Phenomenology and “Red Desert”

Film critic Stanley Kauffman relates the following conversation that took place over dinner with Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti during his visit to Rome in 1964, prior to the release of Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964):

“After an hour or so of chat as animated as my Italian will permit, I ask, ‘Well, what about Red Desert? Antonioni smiles broadly, makes a sweeping gesture, and announces with the self-satire of the confident, ‘Un film stupendo!’” [1]

This was another instance of Antonioni’s spare but remarkably revealing comments concerning his own work, for critical reaction in this country has generally been one of stupefaction. There can be no doubt that behind the film is a great degree of cinematic control and seriousness of purpose, but there appears to be confusion as to what Antonioni is actually getting at. His three previous films had been thin in terms of the narrative content but rich in terms of the depth of the interpersonal relationships. Red Desert on the other hand, lacks even the substance of human relationships. John Simon was thus moved to write that

“the color is so eloquent and thought-provoking that it emphasizes the vacuousness of what it envelops: plot, character, dialogue.” [2]

Similarly Dwight MacDonald observed that

“the thinness of the subject matter . . . contrasts with the brilliance with which it is expressed to the eye. . . And the farther he goes in that direction [towards abstraction] without giving up the conventional kind of plot, as in his last two films, the more obtrusive is the discrepancy between the feebleness of what he has to say and the cinematic power with which he says it.” [3]

When one embarks upon the expedition of exegesis, all sorts of objections are immediately raised – particularly in connection with a visual artist like Antonioni. One is warned that the work of art is just there – take it or leave it. The feeling is that the expository analysis is ultimately reductionist and that to intellectualize a work of art is to rob it of its aesthetic mode of communication. To this feeling I am sympathetic, inasmuch as I agree that Antonioni’s film is not overtly symbolic; it does not stand for something else. Yet for one to integrate one’s experience of viewing Red Desert with his other experiences, a certain amount of analysis and systematization is necessary. Therefore my comments concerning Red Desert are to be directed not so much in terms of an explanation (or, at least, in the commonly understood sense of that word) but more in terms of an aid to relating the experience of watching Red Desert to other modes of experience.

There have been typically two ways of interpreting Red Desert. The first, and one that was seized upon by those with a generally Marxist critical disposition, was to view the film as an attack on modern society and as a condemnation of the ravages wreaked upon man by modern technology. This critical approach was refuted by Antonioni just after the film's release when he was interviewed by Jean Luc Godard:

“It simplifies things too much (as many have done) to say that I accuse this inhuman, industrialized world in which the individual is crushed and led to neurosis. My intention, on the contrary, . . . was to translate the beauty of this world, in which even the factories can be beautiful.” [4]

The second manner in which this film has been considered is as a psychological case study of a neurotic girl. While this is ostensibly true, it is not particularly fruitful to think of the film in terms of psychology as it is conventionally practiced. Neither of these approaches is without some validity, but they fail to recognize the extent to which Red Desert probes the fundamental nature of experience. I suggest, instead, that Red Desert be looked upon as a cinematic exploration of the phenomenology of perception. In particular, certain ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger can be perceived within the cinematic structure of Antonioni’s film, and these ideas lie outside the realm of traditional film-critical categories.

The breakthrough associated with Kierkegaard was the understanding of the opposition between what is called “essence” and “existence”. That is, a thing’s essence is that which determines it and distinguishes it from others; existence is that which distinguishes the thing from nothing. Existence is that which brings the thing to realization; essences are interrelations, a thing’s essence relates it to other things. In this way a system of essences can be contemplated by the mind entirely separate from existence – an abstract, universal, timeless systems of inactive essences. Modern philosophy from Descartes onward has had a strong bias towards essentialism, and this was culminated in the Hegelian system. It was Kierkegaard who recognized that philosophy concentrated exclusively on essentialism was incapable of accounting for individuation, contingency, time, and will –

“What confuses the whole doctrine about being in logic is that people do not notice that they are always operating with the ‘concept’ existence. But the concept existence is an ideality and the difficulty is, of course, whether existence can be reduced to a concept. . .

But Existence corresponds to the individual things, the individual, which even Aristotle teaches lies outside or least cannot be reduced to a concept. . . an individual man has not, after all, a conceptual existence.” [5]

Thus it was that by considering the concrete nature of existence, which he felt Hegelianism overlooked, Kierkegaard introduced the related idea of nothingness. This attack on Hegelianism was and is of considerable consequence simply because most of the established thought patterns of the present age are founded upon Hegel’s thought. In particular all the social sciences are rooted in Hegelian essentialism, and this is especially significant for an existential critic of essentialism like Kierkegaard, who would charge that it is precisely in the social sphere that the scientific method of essentialism is inadequate. In other words the scientific method applied to objects in the world may have its uses, but it does not render an accurate accounting of our experiences of objects nor of our experience of each other – each of which can only be adequately dealt with by a philosophy that considers existence as well as essence. The breakdown of classical philosophy has, say the existential critics, brought about a mass neurosis, causing people to be regarded as dehumanized conceptual quantities and leaving the individual with a feeling of homelessness and boredom. It is this malaise that Antonioni has dealt with in Red Desert, and the psychotic condition of Giuliana is an externalization of that which is implicitly present in a great number of troubled souls.

It is now evident why the above-mentioned conventional critical approaches to Red Desert are inadequate. A Marxist attack on modern capitalistic technology is founded on Hegelian principles and thus is still essentialist. Similarly a psychological case study is a social scientific treatment that also remains within the confines of pure essentialism. Antonioni’s film, however, is existentialist, and thus of a different nature altogether. [6]

Now to express the idea of existence opposed to essence verbally is difficult, since it is the nature of language to deal with essences. For example the word “tree” does not do justice to this tree, and, in fact, no matter how detailed I become in my description of this tree I can never adequately convey the this-ness, as it were, of the tree. Nevertheless post-Kierkegaardians, like Sartre and Heidegger, have invested great effort to express their philosophies, which involve important ontological distinctions, in terms of written language [7]. Consider the following passages from Sartre’s novel, Nausea:

I lean my hand on the seat, but pull it back hurriedly: it exists. This thing I’m sitting on, leaning my hand on, is called a seat. They made it purposely for people to sit on, they took leather, springs, and cloth, and they went to work with the idea of making a seat, and when they finished, that was what they had made. The had carried it here, into this car, and the car is now rolling and jolting with its rattling windows, carrying this red thing in its bosom. I murmur: “It’s a seat,” a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated – bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey’s belly, my feet dangling in the clear water. Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenseless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me. . . . .

[later] I’m in the park. I drop into a bench between great black tree-trunks, between the black, knotty hands reaching towards the sky. A tree scrapes at the earth under my feet with a black nail. I would so like to let myself go, forget myself, sleep. But I can’t, I’m suffocating: existence penetrates me everywhere, through the eyes, the nose, the mouth . . .

