“Wait for the Birth of the Husband” - Zheng Hua (2008)

The Hakka people (aka Hakka Han), a Han Chinese ethnic group primarily in southern China, have long had a peculiar tradition of marrying young girls into families who do not yet have a suitable bridegroom for the girl. The Hakka “bride” must await the future birth of her “groom”, and then further await the maturation of the boy, before the couple can finally have a truly connubial relationship. When the boy is finally of age, the girl is no longer young. Zheng Hua’s Wait for the Birth of the Husband, tells the fictional story of one such girl who went through this experience. At moments during the film, a folk song is heard on the soundtrack with the following sad lament:

An 18-year-old bride has a 3-year-old bridegroom
Thinking of this, she can’t help feeling distressed at midnight
She would be old when he is grown up,
Like a flower in blossom when the leaves turn yellow.

Wait for the Birth of the Husband has not yet been widely seen in the West, but it did secure an award for the veteran director Zheng Hua at the 2008 Monte-Carlo Television Festival and may perhaps receive the wider exposure that it deserves in the future. The film features excellent color cinematography, with the adroit use of short focal-length compositions. In addition, the acting performances are first-rate, particularly those of Yuan Zhibo (as the mature Runyue) and Dong Ping (as the well-meaning, but conservative, Taohua). The film is partly shot inside the confines of a traditional Hakka walled village, whose interesting architecture supplies a picturesque backdrop for the drama that unfolds. Although Wait for the Birth of the Husband could be viewed as simply a dramatic depiction of colorful, but curious, customs of the past, we also expect, given the Chinese restrictions concerning artistic commentary on society, that there may be metaphorical overtones in the film concerning larger themes of present-day concern.

The story begins during the 1920s, with ten-year-old Runyue traveling with her peasant father to another village where her future in-laws reside. It is evident that Runyue has no idea what is going on, since she promises her brother upon departing that she will play with him later that day. Upon arrival at the destined Hakka walled village, Runyue learns that she now belongs to another family, almost as a chattel, and must serve as a housemaid to her future mother-in-law, Taohua, who is currently pregnant. Runyue soon meets another, similarly-aged “waiting-for-the-birth-of-the-husband” (this phrase in Chinese is presumably more economically expressed and not quite so awkward) girl, A Ju, who becomes her best friend.

It soon becomes quite evident to the Western viewer that women in this society are very much undervalued and underprivileged. The principal value and virtue of a woman is to produce male offspring, and that is the obsession of the pregnant Taohua, who is a recent widow and concerned that her family line will die out without a male heir. She sees her unborn child is the last chance for salvation.. If, on the other hand, the child Taohua delivers turns out to be a girl, Runyue’s fate is quite uncertain. Fortunately for Runyue, Taohua does deliver a boy, named Sihuan, and the first crisis of the story is overcome. As it turns out, however, Runyue’s friend, A Ju, is not so lucky and must wait many years before her “betrothed” enters the world.

Time passes, and as Sihuan grows, Runyue looks after him almost like a mother, giving the boy baths and tending to his needs. The action now shifts ahead to when Sihuan is fifteen-years-old – he has reached a mature height, but he is still a child and not yet a man. Even so, Runyue is now twenty-six and impatiently starting to look at her “fiancé” as something more than a boy or a little brother.

But without having a real man around to help with the plowing, daily life is hard for Taohua and Runyue, so they are persuaded to hire an almost-deaf war veteran, Chunsheng, to assist with the farming and daily chores. While Sihuan is just a scrawny teenager, Chunsheng is a geneial, strapping, and capable young man more Runyue’s age. Thus the stage is set for the next crisis: the growing attraction between Chunsheng and Runyue. Though both Chunsheng and Runyue are shy and obedient, Taohua fears something might happen and rushes to schedule an early marriage ceremony for Runyue and Sihuan so that the traditional customs can be fulfilled before a scandal arises.

