronunciation of �eclisse�*) begins at the end.  The opening scene concerns the breakdown of Vittoria and Riccardo.  Some two hours later this rupture is reprised when both Vittoria and her new lover, Piero, neglect to meet at their appointed rendezvous at pic's terminate.  We are, as it were, back where we started, the circle closed.  Between these 2 endings, or perhaps better said�within the space enclosed by a zilch�is a movie fabricated by a man whose identity, like that of his motion-picture show, remains uncertain.

L'eclisse has never been a popular film.  Even Antonioni does non regard it as amongst his "favorite" films, and indeed, in a recent interview conducted with the aid of his wife, Enrica Fico, remarked, ". . . how crazy was I to shoot the end of L'eclisse?" (". . . quando vedo 'Deserto rosso'  mi rendo conto che è un film strano due east mi dico, 'Come sono stato pazzo! La stessa cosa la penso per la fine di 'Fifty'eclisse.' " [encounter A. Mattanza, bibliography]).  After premiering on April 12 of 1962 at the Cinema Mignon in Milan (L�eclisse was shot in the latter half of 1961 between approximately xix July and October), the film enjoyed little commercial success anywhere in the earth with the notable exception of Japan.1  Alain Delon did not attend this Italian premiere, reprising his role as Piero and not showing up (Delon did attend the presentation of L'eclisse in Cannes on 7 May 1962).  The Movie house Mignon was later on chopped up into a �multiplex theatre� in 1999, renamed the "Excelsior," which in turn was closed in 2007. L'eclisse was itself sliced and diced from its very release, being 125 minutes long in Italian republic and 130 minutes in Cannes (The American Film Establish Catalog: Characteristic Films, 1961-1970, Function two, [page 296]).

Marquee of Cinema Mignon, Milan
12 April 1962

Italian premiere of 50'eclisse with Monica Vitta illuminated past light,
surrounded by a crowd of mostly men, including�to her left�Michelangelo Antonioni
What lite is low-cal, if Monica be not seen?  "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" (III.i.170-187)

Alain Delon aka Piero on the Promenade de la Croisette of Cannes in the back seat of a fancy convertible flanked by two beautiful women
(Sophia Loren and Romy Schneider)
Monica Vitti aka Vittoria nowhere to be seen

     Among Antonioni's films made after 1959, Fifty'eclisse has sold less tickets than any of his other films.  Time has washed lilliputian to alter this situation.  Indeed, the moving-picture show is even less well known today than information technology was at the fourth dimension of its release.  Present, few American university students have ever fifty-fifty heard of Antonioni.  Fifty-fifty among American academy cinema majors their knowledge of Antonioni may be limited to having heard of Blow-Up or 50'avventura, if that.  With regard to America, ignorance concerning Antonioni and in item, Fifty'eclisse, may not seem surprising.  After all, the picture show is European, is 45 years old, is in black and white, has subtitles, and features actors who are not household names in the The states.  Even in Italy and France, notwithstanding, the film has never enjoyed any pregnant degree of pop success.  Besides, moving picture criticism of L'eclisse is relatively scanty compared to other films of Antonioni's mature period.  All of this may seem surprising when i considers that--at least for Western Europeans--the moving-picture show stars ii giants of European picture palace and concerns beloved, violence, and coin.  It may seem quite curious to now write an entire volume in English language on the discipline of a relatively obscure, unpopular film directed by a notoriously austere and "hard" European director.  (I shall henceforth refer to this binary assemblage of 0's and i's as a �book,� although information technology is either less or more than that; regardless, now no conventional, published book of these words you are at present reading exists outside of the confines of internet.)  This may be truthful insofar every bit I believe that L'eclisse is never destined to go a particularly popular film.  Nevertheless, I also believe that--as Seymour Chatman hints at in the final paragraph of his book on Antonioni--Fifty'eclisse is one of the "all-time" movies ever made.*  I write this with a grin on my lips insofar as I wonder if  there are merely thirty half dozen people on the planet World--possibly limited to the Tzadikim Nistarim--who when given a take chances and a guidebook such equally this volume that I accept written, volition hold with this assessment.  The mutual consensus of the remainder of the planet will exist that L'eclisse is a boring, abstruse, and slow-moving pic.  In the 1962 masterwork of Dino Risi, Il sorpasso, the primary character, Bruno, played past Vittorio Gassman--a kind of narcissistic second cousin of L�eclisse�s main character, Piero, played by Alain Delon--asks the immature, ingenuous police student, Roberto, played past Jean-Louis Trintignant:  �L�hai visto L�eclisse?  Io c�ho dormito.  �Na bella pennichella.  Bel regista Antonioni!  C�ha un Flaminia Zagato, una volta sulla Fettuccia di Terracina m�ha fatto allunga� il collo!" / �Have you seen L�eclisse?  Antonioni, a good director, but that movie, information technology put me to slumber. . . .�  If Piero could pace off the screen and encounter L�eclisse my guess is that he, too, would fall comatose.  The irony here is that the narcissism and lack of insight of both Piero and Bruno prevent them from truly recognizing themselves in a mirror or, in the case of Bruno, from recognizing himself as the graphic symbol Piero in some other motion picture, L�eclisse.  Such a lack of �outsight� is a grave sin of many of the characters in the films of Antonioni.  For such predominantly male person characters, not being able to see is akin to another kind of blindness, that of not existence able to embrace.  At that place are other strong and curious resonances betwixt Il sorpasso and L�eclisse, not the least of which is that the Bruno/Gassman character of Il sorpasso poses the in a higher place question while driving a white convertible Lancia Aurelia Sport, which like the Alfa spyder of L�eclisse, volition be transformed from a flashy sports car into a hearse.  (The only thing that really impresses Bruno about Antonioni is that Bruno believes that Antonioni once [may, or may not] have driven a fancy sports car--a Flaminia Zagato--on a famous stretch of the antica via Appia near the town of Terracina some l kilometers southeast of Rome; the point Risi is apparently making is that Bruno, a fictional graphic symbol in a movie, is more impressed past the car that Antonioni, the movie director, drives in "real life" than by Antonioni�s moving picture, L'eclisse.)   In fact, Il sorpasso--an ostensible comedy--is as infused with Death as is L'eclisse or Rossellini'south Viaggio in Italia, the latter motion-picture show itself a reworking of Joyce's "The Dead."

