Michelangelo Antonioni

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“He Is An Artist Who Creates His Mystic And Original Work”

September 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Michelangelo Antonioni was great at many things, but he never filmed sex or dance convincingly. Why was that? Self-consciousness? Guilt? In 1970, at the time of his remarkably infamous film, Zabriskie Point, the director was given the cover treatment by Look. An excerpt from the article:

“When Blow-Up became a money-maker in the U.S., Antonioni had a prompt invitation from MGM to do a film here. Partly because of Antonioni’s temperamental reputation, MGM officials kept their distance. He went to the Chicago convention (where he was Maced), SDS meetings and the Free Church at Berkeley, arousing suspicions in some vigilant quarters that he might be going to emphasize the trouble spots of America. MGM still claims it doesn’t know what Zabriskie Point, an expensive production, is all about.

Antonioni worked on his script with two young American writers, Sam Shepard and Fred Gardner. No one was permitted to discuss the ever-changing plot (‘political events go by too fast for the cinema to keep up’). His company never knew where they would work the following day. Press agents and crew members, unused to his impromptu methods, were fired.

‘Our relationship was purely platonic,’ Mark Frechette says of the director, because Antonioni (politely embarrassed by Mark’s ardor for a ‘spiritual revolution’) never discussed with him the character he was playing, although he spent hours with Daria [Halprin]. Rangers at Death Valley National Monument clashed with hippie members of the Open Theatre during filming of a love-in. College militants didn’t trust Antonioni and suspected he was exploiting them.

So it went. No matter what he did, Antonioni provoked resentment. His maverick methods hark back to the times of I-am-the-boss directors D. W. Griffith and Josef von Sternberg. He is an artist who creates his mystic and original work in absolute control of what he wants, and to hell with busybodies and gossips who don’t understand. Long before this point in his career, he had been bruised by censorship of church and state in Europe. A tense man with a nervous facial tic, Antonioni has become superstitious, suspicious and easily hurt.

Within the shell of his absorption in his work, he is genuinely surprised that some people don’t ‘like’ him. He ‘likes’ Americans and is amused at himself for thinking them a much happier people than he expected. At his return to Rome, he announced that his fellow Italians were unbelievably provincial compared to Americans and were still vainly arguing problems that Americans had resolved 50 years ago.

‘America has changed me,’ he says. ‘I am now a much less private person, more open, prepared to say more. I have even changed my view of sexual love. In my other films, I looked upon sex as a disease of love. I learned here that sex is only a part of love; to be open and understanding of each other, as the girls and boys of today are, is the important part. But it is not fair to ask questions of me before I put my picture together. The responsibility is mine. It is me in front of the camera saying what I feel about my America.'”

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“There Are Many Ways Of Communicating”

December 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Michelangelo Antonioni was still three years from the U.S. release of his “hippie film,” Zabriskie Point, when he sat for a Playboy Interview in 1967. But unsurprisingly, discussion got around to American hippies, a subject that always fascinated him. He suggested that young people were trying to slip out from under old masks, using new ways of communicating, hoping to become more honest. But more than four decades later, we seem to be covering up as much as ever in our information-rich, interconnected world, in what’s supposed to be a time of great transparency. We may be hiding behind an icon rather than a mask, but the artifice remains. We never really lose the blueprint to reconstruct that wall. An excerpt:

“Playboy:

Some people over 30 seem to feel that today’s youth is a lost generation, withdrawn not only from commitment but, in the case of the hippies, from reality. Do you disagree?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

I don’t think they’re lost at all. I’m not a sociologist nor a psychologist, but it seems to me they are seeking a new way to be happy. They are committed, but in a different way–and the right way, I think. The American hippies, for example, are against the war in Vietnam and against Johnson–but they combat the warmongers with love and peace. They demonstrate against police by embracing them and throwing flowers. How can you club a girl who comes to give you a kiss? That, too, is a form of protest. In California’s ‘loving parties,’ there is an atmosphere of absolute calm, tranquility. That, too, is a form of protest, a way of being committed. It shows that violence is not the only means of persuasion. It’s a complicated subject–more so than it seems–and I can’t handle it, because I don’t know the hippies well enough.