And suddenly, suddenly, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.
. . .

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, lone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision.

It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of “existence.” . . when I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word, “to be”. Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belongs to the class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. . . . And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder – naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.

I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn’t need to move in order to see, behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamp-posts of the bankstand and the Velleda in the midst of a mountain of laurel. All these objects . . . How can I explain? They inconvenience me: I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve. The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather . . .

. . .

In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relationship to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, and overflowed. Of these relations (which I insisted on maintaining in order to delay the crumbling of the human world, measures, quantities, and directions) – I felt myself to be the arbitrator; they no longer had their teeth into things. . . .

. . .

In vain to repeat: “this is a root” – it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was . . . below all explanation. . .

. . .

Suspicious: that’s what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. When they ran quickly under your nose like startled hares and you didn’t pay too much attention, you might believe them to be simple and reassuring, you might believe that there was real blue in the world, real read, a real perfume of almonds or violets. But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves. The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart. . . . But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float. . . .
. . .

I was no longer in Bouville, I was nowhere, I was floating. I was not surprised, I new it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being. . . I shouted, “filth! what rotten filth!”, and shook myself to get ride of this sticky filth, but it held fast, and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless: I stifled at the depths of this immense weariness. [8]

Sartre is striving to describe a particular manner of perceiving entities, a particular awareness with which essentialism cannot cope. The character Roquentin’s feeling of nausea in Sartre’s novel is almost exactly mirrored by Giuliana’s anxiety in Red Desert. The threatening forces are not those of “technology”, but just things-in-themselves. The refuse in front of which Giuliana eats her sandwich in an early scene is not to be viewed as industrial waste, but as undefined, unexplained matter, analogous to the black root of Roquentin’s chestnut tree. And, in fact, Antonioni’s effort to bring us to Giuliana’s perceptual state by the use of cinematography is more directly successful than Sartre’s, since Sartre can only appeal to our recollections of possibly similar experiences when he expresses himself in words.

One of the techniques Antonioni used was to shoot much of the film in which Giuliana's perspective is in focus with very long (in focal length) lenses. This created a very short depth of field that results in several psychological effects. For one thing it is closer to our actual visual perception, since only a small part of what we take in in a glance is in focus. Moreover the objects that are seen out of focus tend to lose the specific functionality that we usually associate with them. When objects are seen out of focus, their outlines fuzzy and their colors blending in with color of neighboring objects, they begin to lose their conventional identities and become abstract entities. In the previously mentioned interview with Godard, Antonioni commented on the relation of Red Desert to his previous films,

“It is a less realistic film, from a figurative point of view. That is to say, it is realistic in a different way. For example, I used the telescopic lens a great deal in order not to have a deep focus, which is for good reason an indispensable element of realism. What interests me now is to place the character in contact with things, for it is things, objects, and materials that have weight today.” [9]

Thus it is not surprising that Red Desert lacks depth in its presentation of interpersonal relationships. What are significant are Giuliana’s relationship with and awareness of things – even the faces of actors like Richard Harris are deliberately muted and de-emphasized in relation to the surroundings.

Another technique Antonioni used to represent the altered consciousness was his manipulation of color. This is the most celebrated aspect of the film, but critics err when they assume that Antonioni was trying to create dynamic colorist painting. As he himself says:

“There is, in this film, no pictorial research at all; we are far from painting, it seems to me. . . . Moreover, I had never thought about color in itself. The film was born in colors, but I always thought, first of all, of the thing to be said – this is natural – and thus aided the expression by means of the color. I never thought: I’m going to put a blue next to a maroon.” [10]

The use of color was specifically intended to enhance the perceptual awareness of things. The bright, pure colors serve to detach things from their conventional environment and create new, abstract relationships with other unrelated colored objects.

Perhaps the most significant of Antonioni’s techniques was his treatment of screen kinetics. This effect necessitates on the part of the viewer a continuous struggle to orient himself with respect to the depicted environment. Elliptical action and oblique camera angles are employed not to emphasize dramatic moments but as a continuous condition of perceptual reality. An illustrative scene is the visit of Corrado and Giuliana to the radar installation [11]. A long row of skeletal radio telescope towers is the primary background material, and the viewer is continuously forced to orient the camera position and the characters with respect to his knowledge of the tower geometry. During the visit several important changes of position by the characters are omitted by Antonioni. Thus the struggle with orientation with respect to these huge, abstract edifices is forced upon the viewer, bringing him in greater sympathy with Giuliana’s struggling awareness of things. In addition Antonioni frequently uses slow disclosure by beginning a scene with a detail of an object. In almost every case the object is not seen for what it normally is, but as a quasi-abstract form. When asked by Godard about this practice, Antonioni explained that

“It’s a way of approaching the character in terms of things rather than by means of her life. Her life, basically interests me only relatively.” [12]

This is an extremely revealing statement, for it emphasizes the difference between Antonioni’s approach and the typically essentialist approach of a psychoanalyst. A psychoanalyst would be interested in nothing but her life – except that it would be considered in terms of conceptual events. The uniqueness of her perceptual awareness would be overlooked, and it is precisely this with which Antonioni is concerned.

I have so far only mentioned the visual stylistics with which Antonioni expressed himself, but of course the characters reveal themselves by what they say as well. Ugo, Giuliana’s husband, is a kindly person, but is also the ultimate technician. As such he can be thought of as purely essentialist. A characteristic moment for him is when he shows his son the spinning yellow toy. As an explanation of the toy’s behaviour, Ugo explains that it has a gyroscope in it, the same kind things used to steer ships. This is an utterly reductionist statement, reducing things to concepts. Though the statement is correct, one feels annoyed, given the context within the film, with the complacent disregard for existence implicit in the statement. Immediately afterwards, there is a cut to a large ship, and the visual impact of it seems to bring out the poverty of Ugo’s description. Giuliana, as already stated, is extremely sensitive to and feels threatened by the existence of the concrete other, just as Roquentin did in Nausea. She tells a Turkish sailor, “if you prick me, you don’t suffer,” thereby trying to convey her feeling of separateness and isolation. At another point she says to Corrado,

“The sea is never still. I can’t look at the sea for long and not lose interest in what happens on land.”

The sea is for her not a symbol or metaphor but an ever-changing, impossible to pin down “thing”. For her it is analogous to the chestnut tree root that brings on the “nausea”, since its uncategorizable nature thrusts its existence upon Giuliana’s consciousness.

