OLD TIMES 2: Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura" at Film Forum

The second feature we saw at Film Forum Sunday was an old favorite, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960).  Me and that film go way back.  The first time I saw it was on a ten-inch black and white television, broadcast on the local PBS station in the mid-Seventies.  Even under those conditions it made an indelible impression.  I’d never before seen such controlled composition of shots.

For many, the film is the quintessential art-house film.  It’s slow-moving, it’s subtitled, it’s vague and a bit elliptical, it’s got plenty of upper-class ennui and little uncomfortable brushes with the masses, it’s got an arch attitude toward the people it portrays while all the while not denying its perspective is “of” them and “for” them.  And it’s Italian rather than French.  The French auteurs were the ones with radical ideas and a counter-intuitive fondness for Hollywood genre films.  The Italians created a different kind of film vocabulary without deliberate ideological significance, much as Japan did.  In other words, cinema was a significant industry in both countries, both defeated in World War II and both achieving mastery of this most modern of arts in the post-war period.  The reception of films by the likes of Antonioni and Kurosawa, of Fellini and Ozu, I suspect, had much to do with their ability to play to the humanism that was already fading in the glitzier productions coming from the US and UK.  To the victors go the spoils?  Yes, and the irony.

L’Avventura doesn’t exactly wear its heart on its sleeve, but the sense that some kind of emotional connection is what we most desire is a given.  We can tell that Anna (Lea Massari) is discontented from the start—she’s snippy with her partician patriarch of a dad, she’s blasé with her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti, in the role that made her name), and vaguely disgruntled with her well-meaning hunk of a boyfriend, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti).  The trio is off on a jaunt on a yacht with some slightly older Meditteranean types—one couple combines a rather imperious woman with a dogged male admirer, the other, a somewhat ditzy dame, Giulia, and her sarcastic older male partner, Corrado. 

Anna seems determined to break through her boredom.  First, there’s her precipitate plunge into the water from the fast-moving boat, then there’s her cry that she’s seen a shark—while most of the party is in the water—then she admits to Claudia that there was no shark, and then—on a visit to a small rocky island and after words of disgruntlement with Sandro—no Anna.  Where did she go?  No one knows.  Could she be hiding?  Was there a boat no one saw that she hitched a ride on?  Did she plunge to her death off a cliff?

We could say that Anna’s disappearance is the film’s “red herring.”  It poses a question that is never answered and if viewers expect that issue to be resolved, they will be disappointed.  I can’t say anything about that because before I ever saw the film I already knew that that wasn’t the point.  The film introduces Anna only to get her out of the way.  She is the means by which Claudia and Sandro become lovers, and that’s fairly ingenious, as such things go.  Claudia doesn’t get him after a break between Anna and Sandro, nor after the definite death of Anna, nor even in the absence of Anna, in the sense of when the cat’s away….  No, Anna is there and not there.  She’s the reason Claudia and Sandro are together, as they travel up the coast, following up on rumored sightings of Anna.

Into the somewhat aimless lives of these people comes a sense of mystery.  Is Anna leading them on?  Is Anna simply a pretext?  The dissatisfaction with Sandro that we saw in Anna might end up passing to her friend, but for now, Anna has provided them—in absentia—an opportunity to discover if there was a real romance simmering all along.  The film creates a situation in which the possibility of a second romance within a triangle gets to be explored.  Key to that theme are the different responses of Claudia and Sandro to Anna’s disappearance.  The latter wastes no time coming on to Claudia—the very morning after the night spent on the island in hopes Anna will appear, he attempts to kiss her.  It is as if, by choosing to remain with Sandro and Corrado, Claudia has become Anna’s replacement, for Sandro.  When he follows her onto a train, it becomes clear that his “search” for Anna is really a pursuit of Claudia.

Claudia, in a performance of great subtlety by Vitti, is very clearly content to be “second banana” to Anna.  Anna is the capricious one, the well-to-do one, the one who lends her clothes and maybe even her boyfriend, if the mood struck her. 

Claudia is more beautiful but she seems not to realize it, in part because she is herself an observer.  Two scenes are set-up to establish this.  In the first, a beautiful young girl with a tear in her dress nearly sparks a riot among cruising males who seem to see her state as an unavoidable provocation.  The girl, Gloria Perkins, is an aspiring actress and so it could all be a publicity stunt.  Later, Claudia waits outside a hotel where Anna may be staying while Sandro goes inside to investigate.  Claudia is “scoped” relentlessly by every man on the street, as they begin to gather like flies.  The amusement of Gloria is set against the distress of Claudia.  At the same time, the message that she too could have “any man” shows not only the fascination with blondes in this culture but the degree to which Sandro, in switching from Anna to Claudia, is doing what “anyone” would do, in his position.