The traditional marriage ceremony is performed, but Sihuan, having lived with his “sister” all his life, has difficulty seeing Runyue as an alluring bedmate and is unable to consummate the marriage. Runyue is disappointed, but advised by Taohua to be patient. However, since the Japanese War is now raging, Sihuan abruptly decides to run away to Nanjing in order to escape being impressed into the army. Not long afterewards the news arrives that Sihuan has apparently passed away due to a fever, which renders Runyue a widow. Taohua is crushed to learn that her last chance for a male heir to her family line is gone, but after awhile she regains herself and comes up with an idea that could bring contentment all around. She goes to a village elder and inquires whether it would be possible for Runyue to wed Chunsheng, and for them to have their first male child designated with her own family name, Wang. This would provide Taohua with the sought-for continuation of her family line, and it would bring happiness to Chunsheng and Runyue. Amazingly, the village elder readily agrees to this arrangement! It seems that though the social rules and customs may be absolutely rigid for women, they can easily be bent by the male village elders whenever they see fit.

At this point things look very promising for the long-suffering Runyue and Chunsheng, but there will be a final twist of fate that dashes all their dreams. The ironic closing shots of the film bring us full circle and tie this tale of the past to the present day.

Throughout Wait for the Birth of the Husband, there are no malevolent characters. Runyue, A Ju, Taohua, Sihuan, and Chunsheng are all essentially well-meaning and innocent. They don’t complain; they struggle to play by the rules; and they learn to love and care for one another. But they live in a social prison, from which there is no escape. This prison is not material poverty, but the rules and customs imposed upon them by other people. The rules are rigid, unreasonable, and severely prejudicial against women. It is this human institution that is malevolent. In a suffocating society that denies individuality and privacy, Taohua, Runyue, and A Ju are unable to appeal to higher values or to see outside these repressive confines. Chunsheng, however, is different; he is the outlier, the symbol of authentic good will. His deafness is a metaphor for a person who is partly outside the scope of this restrictive, gossip-driven society. He is less affected by the “inauthentic otherness of the ‘they’”, as a Heideggerian might put it. His responses are not dictated by the rules, but arise from and follow the heart. Unfortunately, neither he nor Runyue is able to overcome the man-made restrictions imposed upon them. And so it is in today’s world, as well.
★★★

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.

“Red Desert” - Michelangelo Antonioni (1964)

Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964) was writer-director Michelangelo Antonioni’s first film in color and came directly after his celebrated trilogy of alienation, L’Avventura (The Adventure, 1960), La Notte (The Night, 1961), and L’Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962). Although the color cinematography marked a new direction in Antonioni’s visual aesthetics, the film’s thematic issues represented a continuation, and even a culmination, of those covered in the preceding trilogy. As I already remarked in connection with the preceding three films, the underlying themes in those films projected a progressive pessimism concerning the possibilities of authentic human love. L’Avventura examined the ephemerality of love; La Notte resigned itself to the inevitable breakdown of the long-term (marital) romantic narrative; while L’Eclisse pondered the modern-day difficulties of even starting an authentic loving relationship. Red Desert digs even deeper still into these issues by presenting a protagonist who feels cut off from authentic connection with everything in the world. Admittedly, this protagonist is psychologically disturbed, but her character is eerily comprehensible and metaphorically represents a psychological malaise that underlies our modernist culture. These issues are explored in more detail in my essay, “Phenomenology and Red Desert” [1].

The narrative flow in most of Antonioni’s films is somewhat problematical, because clear-cut goals or targets are hard to identify, and when they do appear, they are are sometimes misleading. Often the story moves in a circle, with the protagonist’s desires remaining unfulfilled and frustrations unresolved. But at the same time there has been inner journey undertaken, and by the end of the film, the protagonist has often arrived at a new understanding of the compromised world in which he or she (usually it’s a woman) must live. So it is with Red Desert.

Despite all these pessimistic observations and equivocations, let there be no mistake: Red Desert is an outstanding film, perhaps Antonioni’s best. Antonioni has explored new visual techniques here for the revelation of the inner moods and feelings of psychological narrative. Much of what is conveyed is not only not presented in verbal terms, but almost outside the scope of verbal expression. Antonioni achieves this expression not only by his use of color, but also by his comprehensive use of composition, editing, character movements, and camera techniques.