L'eclisse consists of a series of loosely linked episodes.  The narrative trajectory is conventional in many ways.  For example, the time line is linear, and does not involve flashbacks or other manipulations of chronology.  (In this regard it is similar to La dolce vita, a rich film with a relatively simple time line.) The plot itself is threadbare, and might exist explained equally "Girl loses boy, daughter finds new male child, girl and boy lose each other."  (As opposed to Raymond Bellour's ascertainment:  " 'Boy meets girl, male child loses girl, boy gets girl'… organizes, indeed constitutes, the classical American movie theatre every bit a whole."  Quoted by James MacDowell.  Retrieved 20 January 2007  from: <http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/?2005,9,24>).  And all the same, this film is ofttimes viewed as problematic and abstruse, amid the more difficult of Antonioni's films.  The complexity lies not in its conventional narrative permutations, but elsewhere. L'eclisse, like all of Antonioni'southward films, is an intricately conceived structure that is held together by thematic as opposed to conventional storytelling mortar.  Scenes occur because they embody thematic concerns, not because they are role of a plot per se.*

    Ane might say that for Antonioni, theme is plot.  There is fifty-fifty the sense that--unlike almost film--all scenes are created equal, none more important thematically than others.  This aspect can deny usual viewer expectations in which one scene is meant to build upon another, in which narrative hills and valleys occur.  Instead, with Antonioni nosotros are presented with a series of tableaux that are just superficially related in terms of raw plot.  In this regard, scenes may appear digressive, capricious, and inexplicable.  For instance, the lengthy segment of L'eclisse regarding the flight to Verona does not accelerate the narrative of the film in whatsoever obvious fashion.  In reality, nothing much happens.  Why and then, did Antonioni film it?  For the na�ve viewer the answer is an unfamiliar one:  the segment is a gold mine of concealed, thematic riches, as opposed to the pleasures of nigh commercial films, overt sex and violence ("Osculation Kiss Blindside Bang").  Just put, an Antonioni film requires interpretation or "translation."  One must be continually on the picket for where the real "activity" takes place, which is always on the level of the thematic and intellectual.*  In this regard, analyzing an Antonioni film is vaguely analogous to psychoanalysis: one does non accept things at confront value, true meaning frequently being latent.  Commercial films generally treat the viewer every bit if he were a John and the experience supine.  Chiefly, even so, even these films entreatment to largely subconscious appetites of which the client-audience and sometimes even the filmmaker herself/himself is largely unaware.  (Garrett Stewart in his book, Framed Time, writes [p. 3], "Some films think through what others leave simply intuited or scurry to displace.  Films that don�t even seem to know what they�re doing may still practice what they too well know--and thus act out their ain repressions for all to see.�)  In an Antonioni motion-picture show, if explicit sex or violence occur, the existent action--with regard to directorial intent--always lies elsewhere.  Both Piero and his predecessor, Sandro of L'avventura, are obsessed with chasing women.  They do not know why they chase women, nor tin they even begin to understand that their erotomania is a symptom precipitated by a more fundamental conflict.  Unlike nearly movies, such womanizing is non a cinematic end in itself.  For Antonioni, fifty-fifty sex finally doesn't have much to do with sex.*  No costless events occur, for even the smallest action bears thematic import.  Take, for example, the breaking of the ashtray in the opening scene of L'eclisse, or its atavist in 50'avventura, the breaking of the aboriginal amphora past Raimondo.  In the first case the broken ashtray speaks to the profound theme of the volition of inanimate objects, and is linked to the later ripping of Vittoria's wearing apparel as well equally to the broken slice of wood floating in the "butt" (200 L open tiptop steel drum) of the Eur.  (Acronym for "Esposizione Universale Roma," a mod quarter of southern Rome where Antonioni had himself briefly worked in the late1930'south; pronounced in Italian as ii syllables, �Ā'OOR�; long �Ā�; �OOR� every bit in the English word, �your,� without the �y�.  Or, alternatively, employing the International Phonetic Alphabet:  ['eʊər].  Not to be confused with the "euro" (€), the present common currency of 13 European nations.)*