Giuliana’s story that she tells her son is further elaboration of her psyche. The entire scene is shot in bright Hollywood style "technicolor”, the depth of field is increased to that of typical films, and the screen kinetics are completely straightforward. The viewer has to do none of the struggling with reality that is necessary in the other scenes; one feels very comfortable with the environment depicted. This scene acts to convey Giuliana’s romantic yearnings for her formerly naive, untroubled consciousness that was at home in the world. All the colors belong to nature, they seem to belong, as opposed to Giuliana’s real life where colors seem to force themselves on one’s awareness. Rocks are seen not as brute existences, but in terms of human forms. The world has an existence for her – it even sings to her. But this feeling of oneness with the world is only fable; it is not possible in her real existence.

The character of Corrado is somewhat problematical. He appears discontented with his existence and feels a sympathy for Giuliana’s problems. At one point he says to her,

“You wonder what to look at, and I wonder where to live. It’s the same thing.”

In fact it’s not the same thing at all. Giuliana’s sensitivity is more developed than his. Corrado is primarily an essentialist who feels that by sufficient manipulation of the external world of objects he can eventually find fulfillment. He wishes to have adventures, like his expedition to Patagonia, hoping that change of his external environment will bring about satisfaction. Giuliana contrasts her own feelings with his when she tells him, “If I were to leave, I’d take everything.” That is to say, the few things with which she has managed to feel somewhat comfortable (as opposed to the great mass of objects by which she feels threatened) are indispensable. She must cling to them as a means of protection. Corrado, the essentialist, living in a world devoid of content is constantly looking for the external stimulus. Giuliana, on the other hand lives in a world too full of existence. She would like somehow to demystify and humanize her surroundings.

In the final scene Giuliana tells her son that birds survive by learning not to go near the poison waste gas of the plant. In other words she is resolving to be like everybody else. While this may be the advisable course for someone who is on the brink of insanity, the larger questions concerning the inadequacy of our conventional thought patterns to deal with existence are left unanswered. Is the lesson we are to learn from Roquentin and Giuliana that to see beyond the veil leads to madness? Perhaps so, as long as madness is defined in terms of the conventional thought patterns. At any rate the extraordinary thing about Red Desert is that it deals with profound aspects of existence in an immediate fashion. It concerns the phenomenology of perception and expresses itself by means of perception. The gestalt psychologist Rudolph Arnheim has made studies to show that all thinking is structurally similar to visual perception, and “truly productive thinking in whatever area of cognition takes place in the realm of imagery” [13]. If this is true, then Red Desert may be a more direct and unadulterated presentation of existential ideas of Sartre than that philosopher’s own writing was.

Notes:

1. Kauffman, S., A World on Film, Dell (1966), p. 407.
2. Simon, J., Private Screenings, Berkeley (1967), p. 177.
3. Macdonald, D., On Movies, Berkeley (19600, PP. 375-376.
4. Sarris, A., (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors, Avon (1967), p. 23.
5. Kierkegaard, S., The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, Oxford (1938), p. 147.
6. I have taken the pains to specify what I mean by “existentialist”, since casual usage has undermined its meaning.
7. In fact Heidegger came to despair of the possibility of conventional language to express the ultimate nature of existence and turned his attention to poetry as a possible avenue. Perhaps he might have profitably considered the film medium.
8. Sartre, J.-P., Nausea, New Directions (1964), pp. 168-181.
9. Sarris, A., op. cit., pp. 28-29.
10. Ibid., p. 30.
11. "The Visit to the Radar Station in Red Desert", The Film Sufi (2010), http://www.filmsufi.com/2010/09/visit-to-radar-installation-in-red.html.
12. Ibid., p. 28.
13. Arnheim, R., Visual Thinking, U. of California (1969), p. v.

The Visit to the Radar Installation in “Red Desert”

The scene in Red Desert [1, 2] in which Corrado and Giuliana visit the radio telescope installation is an excellent example of the unique manner in which Michelangelo Antonioni laid out the geography in this film. By the use of oblique camera angles and elliptical action, Antonioni achieves a disorienting effect that causes the viewer to struggle constantly with the reality presented. In this way the radar structures become determining factors throughout the scene, since the viewer must constantly orient himself with respect to them. As the scene progresses, these structures, along with a striking black house in the background, take on the character of active participants. The overall effect of the kinetics is thus to establish viewer empathy towards Giuliana’s psychological dislocation.

Just prior to this scene, Corrado and Giuliana have visited the apartment of a man that Corrado is interested in interviewing as a possible employee. They go on in the present scene to seek him out at his place of work – the radar installation.

Shot 1 (355 frames)
Corrado and Giuliana enter the frame from the right in extreme long shot. A sign post about human height occupies a balanced position on the left side of the screen. The camera pans to the left so that the sign and the two characters remain in balance as they walk towards the center of the frame. Before the characters pass the sign, a man appears from the left of the frame and walks to the right, having just passed in front of a black house in the distance. The camera accelerates its panning rate at this point to reestablish a balanced frame. The sign post is now in the middle of the frame, with Corrado and Giuliana still on the right and the house along with the man who has come to greet them on the left. With the house balancing the composition on the left, the camera ends its pan as the couple reach the sign and stop. The man walking from the left finally reaches the two characters, where they apparently converse. Giuliana then walks to the left of the screen, away from the two men talking, until she passes in front of the black house in the distance.

Shot 2 (279 frames)
Cut to a closer shot of Giuliana (in long shot now) in front of the black house, which now dominates the background. As she begins to pass the house, moving screen left, Corrado enters from the right of the frame. They both continue their movement to the left, until first Giuliana walks out of frame, and then Corrado. The house remains alone for several seconds.

Shot 3 (145 frames)
Cut to a reestablishing view of Shot 1 (extreme long shot again). The house is now on the right, and a row of metal towers dominate the left of the screen. We are to learn in Shot 14 that these towers are radar telescope antennae – until that point, and thus for most of this scene, these towers remain unexplained, abstract structures. These structures, it should

be pointed out, are asymmetrical, that is, they arc somewhat to the right, and the row that we

see stretches far into the distance. Corrado and Giuliana continue their movement to the left and toward the row of towers.

Shot 4 (223 frames)
Cut to a low-angle shot of the upper part of one of the radar towers. Because of its curvature to the left of the screen, it indicates that the camera position is now on the other side of the radar installation from that of Shot 3 (refer to Topographical Chart A -- see the end of this article for an overview of the topographical charts). The camera then tilts downward to show the black house seen before in the distance on the left side of the frame. Giuliana enters the frame on the right in medium shot in front of the tower. Once again the frame is in perfect balance: the base of the structure is in center midground, Giuliana is in the right foreground, and the house is at frame left in the background.

Shot 5 (355 frames)
Cut to Giuliana seen from a new angle (see Topographical Chart A) though she is still on the extreme right side of the frame. This is a high-angle shot with most of the frame occupied by the lattice-like structure of the tower support, which is in the foreground and in blurred focus. The angle of view plus the visual clash between the red tower structure and the green grass behind it make Giuliana look small and insignificant. On the extreme right of the frame, Corrado is partially visible (and it is possible that he may have been entirely visible in the original 35 mm print version).

