Antonioni's "L'Eclisse"
“L’Eclisse” (1962), Michelangelo Antonioni director, is considered the third of his modernist masterworks, preceded by “L’Avventura” (1960) and “La Notte” (1961). In all three, Antonioni abandons the genres by which filmgoers orient themselves and their familiar sequential storylines. “L’Eclisse” (“The Eclipse”) is the most radical of the three.
The film opens with a long sequence on the break-up of the relationship between a writer and his translator. They are estranged. The man makes believe he wants to continue and tries, not whole-heartedly, to embrace her. The woman (Monica Vitti) has lost all feeling for him and moves about the room -- blank-white and filled with abstract paintings, mere daubs of dreary colors, and several pottery art objects -- as if trapped and looking for an exit.
A rotating fan blows ... loose strands of her hair, moving here and there, enacting her uncertainty. He doesn’t much care in keeping her, and she is stunned and passive, and frozen in indecision. We wait for a piece of pottery to fall and break, and it does.
Sketched this way, the scene seems empty, yet Antonioni involves us in the mood, the great tension of uncertainty about matters that ought to mean something. The man is weary, conciliatory and false. Vitti is composed and frantic. She stands aside from herself. We expect so much more, but there’s nothing there, no feeling is appropriate, not even regret. It reads as absurdist, but in fact, we’ve all been there – actors without motivation or script.
We move to a long sequence at the floor of Rome’s stock exchange. There we are caught up in surcharged energy as brokers and investors ignite in passion at every click on the big board. Antonioni aims at their contorted faces, their arms waving maniacally, their finger ripping at the air. We’re in one of Dante’s circles in hell, with humankind reduced to monstrous avidity. It’s a long sequence and happens in two segments – one as values rise, and a second as the market collapses.
As if to press his Dantean point, Antonioni has the exchange floor pause for a minute of silence to honor the passing of one of their members. For one minute the hundreds stand silent -- sub specie aeternitatis --as ringing phones go unanswered. The minute up, a bell rings and the room erupts in its normal anguish and complaint. The modern age, after all, is not without passion.
The broker (Alain Delon) of Vitti’s mother – herself chained to the market -- takes an interest in Vitti, notably after his reliable prostitute disappoints him by changing her hair color. Soon he is wooing Vitti, attempting kisses as she turns away, in boredom. He’s dynamic, successful, and prettier than she is, and drives an Alfa-Romeo sports car.
They end up together in the apartments first of her parents and then of his. Her mother’s is modest; the portrait of her father, now long gone, shows him in military uniform, one of Mussolini’s proud but ineffectual warriors. His parents’ presence dominates the wealthy apartment of Delon’s childhood. The rich splendor of the 19th-Century paintings mocks the barren decorations on Vitti’s earlier lover’s digs, as his parents’ marriage mocks the casual play at love of modern people.
He presses his romantic case, without much trimmings, and in a playful turn, she relents. They have 1962 off-camera film-sex, after which she is evasive, and he checks for phone messages. They agree to meet later that evening at a set time and place, and neither shows.
The final seven minutes of “L’Eclisse” is monumental. The camera pans buildings, street scenes, water flowing, trees and sky, empty streets with nothing to commend them, neither hope nor despair. No characters appear – an ironic blank. The camera freezes on brickwork patterns and broken fences, leaves in gutters, street lamps. Antonioni frustrates our efforts to make these images symbolic or allegorical. They possess nothing but their “thing-ness”. How to imagine Antonioni’s modernist negation – ask: “what does the room think after we’ve left and shut the door behind us?
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