The Wasteland

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and
when the boys said to her: �Sibyl, what practise you desire?� she answered:
�I want to die.�

In the second example, the broken vase speaks, among other things, to the theme of the disturbing disconnection between modern man, his environment, and his past.  As in so many of Antonioni'southward films, things incessantly repeat themselves, and over again a vase breaks in a Paris flat in Antonioni'southward terminal moving-picture show, Par-delà les nuages.  A vase mysteriously appears twice in Ozu�s sublime Late Jump ("Banshu" [1949]), unbroken, an affirmation of the human status, of existence, as opposed to Antonioni�due south lifelong attempt at effacing the world and its beings, Antonioni�due south abiding apocalyptic vision.  And what are we to brand of the broken guitar of Accident-Up?

     An Antonioni picture show requires agile engagement by the viewer.  The films must exist closely read.  If one does non deliberately attempt to comprehend the moving-picture show, the film becomes incomprehensible, or worse yet, deadening ("Antoniennui"), 2 accusations normally leveled at Antonioni.  (Pauline Kael, no admirer of 50'eclisse, referred to the motion-picture show as "Some like it cold.")  To paraphrase Socrates, the unexamined Antonioni flick is not worth viewing.  To the engaged viewer of Fifty'eclisse--what might to the disengaged viewer seem tedious, slow-moving, and uninteresting--becomes thrilling.  The richness of an Antonioni film is such that a single viewing is generally never sufficient to "see" the film.

However, Antonioni's films do non follow whatever systematic dogma as dictated by, say, Marx or any particular moving-picture show school, nor do they require much advance knowledge of a didactic nature in gild to understand specific references, allusions, or symbols, which largely do non be in any conventional sense in his movies.  Ane might go so far as to say that, ultimately, there is aught to empathise.  Credentials are not required for access; the right high school driblet-out with a native intelligence, expert eyesight, and street smarts might do too, or better, than a highly titled intellectual with an impressive curriculum vitae who is utterly blind.  Vittoria, a "mere" translator, is clearly less educated than Riccardo, but more in tune with the divine oscillations of the universe than the cultured, leftist intellectual who is her employer and lover.  One must exist inquisitive, open, actively engaged, and preferably take suffered a flake in dear, which means that nearly viewers will come to Antonioni'south film with at least the latter life feel already in their résumé.  A tour guide of a calibre less than that of Virgil who accompanies a tourist less brilliant than Dante might, however, be of some modest assistance in the descent and ultimate ascent into Antonioni's films.*

     Almost every scene in a mature film by Antonioni may be analyzed in terms of the specific theme being highlighted.  There is such a deliberateness�an austere, claustrophobic, auteurial control to a film past Antonioni�that one must constantly ask, no thing how trivial the event or small the item, "Why is Antonioni doing what he is doing?"  Pierre Leprohon (p.88) cites a 1959 interview published in Positif in which Antonioni said:

Reality changes so speedily that if one theme is not dealt with, another presents  itself.  Allowing one'south attending to exist attracted by each piffling thing has go a vice of the imagination.  All 1 has to practice is to keep one's optics open:  everything becomes full of pregnant; everything cries out to be interpreted, reproduced.  Thus, there is no 1 item film that I would like to make; at that place is one for every single theme I perceive.  And I am excited past these themes, twenty-four hours and night.

