In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C h a p t e r F i v e Threat of the Real Fact and Image in Antonioni Come se fosse estate/ci siamo lasciati sorprendere/dal buio. (As though it were summer,/we let ourselves be surprised/by the darkness.) —Bernardo Bertolucci, “L’eclisse” (poem) The career of Michelangelo Antonioni provides a Janus-faced perspective on the history of Italian film. As the innovative auteur whose work in the 1950s and 1960s cleared new pathways for filmmakers overwhelmed by a neorealist heritage, his films reassert the value of experimental approaches reminiscent of cinema’s avant-garde heyday before the dominance of narrative film. However , as a “visual” director who guarded against linking film with nonpictorial art forms, especially literature, he stands outside the traditions of cinematic adaptation that lend Italian film its legendary intermedial reach.1 Yet it is in this seeming impasse between the theoretical auteur and the mediumspecific “visual poet” that the singularity of Antonioni’s contributions to the surrounding aesthetic debates becomes manifest.2 The centrality of his position is intensified by the fact that he, along with Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, stands as a major transitional figure who came of age during the neorealist era yet whose finest work is usually considered to mark a distance from this neorealist apprendistato (apprenticeship). A distillation of the director’s lifelong dialectic with neorealist principles and practices took the form of a meditation on stolen bikes: The neorealism of the postwar period, when reality itself was so searing and immediate, attracted attention to the relationship existing between the character and surrounding reality. It was precisely this relationship which was important and which created an appropriate cinema. Now, however, when for better or for worse reality has been normalized once again, it seems to me more important to examine what remains in the characters from their past experiences. This is why it no longer seems to me important to make a film 90 Aesthetic Corsi and Ricorsi about a man who has had his bicycle stolen. That is to say, about a man whose importance resides (primarily and exclusively) in the fact that he has had his bicycle stolen. . . . Now that we have eliminated the problem of the bicycle (I am speaking metaphorically), it is important to see what there is in the mind and in the heart of this man who has had his bicycle stolen, how he has adapted himself, what remains in him of his past experiences, of the war, of the period after the war, of everything that has happened to him in our country—a country which, like so many others, has emerged from an important and grave adventure. (Leprohon 89–90) Thus, in an Italy “normalized” after decades of civil and world war, the Antonioni of the 1950s and 1960s believed that the new Italian cinema had no need to make films (pace Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini) about the actual if not banal goods of life. The rub in the Italy of the Economic Miracle was to capture the inner life of the individual who, metaphorical bicicletta in tow, sought to adjust to life in a materially though not morally rebuilt nation.3 The reticence to film stolen bikes—and thereby return to a mode of classical neorealism—reveals Antonioni’s stake in the debates in Italian cinema of the 1950s about the image’s relation to notions of realism. In Roberto Rossellini ’s La macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine to Kill Bad People [1949]), the film image’s contact with its real-world referent is so highly charged as to prove lethal, an allegory for Rossellini’s desire to move beyond the documentary style of his postwar films and capture a version of reality that was not surface or immanent. The postneorealist Rossellini eschewed the identity between the realist sign and its signified because it left little room for exploring the hidden psychological textures that preoccupied him in the 1950s; rather than represent “reality” as such, the image in La macchina ammazzacattivi subsumes it. More broadly, the films that pushed the boundaries of neorealism are legion, ranging from styles and genres as diverse as the operatic return to nineteenth-century realism in Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954) to the psychic dramas at the margins of society and mental health in Fellini’s La strada from that same year.4 A critical mass of such films shares a cinematic equivalent of the Pauline biblical injunction—“the letter kills...

Share