Playboy:

Sometimes that tranquility you spoke of is induced by hallucinogenic drugs. Does the use of such drugs alarm you?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

No, some people have negative reactions or can’t stand hallucinations, but others stand them extremely well. One of the problems of the future world will be the use of leisure time. How will it be filled up? Maybe drugs will distributed free of charge by the government.

Playboy:

You’ve always emphasized both the importance and the difficulty of communication between people in your films. But doesn’t the psychedelic experience tend to make people withdraw into an inner-directed mysticism, even drop out of society altogether? And doesn’t this tend to destroy communication?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

There are many ways of communicating. Some hold the theory that new forms of communication between people can be obtained through hallucinogenic drugs.

Playboy:

Would you want to try some yourself?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

You can’t go to an LSD or pot party unless you take it yourself. If I want to go. I must take drugs myself.

Playboy:

Have you?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

That’s my business. But to show you the new mentality: I visited St Mark’s in Venice with a young woman who smokes pot, as do most young people in her environment. When we were above the gilded mosaics–St. Mark’s is small and intimate–she exclaimed, ‘How I’d like to smoke here!’ You see how new that reaction is? We don’t even suspect it. There was nothing profane in her desire to smoke; she merely wanted to make her aesthetic emotions more intense. She wanted to make her pleasure giant-size before the beauty of St. Mark’s.

Playboy:

Does this mean that you believe that the old means of communicating have become masks, as you seem to suggest in your films, that obscure communication?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

I think they become masks yes.”

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“There Are New Ways To Represent Reality…There Are New Technologies”

May 9, 2012 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Michelangelo Antonioni, in 1982, thinking about a “future with no end,” knowing that film–and everything else–would soon change greatly. The rise of the machines and the fall of communism altered the landscape, as movies became more non-verbal for a truly global, multilingual market.

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Classic DVD: The Passenger (1975)

February 11, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Maria Schneider died one week ago at age 58. No cause of death was announced.

An existential thriller set in languid deserts and brisk airports, Michelangelo Antonioni’s drama quietly and gradually stalks the truth, right down to its pitch-perfect, remarkably understated conclusion, which is one of the most analyzed scenes in film history. An afterthought when it was released, The Passenger is now rightly recognized as one of the masterworks of the ’70s.

Journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) finds himself deep in the Sahara desert wrapping up a documentary about a revolution whose horrors he can barely begin to fathom. Complicating matters are his own personal demons, which seem equally inscrutable. All Locke knows is that he wants out of his life, that he desires to throw away the baggage of all that he’s become. The reporter gets the opportunity when an acquaintance named Robertson, who is staying at the same dusty, no-star hotel, dies suddenly, presumably from a heart attack. Their ages and faces are similar, so Locke switches places; he’s the one who is announced as deceased and he’s reborn as Robertson.

But a second act can be tricky and not just because it soon becomes clear that Robertson was dealing arms to a band of rebels. While Locke knows he has no way of fulfilling his end of the munitions contract, which could imperil his life, he has another problem: Freedom from his old self makes Locke realize that angst and anxiety weren’t particular to just him. He dutifully follows Robertson’s agenda book and is diverted, if briefly, in Munich where the erstwhile journalist meets an architecture history student (Maria Schneider) who’s willing to impetuously go along with him on his road to nowhere.

Pursued from city to city by an ever-growing cabal of people who want to meet the mysterious Robertson, Locke, who had hoped to become nothingness, instead has only multiplied his being. In one scene, Locke’s automobile breaks down in the middle of the desert and he screams furiously at the universe, “Alriiiight!” signaling his defeat. As if the outcome was ever in doubt.•

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“I Want To Conquer The World For Mel. I Get So Mad At That World Out There I Want To Kill.”

February 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mel Lyman, jug band player with a Christ complex, died of unknown causes in 1978.

I recently came across “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America,” David Felton’s excellent 1971 exposé of Mel Lyman’s Massachusetts-based commune/cult. An erstwhile jug band musician, Lyman became convinced he was the messiah after dropping acid a few too many times with Timothy Leary’s Boston acolytes. His unbridled egomania would have been scary even if he hadn’t admired Charles Manson so much.