Shot 6 (175 frames)
Cut to a medium long shot of Corrado and Giuliana walking along parallel to the radar towers, Giuliana on the left and Corrado on the right. The camera tracks backward slowly following their movement. The radar towers in the background again serve as the orientational reference. As the couple walk, moving somewhat to the left, Corrado pears ahead and says:

“There he is.”

Shot 7 (139 frames)
A man is seen walking from right to left in medium long shot, the camera panning with his movement. The radar towers in the background serve as the only reference in which to locate this man. In other words, by using our knowledge of where Corrado and Giuliana are and the direction in which Corrado is looking in combination with our knowledge of the structure of the individual radar towers seen in previous shots, plus our assumption that they are all identical, we are intuitively able to figure out where this man is located. Thus, like Shot 4, the choice of camera angle forces the viewer to relate to the radar tower structures and causes the tower structures to be almost active participants in the scene. It is to be inferred that the man seen in this shot is the man whose house Giuliana and Corrado had visited in the scene immediately preceding the present one and that he is the one in whom Corrado is interested as a possible employee.

Shot 8 (495 frames)
The towers are now on the extreme right side of the screen, as the man who was seen in Shot 7 (who shall be referred to as “the worker”) comes directly towards the camera. Corrado is in the foreground on the left side of the screen, with the worker walking down a path filling the space on the right. Corrado glances briefly over his shoulder, and the camera dollies backward to take in Giuliana, such that she appears in the frame in medium close-up on the right. The worker, who has been walking forward from long shot, continues forward until he passes out of frame on the right. However, Giuliana’s presence on the right maintains a compositional balance with Corrado, i.e. Giuliana appears on the right of the frame at about the time that the worker passes out of the frame, so that, in effect, Giuliana replaces the worker as the right-side compositional element. When the worker passes out of the frame, both Corrado and Giuliana turn and stare forward and to the right of the screen to where the worker is apparently positioned. The couple briefly exchange glances, then continue to look out of frame until the worker reenters the screen from the right. At this point, Giuliana asks the worker:

“How are you? All right?”

The final composition of this shot has Corrado in the left background, Giuliana at midground center- right, and the worker on the right foreground.

Shot 9 (117 frames)
Cut to a reverse-angle shot. Corrado, however, has been moved considerably to his right from the preceding shot to enable the familiar black house to be included in the background of this shot. Thus Corrado is in the foreground in medium shot on the right; Giuliana and the worker are in long shot in the center; and the black house is in the distance on the left. These three elements form a straight line from right foreground to left background. Since the worker and Giuliana are in a conversation that continues from Shot 8, they form the principal axis for these two shots, and the angle of Shot 9 does not constitute a crossing of the axis. During this shot the worker says to Giuliana:

“I’m all right, and you?”

Shot 10 (216 frames)
Cut to a frontal medium closeup of Giuliana. She answers:

“I’m fine, too.”

She nods to her right (referring to Corrado) and says:

“He came to see you.”

Giuliana has been turned in this shot to enable the camera to include the radar tower structures in the background. Had she not been moved, the background would have been the same as in Shot 8 – looking down the pathway that runs parallel to the radar towers.

Shot 11 (198 frames)
Cut back to the same view as Shot 9. Giuliana moves to the right, down the pathway, and the worker comes forward towards Corrado. Giuliana is now walking in the opposite direction along the path from that which she and Corrado had taken in Shot 6. The worker’s movement restores the straight line formation that had existed in Shot 9, running from Corrado to the black house. The worker turns his head backward, looking in Giuliana’s direction (Giuliana is still in the frame before the cut to Shot 12).

Shot 12 (259 frames)
Giuliana is in a frontal long shot seen

through the radar tower support structure and is partially obscured by it. Due to the short depth of field, the tower girders form fuzzy red lines crisscrossing the frame. This is high-angle shot similar to Shot 5 (see Topographical Chart B). Giuliana looks straight upward and says:

“Tell me, please, . . .”

Shot 13 (642 frames)
Cut to a low-angle shot of a radar structure not hitherto seen. A man working on the structure and somewhat encaged in its girders is seen moving slightly to the left, and the camera pans to the left following the architecture of the structure. Then the camera tilts downward to reveal Giuliana in extreme long shot looking up at the man. In the background Corrado and other worker are seen conversing. The initial view and the subsequent pan are a slow disclosure and the viewer might well struggle to determine where he is in reference to the main characters before Giuliana comes into view. In particular, Giuliana’s question and glance upward in Shot 12 might possibly prepare the viewer for a low-angle shot of what she is looking at from roughly her position for Shot 13. The initial low-angle view of Shot 13 partially fulfils this expectation, but the curvature of the radar towers indicates that the camera is on the opposite side from Giuliana of the structure first seen in this shot and that the camera is in fact in the position indicated on the Topographical Chart B. Thus the viewer again orients himself with respect to the asymmetrical geometry of the radar antennae.

When the camera tilts downward to take in Giuliana, she is heard to say:

“Who owns these things?”

The man she is addressing is now no longer in view, but he answers:

“The University of Bologna.”

Giuliana asks:

“Aren’t you scared?”

The man says:

“I’m used to it.”

Giuliana asks again:

“What’s it for?”

Shot 14 (216 frames)
Cut to the man in the radar structure seen in a low-angle long shot. This time the view is from Giuliana’s side of the arching structure. The asymmetry of this arching structure enables one to locate himself here, too. The conversation between the man and Giuliana is still in progress with the man answering:

“To listen to the stars.”

Giuliana, who is not present in the shot, is then heard to ask:

“May I listen?”

The man answers:

“You’d have to climb up.”

Shot 15 (384 frames)
Cut to Giuliana seen from the rear in medium shot, with the radar structure (which she is facing) behind her. In the distant background is seen the familiar black house. Corrado enters the screen from the left side in medium closeup, again forming a diagonal composition. Giuliana turns around to face Corrado. They have the following exchange:

Corrado: “You knew him?”

Giuliana: “I just met him.”

Corrado: “No, the other one.”

Giuliana: “He was a neighbor. Did he accept?"

“Corrado: “Nothing doing.”

Corrado then walks rightward in front of Giuliana.

Shot 16 (202 frames)
Just as Corrado passes in front of Giuliana in Shot 15, the action cuts to a medium closeup on the same camera axis as Shot 15. Corrado, continuing his last remarks, says,

“. . . unless I dazzle him with money.”

He passes out of the frame on the right, leaving Giuliana smiling after him in the center. The black house is behind her on the right, and some radar metalwork is visible on the left behind her. She turns around, waves to the man she had been talking to, and departs screen right. This is a telephoto shot, and it causes the black house to loom massively in the background, having an effect not unlike that of the ocean-going ships seen at other times in the film. After Giuliana departs the frame on the right, the camera lingers on the black house for a moment.