The plot (i.e. the syuzhet) of Red Desert is all about the main character, Giuliana, and passes through five stages as it follows her struggles to come to grips with her disturbed psychological condition. Her problem is that she feels isolated, cut off, from everything in the world – she feels an acute sense of separation that makes her feel disoriented and desperate for engagement. Though each of the narrative stages of “acts” may offer Giuliana some temporary relief, they conclude with a return to isolation and greater despair.

1. Giuliana’s Situation (17 minutes)
The opening section shows Giuliana (Monica Vitti) escorting her young son of about five years of age, Valerio, on foot towards the petrochemical plant that is managed by her husband, Ugo. Immediately the viewer sees that there is something wrong with Giuliana, as she nervously and impulsively purchases a half-eaten sandwich from one of the workers eating lunch outside the plant. Throughout this section the viewer is presented with unexplained shots of (to us) bizarre industrial structures and debris. It all looks grotesque and inhuman to the ordinary viewer – a representation of brute, inexplicable processes that seemingly are outside the scope of normal human activity.

We are then introduced to the plant manager, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), who is conversing with a visitor, Corrado (Richard Harris), who seeks to recruit some workers for some sort of industrial operation in far-way Patagonia, Argentina. Both Ugo and Corrado are comfortable in the noisy surroundings of the factory – they are modernists, at home in the engineered world of Western civilization. In their conversation Ugo tells Corrado that his wife, Giuliana, had a recent auto accident, and though she was physically unhurt, she has not been right mentally since then. Later, at home in their apartment, Giuliana is seen to be highly agitated and fearful, and Ugo is unable to soothe her.

2. Giuliana and Corrado (19 minutes)
Corrado meets Giuliana and is attracted to her. He visits her in an empty shop that she intends to open up, and they talk. Later she joins him on one of his worker recruitment excursions to a nearby city, and she indirectly reveals to him a few things about her mental state. She mentions that when she was in the hospital, she met a fellow patient (a made-up externalization about her own condition) who was advised by her doctors to go find someone or something to love – a husband, or a son, or a job, or a dog, or a tree, or a river, “but not husband, son, job, god, tree, river, . . .”

They then go to a radar installation facility, where a worker Corrado wants to recruit is located, and again the industrial architecture provides something of a metaphor for Giuliana’s alienated state. This section and the cinematography employed by Antonioni to convey these effects is further discussed in more detail in the article, "The Visit to the Radar Installation in Red Desert” [2].

3. Comfort with the Group (31 minutes)
Corrado and Giuliana join Ugo along a polluted estuary where they intend to have a party with another couple in a small riverside shack belonging to the company. As Corrado and Giuliana get to know each other more, Corrado shows interest and sympathy for Giuliana. He likens himself to her, since he, too, does not feel “at home” in the world. But his alienation is only partial and not as radical as Giuliana’s. It’s summarized in his offhand comment, “you wonder what to look at; I wonder where to live.”

When the others join them in the small shack, they are all confined into a tiny room, where they engage in trifling small talk. It is a scene filled with wise-cracks, role-playing, and sexual innuendo, but Giuliana seems to take comfort in the distractions that the group provides – her sense of isolation is temporarily abated. But when a medical doctor visits a ship docked near the shack, Giuliana flees in panic, breaking up the party

4. Giuliana More Isolated (25 minutes).
After Ugo leaves on a five-day business trip, Giuliana spends more time with Corrado and reveals more about her inner anxieties. When she returns home, she is alarmed to discover that her son has apparently become suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. Giuliana feels powerless, but tries to soothe him with a story that she invents. It is about a young girl who lives on an island and swims off a beach at an isolated cove. The girl is perfectly at home with her surroundings, but after a silent approach by a mysterious offshore sailing ship, all the rocks of the cove seem to come alive and sing to her in one voice.

Shortly after her story, Giuliana discovers to her shock that Valerio was only pretending to be paralyzed; and her inability to imagine why he would torture her with such a stunt brings back her sense of loneliness and isolation with a vengeance.