     Because virtually everything in an Antonioni moving picture, particularly L'eclisse, is potentially significant, the films--yet elegantly simple on the surface--are amongst the most "dense" films ever made.  The density, however, is of a different kind than that of Joyce's Ulysses, a piece of work that is too remarkably dumbo, but saturated with allusions.  Such Joycean allusions to specific events, places, and people in the Dublin of June 16, 1904 with their superimposed mythological and other references do not apply to Antonioni's vision of Rome in the summer of 1961.  The objects and people that populate Antonioni'south Rome are less specific and more generic.  While Ulysses could simply have taken place in Dublin, information technology might be argued that Fifty'eclisse could have been set in London, Blow-Upward in Rome (or Milano), and that Zabriskie Indicate need not take faithfully recreated the California of the late 1960'due south.  (Antonioni seems to have confronted the criticism that Zabriskie Signal did not accurately portray America by suggesting that his artistic goal was not to recreate in a literal fashion a land which he admitted was foreign to him.)  Equally volition be shown later, to the model, Verushka of Blow-Up, London and Paris are somehow the aforementioned.  Curiously, not a single, major picture show of Antonioni takes identify entirely within the confines of a single metropolis.

     In lieu of the kind of specific allusions and references that populate all of Ulysses, in 50'eclisse there are instead a number of major organizing themes which repetitively "explain" one scene later another.  As William Arrowsmith has pointed out, Antonioni's canon is a true, homogeneous �uvre in the sense that his films tend to be contiguous with similar themes appearing over and over over again.  Peter Brunette in his written report of Antonioni appears to touch upon this important aspect of Antonioni'southward films when he writes, ". . . a strange feeling of simultaneity and repetition results.  This leads once again to the impression that we are watching a drama of forms [Brunette's italics] every bit much as a drama of people."

     Brunette likewise uses the adjective, "permeable," to describe the boundaries that in full general exist betwixt the private films of an auteur.  In Antonioni's case, the boundaries are particularly porous.  Indeed, Brunette suggests that ". . . information technology seems productive to efface boundaries between films." . . . every bit if Antonioni had fabricated only ane film instead of many (reminiscent of the observation past Jean Renoir that "A manager makes only i movie.  Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.").  Biarese and Tassone (p. 155) quote R. Benayoun as observing that with regard to Antonioni's The Passenger, "L'avventura di questo Vinto si chiude con la sua Eclisse." ("L'avventura of I vinti concludes with Fifty'eclisse.")  The number and degree of similarities and correspondences between L'eclisse and other Antonioni films are remarkable.two

    I reason that might in role explicate the homogeneity of Antonioni's films, besides every bit the recurrence of certain patterns, is the relatively restricted range of his cinema.  Every bit Moravia, who I believe was an admirer of Antonioni, has written of the filmmaker, "È come certi uccelli solitari che hanno un verso solo due east lo provano notte e giorno.  Attraverso i suoi film egli ci ha dato questo suo verso east soltanto questo." ([Antonioni] is like certain alone birds that take but 1 song, a tune they sing all twenty-four hour period and night.  In his films he has sung to u.s. but this i song.").  A crude contour for near all of Antonioni'due south films would be as follows: Antonioni's movies are usually contemporary dramas of a highly aesthecized and intellectual nature with a skeletal plot, sober tone, generally dealing with adult characters from the middle or upper classes who are experiencing a romantic conflict, often adulterous.*  In addition to these narrative and other descriptors there are also certain stylistic features nowadays in almost all of the films, examples existence Antonioni's long takes, a general abstention of all things theatrical (preferring, for example, naturalistic settings as opposed to sets), frequent violation of standard cinematographic rules such equally the "180 caste rule," avoidance of standard cinematic techniques such equally shot-countershot, lack of exposition, frequent use of ellipses in scene transitions, the meticulous habit of carefully �framing� characters in a particular, "Euclidean" manner with their environment (characters often in profile at 90 degrees with one some other), recurrent employ of favored images and motifs such equally window grills, reluctance to employ commentative music, preference for exotic, often aquatic-themed location shooting, tangential, apparently unmotivated scenes interrupting continuity, frequent casting of Monica Vitti, and many others.  Tone and viewpoint are invariably neutral, the creator distanced from his carefully wrought creation.

    This book is an attempt to identify those themes which characterize 50'eclisse and to place such themes in other films by Antonioni. (Adequate substitutes for the word "theme" might be class [à la Brunette], motif, pattern, organizing principle, trait, or fifty-fifty issue or business concern.)  It is my conventionalities that Antonioni constructed L'eclisse in the most meticulous and self-conscious of manners.  However, even if this were not the instance, a work of fine art that is true to life may withal yield itself to a close thematic analysis.  This is true, if but because life itself--even so chaotic its surface--has its patterns.*  The surreptitious for nifty filmmaking is possibly knowing what to signal the camera at.  The recipe is otherwise straightforward: Go a camera, plough it on, point it at life, add together no additional spices, flavoring, meaning, or significance.  Life can speak for itself.  Must we only learn how to look and heed?  Or, as in the case of David Locke of The Rider, how to be?

Ii.  THINGS >>

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Source: http://www.davidsaulrosenfeld.com/chapter1.html

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