Topographical Charts
The Topographical charts presented here are a schematic representation of all the camera positions for this scene. Chart A depicts the positions for the first six shots, and Chart B for the subsequent ten shots. We have attempted here not to produce a scale drawing, but merely to construct the geometry of the entire scene and locate the relative positions of the camera with respect to the basic elements within that geometry. The camera position for each shot is depicted by an encircled number, and the arrows indicate in what direction the camera was pointed. For simplicity of presentation, we have given the positions as if a single focal-length lens was used for the scene, which was not the case. Thus Shots 2 and 16 were almost certainly telephoto shots taken from the same positions as the respective preceding shots, but the camera position has been advanced forward on the chart to indicate that the image was enlarged. The movement of Giuliana, Corrado, and the interviewed worker is depicted by the lines with arrows in the charts – the dashed line portions of which represent movement that is not presented in the scene, but which must have taken place for purposes of continuity. It should be noted that the dashed line movement that Antonioni chose not to relate in this scene is precisely that which would enable the viewer, were that material present in the film, to simply locate all the action. Instead, the viewer must continually reorient himself with respect to the geometry of the radar towers and the black house. Thus the continuity of physical existence is broken down and fragmented here in much the same way as that which presumably exists in Giuliana’s mind.

Notes:

1. Red Desert, http://www.filmsufi.com/2010/09/red-desert-michelangelo-antonioni-1964.html.
2. Phenomenology and Red Desert, http://www.filmsufi.com/2010/09/phenomenology-and-red-desert.html.
3. Mike Ceraso contributed to this article.

Cinematic Expression in "L’Avventura"

The mark of an outstanding creative work is its accessibility to multiple critical points of view. Such is the case of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which has been generally recognized as one of the most important films of the 60's, but has not generated a consensus of opinion as to its interpretation. This is not to say that the various critical interpretations contradict each other so much as that they seem to emphasize different ideas with regard to what is central and what is peripheral to the film’s meaning.

There is no question that the film seems to mean something, even if it is the meaninglessness of human existence. For though the film concerns primarily the relationship between Sandro and Claudia, the departure from conventional narrative style and the suggestiveness of the visual imagery convey a notion of larger significance. Generally critical opinion has fallen into several main categories concerning L’Avventura’s ultimate theme:

1. that it is an attack on the depravity and uselessness of the upper middle class in Italy,
2. that it is a condemnation of the obsolete moral values and ethical ideals of the bourgeoisie,
3. that it is an examination of the impossibility of human communication or love in the present age, and
4. that it is an investigation into the changing, and perhaps inverting, roles of men and women in modern society.

Obviously these categories are somewhat arbitrary and far from mutually independent, but they will serve for the present purpose. Thematic categories (1) and (2) focus on a social context and seem to draw on the knowledge that Antonioni had a Marxist background. (3) is concerned more with the individual, while (4) exists on the level of social psychology. My own feeling is that the third position comes closest to being the central issue, with the second and fourth being inferences to be drawn from it. However the first position is less closely connected with Antonioni’s expressed intent in view of the following passage quoted from Hollis Alpert:

"The film has been interpreted as a study of corruption among members of a certain group of upper-class Italians. I questioned Antonioni on this, and found that this was not his purpose. 'The people were members of the upper class,' he said, 'because I did not want to explain how they make their living, or why it is that have so much time to do the things they do.'” [1]

At any rate what is most in terest5ing about L’Avventura is the cinematic means with which Antonioni conveys his notions. He is able to convey in purely visual terms some rather abstract ideas about human relationship, and he does so with a succinctness and directness that goes beyond the powers of verbal expression. The principal psychological effect which Antonioni achieves cinematically and around which he is able to build his structure is alienation. I mean this not in the Marxist sense (a source of possible confusion) but in the existential sense. By the appropriate use of sound, pacing, and visual arrangements, Antonioni is able to get across to the viewer an idea which, though fundamental to human consciousness, was not conspicuously present in the film idiom – that a person’s consciousness is continually shifting back and forth between a state of direct involvement with one’s surroundings and a state of self-conscious reflection. The awareness of self and its concomitant reification of the external world has been felt by many to be one of the central problems of 20th century philosophy. For the objectification of external reality enables us to conceptualize and manipulate it, but at the same time the world is devitalized, and we are left alone, isolated, alienated. The state of alienation h as enabled Western man to build the modern world, but it has also left him with a feeling of not being at home in it – he has fallen from grace. Thus it is constant transitions between I-THOU and I-IT relationships, as it were, that figure fundamentally in Antonioni’s mode of expression.

Naturally, the state of alienation is inimical to that of love. Alienation brings along with it greater power of analysis and thus capacity for action. Opposed to this freedom wrought by alienation is the desire to free oneself of responsibility – the desire to merge one’s consciousness and being with that of another human being. This desire to lose one’s identity and merge with another person is not necessarily romantic love, which is a fairly complex and historical idea. For some people it may just be the erotic impulse. But whatever is the true nature of love, it is affected significantly and momentarily in an individual by his relative state of alienation.

Now the first and foremost question concerning a transition in or out of a psychological state of alienation is, what makes it happen? How does it happen who makes it happen? To answer that question necessitates revealing the extent to which one is a mechanical determinist, but there can scarcely be any question that the initial stimuli for such psychological states of mind occur as external events. Thus the surroundings in which one finds oneself can have, as we all have experienced, profound effects on one’s consciousness. Antonioni has take this idea as a starting point for the making of his films. He says that

“in general, I decide upon the outdoor locations before writing the script. . . . There are times too when an idea for a film comes to me from a particular place.” [2]

Thus the arrangement of the environment in an Antonioni films has a direct effect on the action and is not merely a metaphorical reflection of it. Throughout L’Avventura there are landscapes which seem to dominate the individual characters. First there is the barren volcanic island, Lisca Bianca, which sets the stage for Anna’s original disappearance, and by virtues of its harsh conditions, forces Claudia and Sandro to come closer together. Next Claudia and Sandro find themselves alone in a deserted village. The vicious environment of the island has given way to a state of environmental passivity and timelessness. At another point Sandro, wandering through the grand piazza of Noto, looks at the baroque architecture of the bell tower and is reminded of his betrayal of his youthful ideals about architecture. He deliberately knocks over a bottle of ink on a young man’s architectural drawing of the tower, causing a black swath to spread across the drawing. During the ensuing altercation, Sandro looks up to see black row of seminarians filing out of the bell tower. In the final scene, with Claudia’s illusion of love crushed by Sandro’s infidelity, the background to the two principles consists of a church ruins and Mount Aetna in the distance. While these environment can be viewed symbolically, it seems that the composition was intended to engender in the viewer an intuitive feeling for the psychological nuances taking placed within the characters.