5. Giuliana Seeks Help (23 minutes)
Getting desperate to end her isolation, Giuliana rushes to Corrado’s apartment. Corrado succumbs to his masculine instincts and tries to force his affections on her, which the exhausted Giuliana initially tries to resist. Eventually Corrado makes love to her, but it doesn’t help. They part the next day, and the distraught Giuliana wanders to a dockside ship and self-reflectively airs her troubles to a foreign sailor, who can’t understand a word she says. “We are all separate,” she complains; “if you prick me, you don’t suffer.” She seems to be completely alone and at her lowest state.

But in the next, and final, scene, perhaps some time has passed. She is again walking with Valerio near her husband’s plant. When Valerio spies a smokestack emitting poisonous smoke, he wonders if the birds who fly near it will sicken and die. Giuliana advises him that the birds learn not to fly over there. These words indicate that her psychological depression and sense of isolation has not been cured, but she is learning how guide her mind away from those thoughts. She is trying to to cope and live in this world as best she can.

In this film Giuliana authentically faces the full horror of existential doubt, and our modernist culture offers her no solace or comfort to alleviate her anguish. Corrado is half-way to understanding her situation. Even though he is a man of action, an engineer who is comfortable in the modernist scheme, he feels some sympathy towards her and shares the feeling of being lost and that there is something missing in his life. But he doesn’t fully understand the depth of her anxiety, and his amatory advances are not what she needs.

Throughout Red Desert Antonioni uses cinematic techniques to align the “silent witness” (the viewer) with the way Giuliana engages the world. This is accomplished in various ways. For example whenever Giuliana is shown in a mentally distressed state, she is isolated from others by being the only person in the frame. This subjective isolation extends to her surroundings by having her photographed with a telephoto lens having a relatively short depth-of-field, which leaves only her in focus and everything else in a blurred, difficult-to-recognize state. Even in these situations, though, whenever the frame does include other people, the depth-of-field is greater, with much of the field in focus – hence the scene is presented as more “objective”. In the blurred world of isolation, one is frighteningly powerless; whereas in the more in-focus, objective, world, a person can take action and is more comfortable. In other words, when Giuliana is distressed, she is powerless, and her “world” has less affordance. This affordance contrast is accentuated with respect to Corrado, who is often shot with a wide-angle lens, which suggests that he is inhabiting a “world” that particularly affords wide movement and action. These contrasts of isolation and affordance are particularly evident in the brief scene in which Giuliana and Corrado visit the radar installation [2].

A further visual evocation of psychological state is accomplished in connection with the camera angles and editing. In the scenes in which Corrado and Giuliana are together, there are often jarring edits, where the camera angle is only slightly changed between two shots. This has a somewhat disorienting effect on the viewer and is ordinarily avoided by professional filmmakers, but here the cuts contribute to the feeling of Giuliana’s agitated state. By contrast in the dockside shack scene, where the confined multi-person camera setups would have been more difficult, the editing is more fluid, which accords with Giuliana’s more comfortable state, where she is surrounded by friends. In fact the two sequences in the film that have a more conventional cinematic look to them – the shack scene and Giuliana’s story of the girl in the cove – are the two sections that present Giuliana in a more “normal” (i.e. comfortable) state. In the shack scene she is comfortable, because her wished-for “wall of friends” distract and protect her from the brute reality of the world outside. In Giuliana’s story (about the girl in the cove) scene, she is describing an imagined ideal world where she can be one with all of reality.

Note that in general the worlds that Antonioni’s men and women live in have characteristic differences. The men live in worlds in which they construct their own narratives (or perhaps we could say that they play their own self-constructed games). On the other hand Antonioni’s women are more passive and tend to be seeking a given, stable world (not a self-constructed one) – a world in which they can have stable relationships. This is reflected in Red Desert in the “shack” episode in Act 3, where the other two women in the party seem to be somewhat passive pawns of the game-playing undertaken by the men [3]. Moreover, Giuliana’s story about the girl in the cove also presents a fantasized and now unattainable stable world.