Antonioni toys with this notion by having Claudia wear a blouse belonging to Anna, by having Claudia present when a young pseudo-artistic prince comes on to Giulia, claiming he prefers her to Claudia, and when he has Claudia don a black wig.  In each instance, the film manages to convey Claudia’s perspective.  She is self-conscious each time.  She never aspires to be a femme fatale, or even Sandro’s lover.  She only becomes the latter, we realize, by falling in love with him.  The scene on the rooftop ringing the bells presents her rare unself-conscious enjoyment of a moment—after she has finally accepted Sandro as her lover in the fields outside Noto—subsequently become ecstatic the morning after they sleep together.  Vitti enacts the joy of a woman in love with playful abandon and Sandro seems like a rather tiresome stiff in comparison.

Alone, Sandro does things like spoil a stranger’s architectural drawing (Sandro is a frustrated architect) and eventually, at a party that Claudia chooses not to attend, is spotted by Gloria Perkins, who makes a deliberate effort to get his attention as a desirable solo male.  They spend the night on a couch, only to be discovered there, still engaged with one another, by Claudia.  The final sequence of the film is rightly famous as a wordless stretch of time in which the two move toward rapprochement, Antonioni’s sense of space and composition acting as silent commentary.

That element of the film has been present all along—for instance with the shot framing Claudia below through a window while we are with Sandro and Anna in his bedroom, or with the figures against the barren island, or with the placing of Sandro and Anna against rock and water.  The use of walls and voids creates a visual texture that comes to have a rigor we grasp as the point of view of the film.  We see not only people in space and in groups and against backgrounds—as in any film—but we see them as figures in compositions, their actions and passions contained by a sense of artistry that, rather than intruding or distracting, provides meaning.  How things look is inseparable from how things feel.  Antonioni’s assertion is that only cinema allows us fully to register this aspect of existence. And this is a film to see that proven.

Viewing it this time, after The Servant, I was conscious of the fact that humor was rather lacking—that irony I spoke of earlier—and that the print was nowhere near as pristine as the one we’d been treated to of Losey’s film.  I believe my copy of the Criterion DVD is sharper, but one thing that came across to me more than before was the score.  The music adds odd commentary to the visuals, often feeling oppressive, or building in ways that suggest discomfort or anxiousness.  There’s a brooding quality that adds a certain solemnity to it all, but that also deadens any sense that the characters have any independence from the terms in which they are presented.  L’Avventura presents a formal and rigorous artistry that surrounds human impermanence with a sense of austere beauty, and finds in Monica Vitti a figure whose expressive resources add a subjective contrast to the sense of detachment.  The film never fails to fascinate me.

OLD TIMES: Joseph Losey's "The Servant" at Film Forum

As the opening credits played at a screening of the 50th anniversary restored version of Joseph Losey’s film, The Servant (1963), I sat in my seat in the third row of the Film Forum next to my daughter Kajsa and reflected how something in the visuals spoke to a bond between us.  Not just that I raised her, but that I raised her to watch with me certain kinds of movies.  The gray skies and leafless trees in those opening shots, filmed in pristine black and white on streets of posh London townhomes, betokened a kind of shared cinematic space of the soul.  It felt like an eternal world of Saturday or Sunday matinees, where the world outside—of no matter what era or time in our lives—could be held at bay while we pursued an imaginative interaction with worlds preserved on celluloid. 

On that note, I began my viewing of the film rather bathed in nostalgia, not only for our comradely viewing of so much vintage art-house cinema in Kajsa’s early teens through her twenties and beyond, but for that space one inhabits as a willing revenant to the cinema of yesteryear, a space that feels like eternity.  It could simply be a matter of certain neurons sparking that hadn’t sparked since whenever last I sat before smooth dissolves of black and white shots, but it felt more telling.  I don’t mean “it’s 1963 again,” exactly.  Since, to be sure, I have no real recollection of 1963—except, ok, a grim November day and hushed and stunned and sniffling adults gathered before a television set.  But that’s not where I was while I sat in the Film Forum.  That recollection is from me talking now.  In my seat, I was only aware of being transposed to a world known to my inner landscape as “black and white Britain.”  I gratefully entered.