Besides linear composition Antonioni effectively uses sound throughout L’Avventura to convey shifts in emotion. Two of the most striking examples are

• after a difficult night in a hut on th e island, Claudia and Sandro strike up a conversation the becomes progressively more oriented around themselves, when the harsh sound of a motorboat jolts them back to the realization that Anna’s fate remains unresolved, and
• after their initial encounter of love-making a train whistle is heard bringing them (us) out of their mutual absorption, back into a world of self-awareness.

The most common Antonioni effect is the most difficult to describe. This is the pacing of the length of various shots so that the camera continues to run, after the significant action of the shot has been completed. Our forced observations of the frame drains it of its emotional content and we “pull out” of the shot, so to speak. It should be mentioned that this self-awareness induced in the viewer at these moments introduces an element of boredom. This film would be ultimately boring if we were not subsequently reinvolved in the scenes. As it is, we are frequently forced during the film (as the director consciously intends), and yet the film itself it not boring. The most celebrated use of th is kind of technique occurs in the final sequence of L’Eclisse (Eclipse), wherein the lovers’ meeting place is shown from vari8ous angles and at a various times of the day for the last seven minutes of the film. L’Eclisse also contains perhaps Antonioni’s most explicit depiction of the psychological shift in and out of alienation with the stock market panic scenes.

All of the above effects are used with great subtlety by Antonioni and go into the making of a rich and fascinating motion picture. Especially effective is the continued presence, though progressively less forceful, of the consciousness of Anna long after she has disappeared from the screen. In the end on is left with the feeling that the inevitable transitory nature of love is bound up with the transitory nature of all our thoughts and feelings, that the feeling of loves comes and goes may times during that day, and that, however one may with otherwise, such is what we must accept.

Notes:

1. Hollis Alpert, The Dreams and the Dreamers, Macmillan, 1962, pp. 189-190.
2. Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Avventura, Grove Press, 1969, p. 237.

The Seduction of Florence in Chabrol’s ""Les Cousins"

“. . . And also by Gégauff are one or two little things such as the scene where they talk about the erotic quality of their skin. The whole story depends on this, he would say: it’s a story about skin texture.”

– Claude Chabrol

“Chabrol has been able to pass with masterly skill from the theoretical beauty of a script by Paul Gégauff to its practical beauty – in other words, its mise en scene.”

– Jean-Luc Godard

The scene in Les Cousins (1959) referred to in the above quote by Claude Chabrol is the subject of the present analysis. This is the critical, disturbing scene that elevates the film to a nightmare and remains in the viewer’s memory. It begins innocently enough. The morning after a wild, orgiastic party, Paul’s cousin, Charles, arranges for a date with Florence, whom he had met the night before, to take place after his afternoon class is over. Florence mistakenly arrives at the apartment of Paul and Charles two hours too early, and the ensuing seduction of Florence is the essential event of this scene in the apartment.

In terms of film language, the scene is shot in a provocative fashion. It is nine-and-one-half minutes of continuous action – primarily a rhetorical conversation between Florence and first Paul and then Clovis, which takes place in a single room. Despite these elements which suggest stasis, the scene is propelled by Chabrol’s prowling camera which seems to trap the characters in fatalistic courses of action. It is as if the characters can walk anywhere but are condemned to confinement within the invisible cage of Chabrol’s fluid framing. The scene that follows takes place immediately after the telephone conversation between Florence and Charles.

Introductory Note:
The fourteen schematic floor plans included in this analysis provide a means to follow the character movements within the scene. The camera positions are denoted by encircled numbers with arrows, e.g.and give the direction of the camera angle at the beginning of the shot. Any tracks, pans, or tilts that take place subsequently are not shown on the diagrams but are described in the text. The camera position is given only to suggest the direction in which the particular shot was taken, not to show the exact physical location of the camera during shooting.

The individual characters are indicated by the capital letters of their first names. Thus “C” stands for Clovis. Character movements within the shot are denoted by solid lines, and movement that takes place off camera is indicated by dashed lines. Where several shots are shown on the same diagram (for example, floorplan 8), the mark,
is used to consign the movements to the separate shots.

Shot 1 (698 frames)
Paul is seen from profile in closeup, on the inside of his opened apartment door.

PAUL: “But he’s gone to class, Flo.”

The camera pulls back and pans to the left to form a two shot of Florence and Paul at the door. Florence is at the left side of the frame

FLORENCE: “He said we’d go together at three.”

PAUL” “You’re in a fog. He said five. Come have a drink.”

Florence shakes her head to decline the offer.

PAUL: “Come on. You’ve two hours to kill.”

Florence looks up at Paul and then moves screen right, passing in front of Paul and through the doorway into the apartment. With her movement the camera pans slightly to the right until Paul is in the center of the frame in medium closeup. After she exits the frame on the right, Paul is seen following her with his eyes, establishing a separation.

Shot 2 (94 frames)
Florence is seen in medium long shot moving to sit down in a rocking chair inside the apartment. She looks forward and to the left of the frame, returning Paul’s glance from shot 1.

Shot 3 (142 frames)
Paul is seen from the same position as he was at the end of shot 1, still looking at Florence. He then exits in the direction of his gaze (screen right). This return to Paul in shot 3 reinforces the initial separation and sets the tone for the rest of the scene.

Shot 4 (704 frames)
Florence is in her chair, viewed from the same angle as in shot 2. Florence’s eyes are following Paul, and the separation is resolved as Paul enters the frame from screen left, passes in front of Florence and goes to a table to the right of her chair where he picks up a drink. As Paul passes in front of Florence, the camera begins to pan rightward, following his movement, and tilts upward in order to frame Paul in medium shot. When Paul reaches the table, Florence is no longer visible in the frame, and a new separation is formed.

PAUL: “Tell me, kitten, what’s with you and Charles?”

Paul moves to the left and leans down to hand Florence (who is not seen) a mixed drink.

PAUL: “Playing a new game?”

FLORENCE: “Just playing.”

Paul walks away from her to another table in front of the wall where the guns are mounted. The camera has followed this movement, which is forward and to the right. Paul begins to prepare another drink and turns back toward Florence.

PAUL: “Such refreshing frankness. And what do you get out of it?”

The camera pans leftward back to Florence in her chair.

FLORENCE: “ A strange pleasure.”

She then looks forward and to the right, offscreen, at Paul.

Shot 5 (1636 frames)
Paul is seen in medium closeup, returning towards Florence.

PAUL: “With Charles? Impossible.”

He kneels down and the camera pans and tilts downward to form a two-shot with Florence. Florence is in the chair, and Paul is to the right of her in a squatting position. This resolves the separation begun in the middle of shot 2.

PAUL: “A great guy – honest – I’m mad about him. But . . . . well, you know what he’s like."

He looks at her and then continues.

PAUL: “I’m not getting through. And you look so bright. I can see you two at art exhibits – but once in bet. . . “

FLORENCE: “You’re not bright. With him I don’t think about that.”