Overall, Red Desert offers Antonioni’s most disturbing vision of the psychological inadequacies, and ultimately the impasse, that our Western modernist culture has left us in. It reveals a cultural neurosis that we still haven’t come to terms with, but to which other existentialist and Sufi artists have also pointed. Antonioni seems to have worked intuitively, rather than from a logical or analytical framework, and this is what makes the film original and profound. When we, the viewers, watch the film, we share and participate in the direct psychological vision of the artist – all unmediated by the mechanical artifices of the written word. This is the essence of artistic co-creation, and Antonioni’s achieved it in Red Desert by exploring new forms cinematic expression.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Phenomenology and Red Desert, The Film Sufi, 2010.
2. "The Visit to the Radar Installation in Red Desert", The Film Sufi, 2010.
3. This is even taken to the point of their accepting the men’s versions of reality. When one of the women in the “shack” scene says she heard a cry from outside of the shack (also heard by Giuliana), the men insist that she couldn’t have heard such a cry. To the consternation of Giuliana, this woman then acquiesces to the mens’ story and concedes that she didn’t hear anything.

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.

"L’Eclisse" - Michelangelo Antonioni (1962)

L’Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962) was Michelangelo Antonioni’s final installment of what is sometimes said to be his trilogy of alienation, which included L’Avventura (The Adventure, 1960) and La Notte (The Night, 1961). Rather than alienation, though, one might find the common theme to be a pessimistic meditation on the possibility of romantic love in our modern civilization. And with each film in the trilogy, the scope of hopelessness seems progressively more gloomy. L’Avventura examined the ephemerality and inconstancy of love. La Notte looked at how the inevitable breakdown of the romantic narrative makes long-term love in marriage unsustainable. L’Eclisse finally closes the theme with a discouraging look at how difficult it is to begin an authentic loving relationship in the modern age.

In each of the three films, Antonioni defied narrative film conventions by dispensing with a typical story and focussing on the inner turmoil of the principal characters. And in each film the narrative resolution of the relationship conflicts is highly ambiguous – there is no denouement to speak of. But perhaps of the three films, L’Eclisse is the most uncompromising with respect to narrative development. The other two films have some external events that, temporarily at least, seem to drive the action. But L’Eclisse zeroes in on the possibilities, or impossibilities, of love without much stimulus from external events at all. It seems to be a morose reflection on a relationship that has no hope of really coming to fruition. As such the film is alternatively admired or loathed by audiences, depending on their sensitivities to Antonioni’s aesthetics.

The narrative can be structured into about seven sections, though the last three sections are relatively continuous and one could partition them somewhat differently. The overall pace of the film through this narrative is very leisurely, and the principal relationship thread, that between Vittoria and Piero, doesn’t begin until more than halfway through the film.

1. The Breakup with Riccardo (17 minutes)
As with L’Avventura and La Note, L’Eclisse opens with a focus on a character who initiates and seeds the principal issue and then disappears from the rest of the story. In this case that character is Riccardo, the fiancé of Vittoria (Monica Vitti), who is in the process of breaking up with him. Riccardo is a handsome, educated, wealthy, and civilized man who is distraught that Vittoria wants to end their engagement. Almost deadened with a sense of loss, Riccardo appeals to her that he always “wanted to make her happy”. But in the all-night “argument” into which the film initially breaks in on, Vittoria gently, but adamantly, swears that she no longer loves him and has to move on. This opening sequence establishes Vittoria as the romantic seeker who is looking for something ultimately fulfilling out of a romantic relationship.

