From “Stark Eclipse”, and: Unavoidable Changes in the Screenplay: From the Po to the Hudson

3

After an unexpected meeting with her mother’s stockbroker—who looks like Alain Delon—

she looks past EUR again back to the umbrella pines stirring softly in the breeze on

the Aventine; she used to go often to the park and stop into the Protestant cemetery

and think about the exiled Englishmen who flourished under the Italian sun,

then stop at the fromagerie, the best in the city. She’s never without a book in her purse now.

She’s never had more time on her hands since she began acting in A’s films.

L’Avventura was an exercise in waiting. La Notte—a crash course in night vision.

4

(Scene: “The Aventine”)

She muses how Mussolini wanted to design a mile-high tower

but couldn’t find a way to anchor it in Rome’s volcanic soil; it would have called for a miracle:

sinking a taproot on the off chance it might strike not gold, not oil, but meteor.

She always felt a pang at how far Italy has come, how backward a progress it has accomplished

since it’s synonymous with freedom— as she walks, strolls now rather,

down the steep pine-shaded streets past houses fashioned after the landscape,

visible and at the same time hidden; the house is yours to enjoy as you pass by,

but the threshold is not yours to cross. After the night-long quarrel with Ricardo,

inflexible, bullheaded, whose books she had agreed to translate—

as part of a package deal?—she’s awakened. We wonder why? Had she cried out “Yes!

All right. I will” right before orgasm? Or when giddy one

drunken night after a party when the wind in her hair made her feel

as she does today in her exhausted sober ecstasy—and the park itself—and the trees

which are also useful: cooling shadows. And the view from the parapet with all

seven hills visible.

5

What had kept her? What took her so long? Why did she follow others when she knew

they were wrong? To be—agreeable? Vestiges of what it was to be a woman then

as opposed to now? She knows her friends would treat her independence as—disloyalty.

Now it’s all clear. The—eclipse! If she had lived her life the same way as he had done,

it would have been her not the sun who was on her way to being eclipsed    blotted out    invisible—

her next phase a disappearing act like Anna for whom the search stopped once the searchers

lost interest and wandered off the case, thoughtlessly, unable to rouse

any more concern for her best friend who was lover to one, daughter to another, and . . .

now she understands why A has the Girl in The Passenger remark to Locke that people disappear every day,

and Locke comes back with a deliberate finality: “Every time they leave the room.”

6

If you look closely, there are two documentaries in the film, Locke’s documentary on Africa and mine on him.

—Michelangelo Antonioni

Locke is the key, Locke grasped the problem and the solution,

not the ones that his Profession: Reporter demanded he confront

from behind the camera in Africa but to seeing the habits that have built

a fortress inside that rather than keep invaders out never allows you to leave

and you live with an invisible prison no one can see much less detect.

7

Mariella in the beach scene of Le Amiche: “You know what a woman’s real dress is? Her skin.”

After the mayhem of the incident of the drunk’s death and the injuries to Piero’s car, Vittoria’s allowed

a few seconds of screen recomposition— a fresh white blouse and a certain poise

while the convertible is hauled out; she is buoyed by unbidden

insights into who’s been her real off-screen lover since—can it be?—her screen

test for her first serious role; it cracks her up to say “serious role” with a straight face

and ask herself...