I was only familiar with the cult because as a fan of Michelangelo Antonioni’s flawed but fascinating 1970 drama, Zabriskie Point, I read somewhere that the film’s intense young leads, Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette, were members of the Lyman Family. But they had a lot of company at the commune when it came to intensity. A chilling excerpt from Felton’s piece:

“We believe that woman serves God through man,” said Lou, an attractive former nun now in her first stage of pregnancy. ‘I was sort of into women’s lib before I came up here, you know, “cause so many men are such piss-ants, such faggots. But when I came up here and started serving them breakfast, I really began looking up to them.”

She shoved a spoonful of strained vegetables into the squirming infant on her lap.

“The men here on the Hill are real men; the men out there are faggots, with their long hair and everything. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t let their women get away with the things they do.”

Lou learned about the true role of women from something Mel wrote in the Avatar. “If a woman is really a woman, and not just an old girl,” wrote Mel, “then everything she does is for her man and her only satisfaction is in making her man a greater man. She is his quiet conscience, she is his home, she is his inspiration and she is his living proof that his life, his labors, are worthwhile.

“A woman who seeks to satisfy herself is the loneliest being in God’s creation. A woman who seeks to surpass her man is only leaving herself behind. A man can only look ahead, he must have somewhere to look from. A woman can only look at her man…I have stated the Law purely and simply. Don’t break it.” 

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Not that anyone does. Most of the Hill women, if they’re not holding down outside “female” jobs as waitresses or secretaries, spend their time cooking, sewing, cleaning house, tending the children and serving the men. They seem to do so with great relish, developing an almost worshipful attitude toward the men.

“I mean, couldn’t you feel it in those men at lunch?” asked Lou, “how strong they were? How simple. Life here is so simple. Of course, the more simple life is, the harder it is. Let me tell you, there’s a lot of hate and frustration up here. And pain.

“When I first came up here I was a bitch.’ Lou sneered at herself.

“A bitch, hah, that’s putting it mildly. I was a viper. I hated Mel Lyman, I hated everyone here. I resisted like hell. And the thing that shocked me was how much they still cared about me. I mean, with me my hatred was personal, ’cause I hated on such a low level. But they taught me how to hate on a higher level.”

Why did she first hate Mel? I asked.

“Because he was stronger than me. I guess I wanted to be God too. But finally I had to break down; he was so much stronger than me, I finally had to accept it.”

“Do you believe he’s God?”

“Yeah, in the sense that Jesus Christ came down on earth. But he’s dead, so Mel’s the son of God now.” As she said these last words, Lou raised her eyes in adoration toward a photograph of Mel on the opposite wall, the one on the cover of the Christ issue.

“When I first met Mel,” she continued, “it was really weird ’cause he was the most down-to-earth, easygoing guy I’d ever met. Until he looked at you, and then, oh God, his force just filled the room.

“Now I love him intensely, I’m his forever. I want to conquer the world for Mel. I get so mad at that world out there I want to kill, I want to shove Mel in their hearts. He’s the only one who knows how to deal with feeling, the feelings you have at the time, whether they’re love, or hate, or fear.”•

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Classic DVD: Blow-Up (1966)

January 4, 2011 in Film | Permalink

David Hemmings photographs Veruschka, who is now 71 and still models occasionally.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s drama about a fashion photographer who may or may not have accidentally recorded a murder being committed uses the alluring backdrop of Swinging ’60s London to meditate on the frustrating elusiveness of truth. Blow-Up became an art-house smash in the U.S. in 1966, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, perfectly attuned as it was to the Kennedy assassination paranoia that the Warren Commission was never able to quell.

David Hemmings plays an obnoxious, nameless photographer, who berates his female models and fancies himself something of an unappreciated artist. While in the park one day, he stealthily snaps a man and woman in the distance, but she eventually spies him and pursues him vigorously. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) desperately wants him to turn over the film.

The photographer realizes why she’s so panicked when he later blows up the image and notices what might be a man in a bush pointing a pistol. Did the gunman commit a murder after the photo was taken? Or is he seeing something in the photo that isn’t really there? A friend peers at the enlarged picture and remarks to the photographer that it looks like one of “those paintings,” meaning an Op Art piece, whose meaning shifts depending on the perspective from which it’s viewed.

Early in the film, another of the photographer’s friends, an artist, opines about his Abstract paintings: “They don’t do anything at first…just a mess…afterwards I find something to hang onto…it adds up.” But what if life, more fleeting than art and too restless to truly study, does not? (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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