PAUL: “What else is there?”

FLORENCE: “There are other things.”

The camera now begins moving forward, closing up the frame.

FLORENCE: “I want to be in love with him.”

PAUL: “Okay – let’s start with that. How old are you?”

Paul stand up and exits to the right of the frame. As he does so, the camera pans leftward to center the frame on Florence.

FLORENCE: “Twenty.”

Shot 6 (3636 frames)
Paul is in closeup, looking down and to the left (towards the still-seated Florence, who is offscreen.

PAUL: “So you’re in love with him.”

He turns to his left and begins walking away from Florence. The camera follows his movement (to the right), keeping him in closeup.

PAUL: “And, of course, he adores you. So what happens? You play house.”

Paul turns back to look at Florence.

PAUL: “He works like a dog. He’s that type.”

Paul now begins to walk back towards Florence (to the left), and the camera follows.

PAUL: “For two weeks you tidy up the place. Or someone else does the work, while you lie in bed and read books. . . “

Paul turns three-quarters of the way around and points at Florence as he continues with his argument.

PAUL: “ . . . . that he picks.”

Paul begins to walk away from Florence again.

PAUL: “Saturday night – movies. Sunday – I visit – invite you both for a drink.”

Paul again turns back toward Florence.

PAUL: “He’s too busy, and you won’t leave him. But I know you.”

Paul beings walking back towards Florence’s chair.

PAUL: “You’ll act like a sainted martyr. And I’ll die laughing.”

As he approaches Florence, the camera continues its motion until it reaches Florence in the chair. When Florence is centered in the frame, the camera moves in.

PAUL [offscreen]: “Wait. I forgot Mama. What’ll she say?”

Paul leans down and into the frame to form a two-shot. The camera pulls back at this point, and the composition is maintained by Paul’s straightening up and stepping slightly forward (so that the two characters continue to fill the frame).

PAUL: “He won’t dare write her, because he can’t lie.”

Paul again walks away from Florence’s chair.

PAUL: “What’ve we got? A good boy.”

The camera pans and zooms in so that P:aul is in medium closeup when he turns toward Florence.

PAUL: “Now let’s be practical, Florence.”

Paul begins walking back to her again.

PAUL: “He’s good looking. He’s not a simpleton. He’s quite smart.”

Paul kneels down beside her chair again to from another two-shot – Florence left and Paul right. That is, the camera follows Paul as he kneels down until Florence appears in the frame on the left.

PAUL: “He has a noble character. But you each speak a different language.”

The camera zooms in as Paul stand up and exits the frame. Florence is now seen in closeup

PAUL [offscreen]: “You’d both be miserable.”

Paul’s hand now appears in the frame and rips Florence’s head.

PAUL [offscreen]: “And you’d cheat.”

A doorbell is heard offscreen, and there is a continuity cut to shot 7.

Shot 6, which is over two-and-a-half minutes long, contains what amount to hidden cuts which break up the action. First Paul is seen in closeup, which begins a separation. He walks away from Florence until he is standing so that the apartment door can be seen in the background. When he walks back to Florence, the camera follows but not quite as closely, and Paul eventually is seen in medium shot. Then the camera pans to Florence (hidden cut) and then pulls back to form the first two-shot (another hidden cut). This sequence is more or less duplicated as Paul walks away again, comes back, and then approaches the chair to from the two-shot followed by the closeup of Florence. Thus there are six “quasi-shots” within shot 6.

Shot 7 (391 frames)
The doorbells is ringing, and Paul and Florence are seen from the position of the apartment entrance in long shot and looking toward the camera. Paul walks forward and exits screen left. Florence gets up and takes off her dress coat. She lays it across the couch.

CLOVIS: “I’m staved.”

Clovis and Paul enter the frame in medium closeup, Clovis from the left and Paul from the right, their backs to the camera as they walk toward Florence. Clovis is wearing a hat. He puts his arm around Paul just after he enters the frame.

CLOVIS: “Ah, best of pals. . . . “

As they walk towards Florence, she sits down, and the camera pans slightly to the left so that Florence is still visible on the right, and the two men are on the left of the frame.

Shot 8 (679 frames)
Action cut to Clovis and Paul seen approaching Florence from the front. Florence is closer up and to the right, seated in her rocking chair.

PAUL [looking at Florence but speaking to Clovis]: “She came up to see Charles.”

CLOVIS [drinking out of Paul’s drink]: “Whatever for?”

(Clovis had already known of the meeting with Charles, since he had seen Florence when she had made the appointment by telephone.)

PAUL [still approaching]: “She’s in love with him.”

CLOVIS: “Impossible! It can’t be true.”

Clovis removes his hat and approaches Florence’s chair. Paul turns and walks away, along the path he had taken for shot 6. Clovis and Paul are now separated and the orientation of the characters begin to get complicated at this point. Up until now, the scene has only involved two units – Florence, usually seated, and either Paul or Clovis-and-Paul (as a single unit) walking about her. From here on Chabrol must keep track of the three separate characters.

CLOVIS: “You can’t be serious. You two?! You’d be bored to death. In three days . . . [he spreads his arms out.]

Paul comes ack up to Clovis and grabs his arm.

PAUL: “I told her.” [he comes forward].

Florence, in medium closeup on the right side of the frame, has been learning forward in her seat. By leaning backward, she now exits the frame on the right just as Paul moves forward. Thus the three-shot transposes itself to a two-shot, with Paul on the right and Clovis on the left.

Shot 9 (43 frames)
A medium closeup of Florence looking forward and to the left of the frame. The separation is between Florence and the two men.

FLORENCE: “You don’t unders- . . . “

Shot 10 (174 frames)
A medium closeup shot of Clovis and Paul. Clovis on the left is leaning down and looking in profile to the right at Florence (who is offscreen to the right). Paul, who is standing straight up and is slightly behind Clovis, is on the right of the frame and is visible on between the neck and the waits.

PAUL: “There we go!”

Paul turns and walks out of the frame to the left.

CLOVIS [leaning towards Florence]: “The stupidity of it sickens me.”

Clovis walks to the right of the frame. Then he turns a round and looks down and to the left, indicating that he has passed in front of Florence. Florence is not seen in this shot at all, because the camera passes above her.

Shot 11 (78 frames)
Florence is seen in closeup, looking left in profile. This angle is from Clovis’s point of view.

CLOVIS [offscreen]: “The Can’t-Say-No Girl wants Choir-boy . . “

Shot 12 (56 frames)
The same view as in shot 10.

CLOVIS” “. . . . Presto! – she’s a virgin.”

Clovis begins to move left again. Notice the fact that since the entrance of Clovis, the length of each shot is much shorter. This reflects the change in mood that Clovis’s entrance has created, as well as the altered situation of having to establish the positions of three people in the room instead of two.