The early going of the film seems paced to make us drink that world in.  Losey’s oh-so-crisp images in the early going seem bent upon making us savor how things look.  It’s a feast of textures.  And the voices—the partly rushed and swallowed syllables of the manservant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), the lilting and outgoing capriciousness of the upper-class and tony Tony (James Fox)—immediately clue us in to the distance between these two men.  These two men and Susan (Wendy Craig), the fiancée of the latter.

With the introduction of “the female element,” the film’s pace becomes that of opening moves in a soon-to-be-sinister game, one I was quite willing to let go on for the entire afternoon.  Let’s watch how Barrett insinuates himself between these two brittle lovebirds, with Tony only too conscious of how much he stands to lose if he lets his bachelor domain come under the sway of the woman he has not yet got around to marrying.  And Susan—why shouldn’t she be irritated by the way that servant is constantly underfoot, so cunningly serviceable.  And Barrett, well, yes, Barrett.  Dirk Bogarde is one of the greatest film actors of that era, able to communicate so much with just the smallest hint—like whether or not his eyeballs shine or grow cold, like whether or not a few stray hairs flip across his brow, or whether or not his lips curl ever so slightly—or precisely when.  At this point, we’re watching the mouse putting the cats through their paces.

The film doesn’t stay there, though.  And at some point in the next segment—featuring big-eyed, mobile-mouthed Sara Miles as Barrett’s alleged sister Vera, a maid who makes a different kind of threesome with Barrett and Tony—I began to think that the change was a sop to viewers who want more sex, less frigidity.  It was as if, unable to show an actual romance between Barrett and Tony, the film had to introduce a surrogate—“the sister.”  Of course, we soon learn, as Barrett lets Vera tart the place up a bit, that the two are lovers and in league to seduce their superior.  But why?  That’s not quite clear, and that’s where the headgames really begin.  Miles’ Vera is not nearly subtle enough for Barrett as he was when we assumed he was gay, and so everyone has to come down to a more deliberately carnal level.  Certainly, that has its place in any ménage à trois, and it's not like the species is ever likely to outgrow it.  So, yes, Vera, then, as the game little piece promoting class relations and giving her supposed fiancée, Barrett, the thrill of consorting with his master through their access to the same bit o’ stuff.

All well and good—after all, Susan is rather left out of things as she’s too uppity for anything like what Tony’s willing to get into behind her back.  And isn’t that always the way?  In any case, a trip to a lovely estate out of town finds Tony and Susan as hot for each other as they ever were—except that Tony seems to pine for his townhouse.  A surprise return in the middle of the night and…who’s been sleeping in my bed and – why here they are, still in it!  This scene is captured by Losey with all the discomforting irony of the situation.  Don’t you hate it when you come home with your lady love only to find that your “man” is above stairs in your bed making “incest” with a near relation whom you’ve been having cordial relations with yourself upon occasion?  What can you do, lord and master that you be, but stand at the foot of the stairs feeling, well, humilated and impotent as you hear their quite-at-ease-thank-you voices drifting down to stick daggers in your most vulnerable spots, while your not-yet-missus stands there looking as though she were watching an immolation, concerned that it’s bad form.  And then, when the shadow of the naked “Man” stands there between you two…  

Where can we go from there?  Tony can call Barrett for a dressing-down but, since Susan stoically refuses to depart, that also means certain revelations—particularly when delivered by a blubbery Vera who, after all, was genuinely keen, you see—will cause no end of ill will in Tony’s above-board relationship.  So, yes, he can send Barrett and his strumpet packing—his manservant’s cheeky “I’m well within my rights” still ringing in his ears—and then try to get back to where he once belonged.  Until a chance meeting in a pub when Barrett, now enduring a service position that feels like hell after the bliss of his former employer, tells him how Vera ran off on him and begs to return.

A return with a difference we can say, for now the two—master and man—disport themselves one minute like a bitchy couple and the next like frat boys on a bender or brothers mucking about till mummy comes home.  We could say the film is lurching back to the path it might have been on at the start, but then it can’t stay there either.  We can’t have them live happily ever after with each other when they can’t possibly have been in school together!  Bring back Susan.

And return she does, just in time to catch one of those orgiastic set-pieces that were all the rage after La Dolce Vita (1960)—decadence isn’t for kids, kids, because it’s never really much fun, particularly when all the participants really do know better—and, when Tony goes to pieces, why there’s no one to master him like his man.  Au  revoir, Susan, it’s been swell.

