[...] Antonioni's appetite for photographing street scenes or landscapes or objects at rest (as in the end of Eclipse) reminds one in some respects of the great Japanese director Ozu. But the difference is more revealing. Ozu takes cutaway shots -- separate inserts of a beaded-curtained hallway where the family is temporarily absent, or a lantern hanging in front of a restaurant -- and makes them into self-enclosed still lifes, restoring the world to its peaceful, static mode of objecthood. Antonioni's tendency is to start with his characters and, in the same shot, pan away from them, so that the effect is of losing sight of them, or, more pointedly, rejecting them. Unable to take quite seriously the difficulties and sickly longings of his characters, the reality of their sufferings, his camera eye seems pulled as by a magnet across the road, where he is able to do what he likes best: look at the anonymous world.