Michelangelo Antonioni
L'Eclisse

I must announce some painful news.

This morning, colleague Minetti passed away due to a heart attack, please observe a minute of silence.

PIERO: a minute of silence as for football players.

VITTORIA: did you know him?

PIERO: Of course, but you know... a minute here costs billions.

VITTORIA: ah

Rome. 1960s.

In Vittoria's astonishment, in her lunar exclamation, lies the entire distance from that world, from the primordial surges of the first stock exchange agents, who at the dawn of the renaissance of the Bel paese, proclaimed their economic revenge to the world, flaunting and shouting the exuberance of those who, from being merchants in the square, now wore the pinstripe suit of the modern securities trafficker.

But what is a minute of silence, if hypocrites and brazen people continue to ring phones in the room; what is a minute of silence if what separates us is not so much the ticking of those 60 seconds, but the belonging to two ecosystems that will never meet, except by a fortuitous and random collision between two stars.

In the midst of an elusive conversation in the stock exchange hall, the inception of a fleeting relationship, between Piero, a Dionysian Delon, and Vittoria, a foreign and estranged Vitti from the world, a Roman pillar visibly separates the two bodies, standing as a third overriding element in antagonism with the native impulse propagated by the couple.

Only a few moments later, in one of the most beautiful scenes in cinema, the warm and liquid sigh of a languid kiss will be softened and suffocated by a cold crystal window, to make the illusion of that moment real or to render illusory the cool contact between the two lips.

Vittoria

Vittoria, a translator of university texts, estranged from her partner Riccardo, while accompanying her mother to the stock exchange hall, a mother ignorant of culture, but also of finance, continues only to lose a lot of money, gets acquainted with Piero.

From that moment and for a short period, physically/epidermically attracted, she will see in the young broker a Deweyan reflection of her current emptiness and aspirations, only to recognize Piero for what he really is, a superficial womanizer trapped in his egotistic relationship with his own profession.

Vittoria is the melancholy that makes this work of Antonioni a human work and not just post-human, it is the acknowledgment of sensitivity, which with difficulty finds confrontation with the surrounding humanity and finds an oasis and inspiration only in the contemplation of a landscape, in a glance stolen from a half-open window, or by imagining herself a dancing handmaid in foreign land.

Her words are bare, sparse, essential, but they are relentless darts that pierce the heart and break any earthly equivocation;

It feels like being abroad.
Think how strange: you give me this feeling.

Her gaze, suspended between dreams and mist, hides a great ambition to escape from that everyday spleen, the sound of her heels, omnipresent in the film as a call to the awakening of the rhythm of the protagonist on the spatial metaphysics growing in Antonioni's filmic design, betrays a strong desire to escape, from that world.

As in the exotic dance scene, where a guest at the home of two friends (free and artistic communication is perhaps only possible among three friends, as in another film by Michelangelo) after breaking up with Riccardo, in search of comfort, made up as a mulatta, with golden hoops around her neck, she performs an African dance to imagine a place as far away as possible, even wild.

“Maybe over there, they think less about happiness. Things have to go on their own here it's all a great effort. Even love.”

Victoria is also the title of a beautiful film by Sebastian Schipper, a single take, an exciting and muscular one-take of two hours, among the streets and venues of Berlin, of a young girl escaping from the routine. And this might not be another story.

The Fan

In the seminal scene of the film, there is, as in a cyclical deja vu, the breakdown of the relationship between Vittoria and Riccardo, her first partner, an existential incipit of what will also be the future relationship between Vittoria and the handsome Piero/Delon, the most androgynous and dandy among the men in Antonioni's films.

In a majestic long take shot inside the house, amidst the silences revealing Riccardo's growing impassibility from the scene and Vittoria's vacant glances, the focus of the direction is on a fan (model Nordik Evolution) from whose rotating whistle the image inside the room is formed and cryptically steals the scene in silence from the two post-lovers.

Riccardo, in his indifference to any empathy with Vittoria, is static and immobile, anchored on his chair and unable to give action to his image, sunk by the weight of his absence.

In the stasis of the editing, only slightly stirred by a thread of a masterful long take, the frame is nonetheless pinched by a clear visual dilemma; are objects, in the growing importance they assume in society the new cause of human alienation, or rather is it the impoverishment of modern man being at the mercy of the movement generated by these objects.

What happens in this scene is but the mystical and initiatory rite of a post-humanism that will slowly grow overtime in the film, crawling and invisible, but that before the end credits will forcefully take the whole scene and the applause of the masked audience.

In the central part of the film, in a suggestive night scene, Vittoria is alone and walking through the streets of Rome when in an instant is radically captured by the sounds generated by the wind moving the steel wires of some flagpoles; these steel cables take shape only when illuminated by light and intrigue Vitti's gaze, but the movement and sound remain independent of the woman's gaze.

The Prophecy of Michelangelo

Just a moment before, Vittoria to her friends who hosted her had said “that things must go a little on their own”: objects and the surrounding environment are part of an interactive process that man cannot truly comprehend fully and should not have the presumption to control in its intimate essence.

The Eclipse

If the directors (Italians) of his time had deemed it necessary to give impetus and shape to the prose of the characters, Michelangelo Antonioni, to make the sound of incommunicability audible, chose to give substance in his cinema to the silences of his actors and the voids of his shots.

Because it is from these that one must start to understand the complexity of his approach.

And to deconstruct Modernity, a new cinematographic style is needed, which allows the arts to find fit and not division, thus resorting to schemes dear to narrative and representative models stolen from his favorite painters, primarily De Chirico for this work.

The last 7 minutes of The Eclipse are in a frame, a simple anticipation of the End of humanity.

The entire film, in fact, could be summarized as a long prelude to those final 7 minutes.

All the images and movements of the objects, already perceived in the viewer's mind, the rotating fan, the sound of rustling leaves moved by the wind, the night-time oscillations of flagpoles, all these images will relive in those seven minutes during the eclipse.

During the absence of Vittoria and Piero, as they will not be there at that announced meeting.

Replaced by the ominous presence of those objects, which will give life to one of the major and monstrous cinematic climaxes, in a world emotionally on the brink of an abyss, the appointment of the two protagonists is only a minor and irrelevant episode from which one can aridly transcend.

The same places and objects that were made alive and participative in a human process take a sinister preeminence, with scenes of largely empty streets swallowed by twilight, a barrel of water overturned by a running passerby, trees swayed by the wind, fresh water jets; frames that do not recombine among themselves.

The sky offers its dark and threatening version after having served as a celestial frame to the flight of the two lovers, at a certain point a blinding streetlight goes out, it's an Eclipse, it's the End.