Shot 13 (145 frames)
The camera maintains a closeup of Florence while its angle changes. The camera is physically moving from right to left, and, since Florence’s eyes move with the camera so that they are always looking into the camera, we assume that this shot represents the point of view of Clovis (as did shot 11). This implied movement of Clovis enables Chabrol to execute a reverse shot in shot 14, since a new action axis can be established after shot 13.

CLOVIS [offscreen]: “Even I find that immoral.”

Shot 14 (200 frames)
Clovis is now seen in a medium shot looking down and to the right. He leans in the direction of his look and the camera pans and tilts in that direction, until Florence is brought into the frame to form a two-shot.

CLOVIS: “Don’t fool the boy. You can’t change. Sleep with him or drop him.”

Clovis stands up again, and the camera pans down to from a medium shot of just Florence.

FLORENCE: “Filthy swine!”

Florence is looking at Clovis, who is apparently walking away. This shot begins with Clovis in separation, moves into a two-shot, and finally ends with Florence in separation.

Shot 15 (826 frames)
A medium closeup of Clovis on the left and Paul in the background on the right. This reestablishment of Paul’s position indicates that he had walks only a little way after shot 10. Clovis sets his drink down on a table and turns back to Florence.

CLOVIS: “We adore you, . . . our own dear little Florence . . “

Clovis walks toward her (to the right), and the camera pans with him until Paul is no longer visible.

CLOVIS: “We’re only thinking of you.”

When Clovis utters this line, he turns and looks back in the direction of Paul. Then he turns back to Florence and kneels down next to her (Clovis is facing screen right).

CLOVIS: “Enjoy a few nights with him.”

The camera pans over to the right to form a two-shot of Clovis and Florence

CLOVIS: “Don’t confuse things by marrying him first.”

FLORENCE: “I might like that.”

CLOVIS: “And that would be very bad.”

Clovis’s simple movements in shots 14 and 15 maintain a dynamism to the visuals of the scene as well as create separations and resolutions thereof in an inconspicuous fashion.

Shot 16 (479 frames)
An action cut to a closeup (might tighter than shot 15) of Florence straight on.

CLOVIS [offscreen]: “Can you make him happy?”

The camera pulls back to take in Clovis, who is still at screen left. The camera also pans slightly to the left.

CLOVIS: “Touch your flesh. I’m an expert on flesh. Believe me. I’m an expert with a perfect score."

The camera pans down to her right arm.

CLOVIS: “Yours is so warm and alive.”

Clovis touches her arm.

Shot 17 (301 frames)
An action cut as Florence moves her arm away. The two are seen in medium shot.

CLOVIS: “Feel how it trembles. It reveals what you are, kitten.”

The camera itself moves to the right while maintaining the two-shot, so that the shot begins over Clovis’s shoulder and ends over Florence’s shoulder.

CLOVIS: “You were born to be fondled – not kept under glass.”

The camera is now looking more directly into Clovis’s face. The camera pans leftward now as Clovis turns and looks back in the direction of Paul.

Shot 18 (74 frames)
Paul is seen in medium shot. He is seen not to have moved from his position that he held in shot 15.

PAUL: “He makes good sense.”

Paul is looking forward and to the right of the frame. It is interesting to notice that the separation between Florence and Paul has only been linked by Clovis since his entrance.

Shot 19 (293 frames)
The same angle as at the end of shot 17.

CLOVIS: ‘She’ll listen to me. You will, won’t you, Florence?”

Florence turns away from him, towards the camera, but her look is downward.

FLORENCE: ‘Two hours . . . .”

CLOVIS: “Plenty of time . . . for what I want to prove.”

Shot 20 (835 frames)
Action cut to a reverse of the previous shot. This reversed position lasts only for a moment, for Clovis stand and walks in front of the seated Florence. Clovis quickly passes o ut of the frame on the right, revealing the seated girl, whose eyes follow the offscreen movement of Clovis until he reappears again on the right of the screen, but not at Florence’s left side (he had previously been on Florence’s right side). Clovis again leans down next to Florence.

CLOVIS: “Admit that, when you touch Charles, something terrific should happen. Be honest. What do you feel when you touch Charles?”

Florence looks at him but doesn’t answer.

CLOVIS: “Now you know how wrong you’ve been about this.”

Clovis looks down at her arms.

CLOVIS: “Here . . . touch me.”

Florence turns away.

CLOVIS: “No? . . . Then, Paul.”

Clovis looks up at Paul (forward and to the left of the frame.)

Shot 21 (70 frames)
A medium closeup of Paul looking at the two of them with a trouble expression.

Shot 22 (1258 frames)
A medium long shot of Clovis (right) and Florence (left), viewed from approximately the position of Paul. Clovis stands up and comes toward Paul (not yet seen), i.e. comes toward the camera. The camera follows his movement by panning right a bit.

CLOVIS: “What are you afraid of? Let her touch you, Paul.”

Paul enters on the left side of the frame in medium closeup and walks, or rather is led by Clovis, up to in front of Florence’s chair. Clovis bids Florence to stand up and holds her left hand. She removes her hand from his grasp, but he reaches for her right hand and places it on Paul’s neck. Paul and Florence are now standing in front of each other and staring into each other’s eyes. The camera begins to zoom in on them. Clovis is visible behind them and is now in closeup.

CLOVIS: “Well, how do you like it? The feel of such hidden strength . . . of flesh calling to flesh.”

Paul and Florence lean forward and kiss. Clovis turns and walks away from them (directly away from the camera). This shot finally resolves this scene’s separation between Florence and Paul, which had existed since the entrance of Clovis.

Shot 23 (186 frames)
A medium shot of Clovis still waking away from camera. He turns around and faces the camera. This shot is taken from the point of view of the couple, although they are presumably engaged with each other and not looking at Clovis

CLOVIS: “Yes, Florence, it will be Paul who’ll save you from Charles!”

Clovis takes a step forward, and his eyes shift slightly to the left and right, denoting the respective positions of the unseen lovers. This is the final and most striking use of facial glances to identify offscreen character position in the scene.

Shot 24 (300 frames)
A reverse closeup of Paul and Florence kissing ardently. This shot is taken more or less from Clovis’s position.

Shot 25 (272 frames)
Clovis is seen from the rear in medium shot. Behind him (that is, in the background of the shot) Paul and Florence exist screen left, walking arm in arm. Clovis watches them and walks forward and to the right to pick up a drink on a table. The camera pans slightly to follow him. Although the cut from shot 24 to shot 25 is presumed to be of continuous action, there is actually a break in the continuity between these two shots. Florence is now to the left of Paul at the beginning of this shot (she was on the right in shot 24), and the two of them have moved toward the door. Since, at the beginning of this shot, Paul and Florence are partially obscured behind Clovis, this break in continuity is not particularly noticeable.

This ends the scene.