2. Stock Exchange 1 – the “Bubble” (8 minutes)
Vittoria goes to visit her mother, who is at the stock exchange in Rome and engaged in trading. The market is in the middle of a financial surge, and the hectic trading of the brokers on the exchange floor is an effective metaphorical showcase for what Antonioni presumably perceives as a root cause of romantic alienation: modernism and its economic corollary, capitalism. Later in the film, Vittoria will remark, when asked what she thinks of the stock market, “I still can’t figure out if it’s an office, a market, or a boxing ring.” To highlight the frenetic trading madness, Antonioni portrays the stock exchange traders collectively halting and observing a minute of silence for a recently deceased stockbroker – and the film actually does hold on this moment for a full minute of screen time. The second afterwards, though, the floor erupts again in a frenzy of shouted stock bidding and offering. The tonal and temporal contrast between contemplative, meaningful personal (i.e. authentic) interactions and hurried, distracted inauthentic interactions driven by common culture is something that will pervade the film.

3. Girlfriends (18 minutes)
Vittoria returns to her apartment, and later in the evening a married friend, Anita, shows up. Vittoria, commenting on her breakup with Riccardo, says, “there are times when holding a needle and thread, or a book, . . . or a man – it’s all the same.” They visit another girlfriend recently returned from Kenya, Marta, and the three women engage in girl talk. Fascinated with African exoticism, Vittoria has fun role-playing as an African tribal dancer in front of her friends. But there is also a sense of emptiness in these encounters, a feeling that is effectively enhanced by a shot of Vittoria walking back to her apartment and being distracted by the wind-driven rattling of flag-pole ropes along her walk.

Later, Vittoria takes a ride in a small plane with Anita and her husband. Then she walks about the airfield and stops for a drink at an airport bistro. Vittoria is relaxed and observant of all the new sites and sounds. This reflects a recurrent theme of Antonioni’s: the principal woman is highly observant of the contextual world around her, in contrast with the principal man, who is driven by his own internal plans and narratives, irrespective of his surroundings. It seems to be suggested that these plans and structured personal narratives are cutting us off from connectivity with our natural surroundings, including the people around us.

4. Stock Exchange 2 – the “Crash” (20 minutes)
The story returns to the stock exchange, and the focalization is on Piero, a young stockbroker already seen in the first stock exchange sequence. The market is now in a panic, and the stockbrokers are even more hectic in their struggle to avoid catastrophic losses for their investors. But it is the investors who are taking the risks, not so much the stockbrokers. Vittoria shows up looking for her mother, who is in the process of losing 10 million lire (roughly US$ 16,000 in 1962 and over $ 100,000 now) on the day. Vittoria learns of an older man who has just personally lost 50 million lire, and out of concern for him, she follows him out of the exchange and into a piazza.

At 67 minutes into the film, Vittoria finally meets up with the stockbroker Piero, who will become her new love interest in the story.

5. Vittoria and Piero 1 – First Encounters (15 minutes)
In a series of relatively brief incidents, we learn more about Piero and the budding relationship between Vittoria and Piero

• Piero accompanies Vittoria out of the stock exchange, looking for Vittoria’s mother, whose apartment they visit. Piero tries to kiss Vittoria, but she turns away.
• Back at his stock exchange office, where Piero has a junior position as a trader, he is seen to be cocky and arrogant – scornfully dismissing and shooing out of his office personal clients who have just lost their life savings in the crash. Piero then goes out on a date with a pretty brunette, whom he abuses with cocksure arrogance.
• Piero drives over to Vittoria’s apartment and from the street entreats her at her window to let him come up. With Piero standing outside on the sidewalk, a passing drunk steals his car.

6. Vittoria and Piero 2 – Developing Relationship (30 minutes)

• The next day Vittoria comes to see Piero’s car being dredged up from the river, where it had crashed the night before, killing the drunk. Vittoria is troubled about the death, but Piero is crassly only concerned about scratches on his car. Then they begin walking down the street and flirting. When they near a street corner, Piero asserts, “when we get there, I’m going to kiss you.” They kiss, but when Piero presses his affections, Vittoria demurs.
• Back at their respective apartments, Vittoria uncertainly calls Piero’s number, but when she hesitates to speak, Piero impatiently yells into the phone and hangs up.
• The next day they meet at the corner where they kissed, and they decide to go to Piero’s luxurious apartment. When Piero asks Vittoria what she had done the night before, she says, “why do you ask so many questions? Two people shouldn’t know each other too well if they want to fall in love.”