Each segment of this little psychodrama has its own visual feel and presentation, and the transformation of Bogarde displays reserves of psychological nuance that beggar most actors’ grasp of the relation between externals and internals.  There is lots of fun with mirrors and compositions of two and three and four characters, knowledge about what lighting does to faces that is nothing short of revelatory and, for real comic glee, a scene in a restaurant that lets us tour a few tables to eavesdrop on the psychodramas we might be following instead of this one—while Harold Pinter, who makes these characters speak the way they do, shares a bottle with a bird at a table in the corner. 

There’s also a visit to some bohemian coffee bar where a white guy with a moustache—quite outré—bangs out the blues.  Clearly, the class system is going to hell, the thin end of the wedge, and all that.

When I was a teen, what I loved best was the 1967-68 period when it all went technicolor, psychedelic even.  Now, I find in the artefacts of the early Sixties a more subtle grasp of the seismic shift because things have to be more subtle when you can’t just let it all hang out.  Looking back through the constraints is liberating, perhaps?  In any case, as the very short end credits played we returned to 2013 and our vicarious and possibly cathartic contemplation of the masterly control certain artists were capable of bringing to the messy shambles of sexual and societal roles—for our continued amusement.  Yes, it felt like old times, in so many ways.

ECCE POEM

“To communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by means of signs, including the tempo of these signs—that is the meaning of every style; and considering that the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case, I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” 4.

Early in my teen reading Nietzsche set down a tough act to follow.  Not only for the incandescent jolt of his thought, a way of shaking up a lot of dust and sending the shadows for cover, but for the style of his writing, a way of making words dance and jeer and sing and flout every sort of constraint.  For Nietzsche, everything he meant seriously came under the heading of the Dionysian.  This isn’t a hedonism because one of its staples is, as he just said, “an inward tension of pathos,” where pathos is nothing less than suffering from the conditions of existence, from the given that we all must deal with.  Did Nietzsche have a remedy for such suffering?  No, except to exhort anyone who would keep company with him to stop whining about it!  To become “multifarious” in order to avoid being restricted to one order of “being.”

It should be said that what Nietzsche chose to see as “decadent”—as not serving life or the spirit or anything of much use—is a long list of things that most intellectuals pay lip service to, at one level or another.  As he says in Ecce Homo, his amazing self-evaluation, his “seeing morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation and a singularity of the first rank in the history of knowledge.”  Or: “becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of being—all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date.”  Or: “I consider dialectic as a symptom of decadence; for example in the most famous case, the case of Socrates.”  And, having named his nemesis from the ancient world, there’s only left his nemesis from the Christian world: the God of St. Paul: “God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: thou shall not think!”

All this is typical Nietzschean rhetoric, and the fact that he uses terms such as “decadent” and “indelicate” shows that, to a large extent, what he is talking about is a matter of taste.  There is always an aesthetic of the spirit at work in Nietzsche, and that’s what attracted me to him early on.  Repudiating the Christian viewpoint of my first teachers had its part in the initial glee, but that was soon superseded by the fact that, if an artist should need a philosophy in order to make art (blessed is she who doesn’t), Nietzsche was one of the foremost for that, if only because the “becoming” he speaks of is what one engages in the making of art for—maybe also (I would have it) the reason one interacts with art at all.  In other words, if art isn’t adding something to one’s becoming, it’s wasting your time, and if the art you’re making isn’t moving beyond what you already did, then … why bother?

The parts about morality and dialectic and God all to some extent speak a 19th-century language one would like to think we could do away with.  The sad fact that that’s not so is what makes me still think about Nietzsche from time to time.  In America, “God talk” is at its worst in my lifetime, and the bolstering of self-aggrandizing arguments by means of “moral” claims—while I’ve never known that not to be standard procedure—seems even more nakedly the struggle of one will to power against another that Nietzsche always insisted it was.  He was fond of the imagery of emasculation, the sense that Christianity and pious moralism were, inevitably, a way of cutting off a man’s balls (though he never said it that way), and there’s always some degree of truth to that.  He saw Christian morality as “old woman’s morality” for that reason, pointing at the demographic which truly had no use for virile masculine members.  But the same kind of irony I’m treating his terms with is very much of the essence of his irony as well.  He was no worshipper of the phallus as the staff of power, after all.  But he often used its claim to a kind of visceral essentialism as basic to how the systems of power that men have developed for themselves and for women have been understood.

Art was about power of a different kind.  And the place where I was always a bit skeptical about Nietzsche’s claims came in there.  Much of what he would call “decadent” might in fact play its part in a work of art, might in fact contribute—for the beholder—that pathos that, if not Dionysian, was at least akin to its release from convention.  Which might just be a way of saying that Nietzsche never had to confront modernism, or cinema, or rock music. 

