Today would be the hundredth birthday of the cinema’s exemplary modernist, Michelangelo Antonioni, who, from the very beginning of his career, understood form to be the crucial content of his era—and made films that, themselves, had an advanced form of his own design. His fundamental subject is the bourgeoisie and the way that new methods of communication—mainly the mass media, but also the abstractions of high-tech industry, architecture, music, politics, and even fashion—have a feedback effect on the educated, white-collar thinkers who create them. These new ideas have as strong an effect on their creators and implementors as on the world around them, and knocks them off the course of their own lives.
Antonioni is also one of the cinema’s great pictorialists—his images reflect, with a cold enticement, the abstractions that fascinated him. That’s why the word most commonly used to describe his view of the modern world—“alienation”—is, rather, a common mistake. Certainly, many of his characters find themselves out of touch with their own desires, their own physicality, and seem distanced from themselves, in search of an anchor of immediate experience and spontaneous emotion. But he wasn’t nostalgic about the premodern; he understood that technology and advanced design arose in response to authentic needs, and that there is at least as much of a problem with the long-established ways that cry out for sophisticated technical improvements.
Let’s be specific. There has been a lot of talk lately about the death of the cinema, and this clip puts it in its place. It’s an excerpt from Wim Wenders’s 1982 film “Room 666,” featuring a remarkably prophetic and sanguine interview of sorts with Antonioni, when he was a young man of seventy who looked with confidence to the electronic future of the cinema. The premise of the film is that, at the Cannes Film Festival, Wenders posed one question to each of his interview subjects, film directors all—“Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”—and left them alone in a hotel room, in front of a camera, to address it. (By chance, the clip begins with the tail end of Steven Spielberg’s segment, in which he incidentally reveals the same stunted and repressed approach to inner life that dulls his films.)
But Antonioni would have none of Wenders’s hand-wringing. He responded by considering “the influence of television”—and adding that, if it seems like a problem, it’s “only because we belong to a different generation.” He talks about “new technologies”—videotape, which, he says, “will probably replace film”—as may other technologies “like lasers, who knows, or others that are yet to be invented,” which will solve the problem “of being able to entertain ever-growing audiences.” He recognizes that many people are attached to film, but that this attachment will eventually vanish. “We should think of the entertainment needs of future viewers. I am not that pessimistic. Actually, I am quite … I’ve always tried to adapt myself to the means of expression characteristic of a certain time.” He mentions that he had already made a film on tape and was continuing to work in video (“I’m sure that the range of artistic possiblities ofered by video will make us feel differently about ourselves”). He understood that with the “big screen” at home, together with “high-definition magnetic tape, we will have cinema in our homes. We will no longer need to go to the cinema.” He knows that the change will be a big one—but “We will have but one option: we will have to adapt.” And he concludes, “My feeling is that it won’t be all that hard to transform us into new men more suited to our new technologies.”
He cites his 1964 film “Red Desert” as the place where he addressed that theme most directly. I agree; it’s his greatest film (it’s on DVD from Criterion; here’s a clip). It was forward-looking then, and remains so. Antonioni, born on this date in 1912, is younger at his posthumous centenary than are many active filmmakers today.
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Video: Rare interview with Antonioni directed by Wim Wenders. Taken from the documentary 'Room 666'.
