Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

subtleties of the role or Antonioni did not provide him with sufficiently explanatory lines and action, the basis for Niccolò’s absorption with Mavi remains unclear. (Surface 225–226)

      Nor when he suggests that “Part of the problem with Mavi’s characterization may lie with the actress who plays her. It is all very well to depict a character whose psyche is chaotic, incompletely formed, inachevée. But clearly the role must be played by someone who is herself clear about what she is doing” (227). Nor when, discussing the notable wordiness of this film in the director’s oeuvre, he remarks, “Too many lines are spent establishing the believability of Niccolò’s erotic charm” (233). Nor when, in regards to the finale, he chides, “It is sad that Antonioni’s budget did not permit him to end the film with the kind of finale that he wanted (and that it seems to need). For if the science fiction sequence had been realized with effects of the caliber of 2001, Star Wars, or Blade Runner, one’s feelings about Niccolò and his situation as an artist might be entirely different” (237). There is never much sense in reconfiguring an artist’s motion picture along the lines of one’s own tastes and predilections—of pretending to be the filmmaker oneself. The only film ever worth studying is the one the filmmaker has put upon the screen—worth studying only because it is in our desire to study it—and our challenge is to understand how all of its aspects cohere beautifully and meaningfully into a statement that might not at first be intelligible to our limited reception. There is no doubt that we can be wrong, in myriad ways, but any other project of the self is ultimately an evasion of the facts. Rather than squabble with a film, we must adjust ourselves to it; and that adjustment is the true adventure of cinema-going. Antonioni told Pierre Billard, “Mistakes are always sincere, absolutely sincere” (Cardullo 51).

      What kind of science—what kind of eroticized science—is Niccolò doing, that we should understand his charm? And his science fiction film, which is certainly not Star Wars or Blade Runner but which offers a stunning, if abrupt, vision and draws the film to a profound conclusion—what about its significance exactly and wholly in its own terms? When Antonioni spoke with Daney and Toubiana, he did not regret that he lacked the funds for making extravaganzas like those American ones, he merely indicated that in Italy filmmaking was done in radically different terms than in Hollywood. Moreover, the asteroid-ship isn’t the true sci-fi figure in this film, Niccolò is. And the glowing sun only signifies the mysterious universe that is thrown up more concretely in the presences that Niccolò confronts.

      Two fascinating features of the film are indeed valuably invoked in Chatman’s critique: the incomprehensibility and vagueness of the world that fascinates our protagonist (to such an extent that one might question the merit of that fascination); and the nexus between fascination and erotic appeal. The world’s incomprehensibility is one thing as regards knowledge and another as regards perception. We have a long history of seeking to apprehend structures and relations that are not immediately given to the senses, and in this respect it can be argued that the quest for knowledge is a continual negotiation with the world’s mystery or incomprehensibility. After the Enlightenment, science of any sort attempts to illuminate, thus to make experience more understandable and to dissipate the darkness: where id was, there shall ego be. But the world as an incomprehensible datum changed at the end of the nineteenth century, with William James’s theory of active perception. Prior to this, philosophers had posited “the mere presence to the senses of an outward order” (James, vol. 1, 402), which in the case of perceptual difficulty implied either a damaged or an improperly attentive perceptual apparatus, absent which the apparent (and complete) structure of the world would have been directly perceivable. For James, early writers were “bent on showing how the higher faculties of the mind are pure products of ‘experience’; and experience is supposed to be of something simply given” (402). James suggests that perception is bound up with attention, and attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” (403–404). He goes on to stipulate that in paying attention, we must accomplish “withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others” (404). Part of what is troubling Niccolò, seen through a Jamesian lens, is the decision, in regard to both Mavi and Ida, as to what he should attend to and what he should disregard. In causing him this trouble these women also spark his concern about other aspects of the world and the decision he must make, always, in seeing. This is why the title of the film is so appropriate. As much as the problem is women, it is also identification, and, indeed, identification of a woman, that spirit so ineluctable and enticing: woman as the motive of science (not in the crass way that scientists, who are frequently men, objectify women and try to control them through knowledge; but in the spiritual way that scientists, who are humans, seek the ineffable knowledge of their own origin, the place of no return).

      One signal consequence of the shift to thinking of active perception, writes Jonathan Crary, “was that the functioning of vision became dependent on the complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer, rendering vision faulty, unreliable, and, it was sometimes argued, arbitrary. Even before the middle of the [nineteenth] century, an extensive amount of work in science, philosophy, psychology, and art involved a coming to terms in various ways with the understanding that vision, or any of the senses, could no longer claim an essential objectivity or certainty” (12).

      Niccolò can err in his calculations and estimations; as can every other character in the film. Language can seem ambiguous. For example, when the girl at the swimming pool acknowledges that on one occasion she and Mavi slept together, it can be totally unclear what, ultimately, she is saying: that Mavi is a lesbian? That circumstances led to a fortuitous experience, once? That Niccolò has no hope with Mavi? That men tend to misunderstand and misrepresent women? The world’s ostensible “incomprehensibility” can result not simply from inaccurate or faulty (that is, correctible) sight of an object that is fully given, but from a biased observer’s position or attitude in the face of an object that takes its form only in being apprehended. But, suggests Crary, the independence of subjective perception comes to be challenged in further ways: “The rapid accumulation of knowledge about the workings of a fully embodied observer disclosed possible ways that vision was open to procedures of normalization, of quantification, of discipline. Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly the other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation” (12). The vision of the discrete observer is thus measurable and quantifiable, and can be schematized, so that perception can be fitted into a broader calculus of hegemonic control and knowledge. Vision could be instrumentalized “as a component of machinic arrangements” (13). To the extent, then, that the visionary act was externalized as a social entity (through the action that eventuated from it), even as a public resource, any act of identification or discrimination could stand obediently to order within a matrix of predictable and exploitable observations and thus gain its place among what Crary calls “the delirious operations of modernization” (13). A move was induced culturally to “discover what faculties, operations, or organs produced or allowed the complex coherence of conscious thought” (15). Perception and knowledge became rationalized as a system of control.

      Looking at attention as “an inevitable fragmentation of a visual field,” Crary cites John Dewey to the effect that the mind is concentrated “in a point of great light and heat. So the mind, instead of diffusing consciousness over all the elements presented to it, brings it all to bear upon some one selected point, which stands out with unusual brilliancy and distinctness” (24). In bringing consciousness to bear this way, moreover, we come to accept the reality of the thing observed, engaging in “belief in a thing for no other reason than that we conceive it with passion,” which commitment of attention and conviction, writes James, Charles Renouvier calls “mental vertigo” (James, vol. 2, 309). In showing Niccolò’s visual field with sharpness and precise illumination, and in showing him wrestling with the problem of attaining focus upon any such “thing,” Antonioni produces a Deweyan escapade, offering us a chance at each moment to see that the selected field of vision is arbitrary and potentially hopeless even as he shows that it is stunning and alluring.

      Erotic sensibility is a potential escape route from the controlling uniformity of rational vision. Crary argues, for example, that socially organized perceptual