Their romance develops over the next few days as they engage in more embraces in the park and on a couch in Piero’s office. Vittoria is coquettish and encouraging, but at the same time tentative: at one point Vittoria says to Piero, “I wish I didn’t love you . . . Or that I loved you much more.” They agree to meet that night at 8pm at the “usual place” – the street corner where they had their first kiss. Vittoria leaves the office and goes out onto the street. This is the last we see of Vittoria and Piero in the film.

7. Coda (8 minutes)
The much commented-upon ending to L’Eclisse is something of a coda or epilogue to the work. This section comprises image sequences without dialogue of all the familiar street locations that were important to the evolving relationship of Vittoria and Piero, but without those two principal characters. Occasionally a person is seen from behind who superficially looks like Piero or Vittoria, but who turns out on inspection not to be. As the sequences unwind, time passes: afternoon passes to twilight, and finally to night, as the streets become empty. We see the street corner of their appointed date, but neither Vittoria nor Piero appears. Either those two characters have lost interest in each other, or the film has lost interest in them and pulled back from their focus. Now we see people on the street holding newspapers with headlines about the “nuclear arms race” – issues of global concern but beyond the local horizons of most meaningful interactive contexts. The images finally become more abstract and inhuman at the close, with the final shot focussing on a glaring street light near the corner of the missed appointment.

Although L’Eclisse was perhaps Antonioni’s most uncompromising (to popular film conventions) work, by this time his prestige was so great that the film was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival Palm D’Or. What makes the film interesting is the mood it creates of absence and loneliness. This is highlighted in the last sequence (the “Coda”). The absence of the main characters dominates our perception of that sequence. They are missed, and the activities on the street, without them, seem to be empty and without vitality or meaning. This is the “eclipse”, the original meaning of which term stems from “fail to appear”. Antonioni seems to be morosely suggesting that modern culture has led to an eclipse of the possibilities of love and meaningful interaction. At one point Piero tells the sceptical Vittoria that the financial activities of the stock market get to be a passion once you get to know it. But Vittoria says, “a passions for what, Piero?” To her, as presumably to Antonioni, it is meaningless.

Related to this eclipse of meaningfulness is the decontextualizing of narrative, in general, a subject that I discussed in connection with La Notte. Like Lidia, in La Notte, Vittoria here is always open to new events and appearances that come into view. She is open to the vitality of the external world. But, like Lidia, she lacks a meaningful narrative in this world. The ones offered to her by Riccardo and Piero are ultimately empty to her; they are not really what she is looking for. Throughout the film, Vittoria lapses into artificial play-acting – both with her girlfriends and with Piero. The play-acting is so forced and unnatural that I originally attributed it simply to poor acting on the part of Monica Vitti. But on reflection, it seems to me that this artificiality in her role-playing is what Antonioni wanted to portray. She is trying out roles, such as being a native African dancer with Marta or being a coquette with Piero, but this role-playing lacks substance or meaning – they are not sustainable in a longer narrative that would satisfy her. Thus she found her role with Riccardo was empty and directionless, and any meaningful role in a narrative with Piero would presumably be hopeless, too.

Piero is comfortable in his little roles defined by modernist society, but they are shallow. Although he is generally friendly and not devious, Piero is narcissistic (he is unconcerned about the death of the drunk), arrogant (he abusively breaks up with his old girlfriend), and superficial (mostly concerned about his car). When Vittoria discovers a vulgar pen in his office, she begins to realize that, despite his handsome features, Piero offers no long-term romantic happiness for her.

So with L’Eclisse Antonioni has delivered his most depressing portrayal of the possibilities of romantic love in our modernist, alienating, and dualistic world. The problematic focus has moved from fickleness (L’Avventura), to unsustainability (La Notte), to here in L’Eclisse the seeming impossibility of true love in the first place. But let us not be too pessimistic. Love is not a complete mirage, a fata morgana. We, like Vittoria and Antonioni, sense that it is real, and we must keep looking. It is both out there and within.
★★★½