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I rushed to see L'Avventura. It was the movie I had been preparing for, and it came at the right time in my development. As a child, I had wanted only action movies. Dialogues and story setups bored me; I waited for that moment when the knife was hurled through the air. My awakening in adolescence to the art of film consisted precisely in overcoming this impatience. Overcompensating, perhaps; I now loved a cinema that dawdled, that lingered. Antonioni had a way of following characters with a pan shot, letting them exit and keeping the camera on the depopulated landscape. With his detachment from the human drama and his tasteful spying on objects and backgrounds, he forced me to disengage as well, and to concentrate on the purity of his technique. Of course the story held me, too, with its bitter, world-weary, disillusioned tone. The adolescent wants to touch bottom, to know the worst. His soul craves sardonic disenchantment.
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[...] By leafing through these magazines together we shared a mood of sweet latency, imagining the films we had in store, like provincials dreaming of life in the capital. Cinema was a wave originating elsewhere, which we waited to break over us. The waiting had something to do with the nature of adolescence itself; it also reflected the resurgence of European films at the time.
To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to participate in what felt like an international youth movement. We in New York were following and, in a sense, mimicking the cafe arguments in Paris, London and Rome, whee the cinema had moved, for a brief historical movement, to the center of intellectual discourse, in the twilight of existentialism and before the onslaught of structuralism.
For a certain kind of youth, the accumulation of taste becomes the crucible of self, the battleground on which character is formed. [...]
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It is a truism that moviegoing can become a substitute for living. Not that I regret one hour spent watching movies, then or now, since the habit persists to this day, but I would not argue either if someone wanted to maintain that chronic moviegoing often promotes a passivity before life, a detached tendency to aestheticize reality, and, I suppose, a narcissistic absorption that makes it harder to contact others. [...]
All through the sixties, Godard was fascinated with the beautiful woman who betrays (Jean Seberg in Breathless), withdraws her love (Chantal Goya in Masculin-Feminin), runs away (Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou) or is faithless (Bardot in Contempt). What makes Contempt an advance over this somewhat misogynistic obsession with the femme fatale is that here, Godard seems perfectly aware how much at fault his male character is for the loss of the woman's love.
[...] 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.
Cronaca is in fact a tragedy of social class, of a kind familiar to European audiences. A woman from a family of modest income is lifted into the upper classes by her beauty, but the sterility of that life bores her, she has no outlet for her emotions, dwells in the past, and takes (or retakes) someone from her previous milieu, an unemployed car salesman, as her lover. He, however, feels the new difference in their stations acutely. His first remark at their reunion -- ironic, admiring -- when she asks him if he finds her changed, is: "Yes. You have, I don't know -- class!" She tries to equalize their social position by offering to share her money, insisting that love alone has value, and ultimately proposing murder, which will put them on the same ethical if not financial plane; but he continues to act as if he is loving above his station. And that social distance, more than even their guilt at having contemplated a crime, may finally be what prevents them from sharing a future.
Antonioni's interest in local mores and the material divisions of the social world was obviously still strong when he made this first feature. Later it would evaporate in the face of a jet-set rootlessness: the filmmaker would take up comfortable international residence in what Georg Lukacs called "the Hotel Abyss." [...]
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There was a solitary chapel scene, ending in one of those strange short dolly shots that Bresson was so fond of, a movement of almost clumsy longing toward the priest at the altar, as though the camera itself were taking communion. Suddenly I had the impression that the film had stopped, or, rather, that time had stopped. All forward motion was arrested, and I was staring into "eternity." Now, I am not the kind of person readily given to mystical experiences, but at that moment I had a sensation of delicious temporal freedom. What I "saw" was not a presence, exactly, but a prolongation, a dilation, as though I might step into the image and walk around it at my leisure.
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[...] a Bresson composition draws inward, implodes, abstractly denies truck with daily life, cuts off all exist. In many scenes of Diary, the priest, let into a parishioner's house, encounters almost immediately a painful interview in which his own values are attacked, ridiculed, tempted. There is no room for small talk; every conversation leads directly to the heart of the matter: sin, suicide, perversity, redemption, grace.