But when I read today those lines about style, I heard Nietzsche opening a door for Metro Lace to walk through.  I won’t say that I am “multifarious” or that “the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case,” but that, if that poem does anything, it makes manifest many inward states in a tension of tempo and signs.  Which is to say that pathos is the rhythm, the feeling, while the signs—the words themselves—are the melody and the lyrics, or more properly, the voice.  What interests me in that formulation is that such a poem is not about a topic nor a reaction to what has been said or done elsewhere.  It’s an extension of an inner state.  Which is why it’s not something I can do “at will,” but only when seized by that particular pathos that speaks, that needs a voice.

Sometimes I wonder if such articulation is in itself a betrayal.  I mean a) my talking about the poem in that way betrays its intentions, but more to the point, b) the poem itself is a betrayal of something best left unsaid.  I believe at some level I’ve always taken that to be the case.  The poem comes from an effort to take “someone” into “someone else’s” confidence.  I might like to think that it “speaks for” someone other than me, but, if it does, it only does so to the extent that the speaker isn’t me.  I often don’t know who it is, only that it’s a voice that wants to interact with that inward tension, to supply signs that might suffice.

The over-riding contribution that comes from me, from my own intelligence and preferences, is a skepticism about the entire procedure.  And so there is a further tension I would call the tension of ethos, which is to say, a struggle about the “value”—as truth, as judgment, as precision and accuracy—of the “testimony” of the signs.  Do they say what should be said? Can they provide images that do what they should do?  And a further tension is that of eros.  All lyric poetry, for me, is love poetry.  Traditionally, one speaks of “a muse,” saying that this figure for one’s desires and unfulfilled longings dictates what one must say to woo her, to make her lend ear, to bring her to the table or bed or wherever one hopes to meet her halfway.  In Metro Lace there are a lot of figures for such encounters, and the terms by which eros enters into the discourse concern beauty and pleasure.  Who wouldn’t want to show his lover a good time?

These tensions—pathos, ethos, eros—have a further fellow traveler in the search for signs that will suffice.  It’s the dimension that Nietzsche liked to call “the timely.”  Bear in mind that Nietzsche was one who saw “the ‘historical sense’” as a “typical symptom of decay,” “a disease.”  And yet.  There is a strange process by which one’s context, one’s temporal and spatial surroundings, become grist for the mill.  They not only furnish signs—the way people speak in one’s own time and place and the things they speak of—but they furnish an attitude that one is always at pains to engage with, if only to ignore it.  One’s audience, in other words, is an attitude toward speech—whether in poems or other texts—and this “timely” sense is never out of earshot, so to speak.  If I had to be candid about it, I would probably say that a deliberate stretching of such context—by means of diction and the detritus of speech and reading—is what drives the mechanism that makes the poem.

Or rather: a state of pathos—suffering from time itself—sets up a rhythm and what “completes” or “answers” that rhythm is a string of signs that, with whatever blend of ethos (truth value) and eros (desire for beauty), try to trip the light fantastic out on the edge of intelligibility, to prove (“the finding of a satisfaction,” as Stevens says) that language, no matter how debased or disused or derivative, can find resources to make its presence felt … for the moment.

And it’s that momentary aspect of the whole thing that makes me look askance at its ultimate worth.  If I “feel better” for having said “that” on “that occasion,” what merit does reading that statement have at some other moment, or in some other mind—even if only my own mind at another time?

On three to four occasions, Metro Lace has endured my doubts: the original writing of it in 2010, the typing of it into a document, the revisiting/revising of it in 2011, and the revising and posting of it in 2013.  In changing any of its signs, the decision usually goes in the direction of “timeliness”—finding a way of putting into words something that concerns me at that time.  The more obscure aspects of the poem were shaped by a conversion factor—inner state to articulation—that eludes my conscious choice.  Which is to say that the “rightness” of a sequence or phrase has to be left to some factor of pleasure that is peculiar to me and my ear and my tongue when I read the words.

All-in-all, I suppose, poetry for me is simply a manner of speaking, with such “tensions” and “constraints” as one faces whenever one writes, but made more acute by the lack of a definite topic, theme, or purpose.  That makes a poem like Metro Lace utterly spurious and utterly serious, for it has no measure for success or failure other than some nebulous sense of pleasure and necessity—the need “to communicate a state,” to find “a style” acceptable to the pressures of the occasion.