Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

Verdoux: “Disregard virtually everything you may have read about the film. It is of interest, but chiefly as a definitive measure of the difference between the thing a man of genius puts before the world and the things the world is equipped to see in it” (253).

      Also three caveats:

      First, I do not deal with the very lengthy Chung Kuo—Cina (1972), or the rather brief Il provino (1965); Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (1984); Roma (1989); Kumbha Mela (1989); Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale (1993); Sicilia (1997); or Lo sguardo di Michelangelo (2004). This book is about the major color narratives, only.

      Next, there is no attempt here to work out or exercise a color theory, nor should there reasonably be, since color as Antonioni uses it is not a rigid language nor a set of tools but part of the sense of the world at any moment. For children, wrote Benjamin, “picture books are paradise”; and “children learn in the memory of their first intuition.” Also, “For adults, the yearning for paradise is the yearning of yearnings” (“Notes” 264, 265).

      What we know as a vocabulary of color is only a shallow abstraction suffered through the bureaucratic press of social organization in the modern world, but with color we always see more than we know how to say. “Color,” say Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, “is just as capable as music of providing us with the highest ecstasies and delights” (Levin 129; qtd. in Gage, Culture 241). As to the technology of his color—among the fans of which was Alfred Hitchcock (Robertson, Letter to Ascarelli)—we would do well to remember that no matter who shoots a film and how, it is the producer who arranges for the printing (Pomerance, “Notes on Some Limits”). Antonioni had the luck to find producers who trusted his poetry.

      Lastly, stories and story analysis absorb the attention of the vast majority of scholars and writers who take up cinema. But films are events in themselves, not packages for stories. There are only happenings in film, and happenings are everywhere. A purple coat, a pink cottage. Here, I often jump around, neglect “narrative continuities.” The reader is encouraged to find a happy way of balancing all this.

      Viewing is balancing, at any rate.

      In Cahiers du cinéma of May 1980, we find a little note from Antonioni to Roland Barthes, including this (in my translation): “Thank you for Camera Lucida, which is at once luminous and very beautiful. It astonishes me that in chapter three you describe yourself as being ‘a subject torn between two languages, one expressive and the other critical’ … But what is an artist if not also a subject torn between two languages, one language that expresses and another that does not?” Immediately after this, the maestro added, “I was in the middle of writing this letter when news came to me by telephone that Roland Barthes had died.”

      On the morning of July 31, 2007 when I learned that Antonioni had died—he had been debilitated for some long while—I was stunned, because that night I had dreamed of him. And I thought how wonderful it was that we still had his films. The more I watch them now, the more I feel affected by the language that does not express.

      Beyond the Clouds

      We all know that memory offers no guarantees.

      —Antonioni

      The origins of modernity are obscure, notwithstanding scholarly attempts to fix as key dates the Industrial Revolution, around 1750; the institution of railroad time and invention of the daguerreotype around 1839; the demonstration of vitreous construction and the new visible interior at the Crystal Palace in 1850; or the demonstration at the Eiffel Tower in 1895 of the efficacy of iron replacing wood in construction—a “nonrenewable resource [replacing] a renewable one” (Billington 29). Looking backward through history, it is less taxing to determine certain harbingers that prefigured the conditions we now call “modern,” such as the trial, in 1560, of the man called Martin Guerre. Having come to the Pyrenean village of Artigat four years previously, he gave himself out as a person who had run away from the place years before, soon after his marriage in fact; and then returned to live with the wife he had taken and the son she had borne him until it came to seem, for various reasons, that he was, perhaps, an imposter. He was subjected to judicial authority in Rieux, some thirteen miles away, this in front of a jury of strangers before whom his accusers needed to produce a claim entirely unattached to the folk and communal knowledge of neighbors whose understanding of the man had grown in the deeply committed, agriculturally based matrix of everyday life: a claim which, by contrast, stood upon the sorts of facts one needed no history to grasp nor any particular familiarity to clearly discern. The man, whose name was found to be Pansette, was found guilty, condemned, and burned at the stake, an early victim, historically speaking, to the faux pas and misconstructions that are always present in impression management (see Natalie Zeman Davis). To present oneself to strangers is a rigorous task, demanding the most constant vigilance not of what one senses oneself to be and hopes to become but of what one is projecting to the surveillers who form one’s social surround. And modernity, indeed, can be seen to develop in late Feudalism as a form in which strangers proliferate, mingle, interact, and structure a world where private knowledge, traditionalism, family history, and intimacy play a relatively marginal part. Modernity also opens gender, a favorite subject of Michelangelo Antonioni, to new perspectives and understandings, being, as Susan Sontag has said, “the only culture that makes possible the emancipation of women” (Time 114).

      Beyond the Clouds is, in a way, an extended essay on the symptoms and possibilities of modern life, certainly insofar as modernity both cultures and bounds people’s ability to become intimate and engaged with, or sensitive and attuned to, the increasingly distant others who move past and around them in an incessant flux. A boy and girl cannot quite get together; crime does not sit comfortably in the seat of habitual behavior and friendship; a man and woman cannot quite speak the same language; religious passion hovers uncertainly in the precincts of an ancient city, whose stones reverberate with a sense of the deep past. It is superficial to say that this film is about love.

      Antonioni’s project was to cull some of the substantial material he had written over several years (and ultimately published in That Bowling Alley on the Tiber) and fashion it for the screen as a quartet of episodes, each running a little under half an hour and each following the story of characters occupying different social settings. The first gives the story of a young fellow who meets a girl in Ferrara, but then loses her, and then finds her again. The second, set in Portofino, puts a film director into the presence of a girl who draws him out of his meditations with a chilling story of having committed a killing. The third begins with a marriage in trouble in Paris, and continues with a strange and perhaps fortuitous meeting over a problem with real estate. The last, in Aix-en-Provence, has a young man meet a young woman who should love him, and who perhaps does, except that she has plans he cannot interrupt. In these episodes, we see the interwoven and dominant presence of movement counterpoised against tranquility; strangeness challenging the desire for contact; urbanity in the face of traditionalism; etiquette interplaying with urgency; communication either broken or made painfully ambiguous; seasonless merchandising; and the deeply horrifying possibility that our unitary relations have been slowly, methodically exploded over time so that it is only as fragments and with fragmentation of spirit that we may be condemned to lead our lives.

      For aficionados of Antonioni and devotées of this particular film, a brief apology, because there are parts of it I studiously avoid addressing here:

      Having suffered a massive stroke in 1985, Antonioni was exhausted and partly debilitated when it came time to shoot Beyond the Clouds. The insurers insisted on the presence behind the camera of a healthy and competent director. Out of friendship, Wim Wenders agreed to play this role, and eventually himself directed certain introductory, transitional, and concluding narrative passages or bridges involving John Malkovich in the film-director role of episode two: a scene in an airplane “above the clouds”; a scene at a windy lonely beach; a scene on a train heading into France; meditative scenes in the streets of Ferrara; scenes at the Hotel Cardinal in Aix-en-Provence; and a hilltop scene involving Marcello Mastroianni conversing with Jeanne Moreau as, painting Mont Sainte-Victoire, he attempts to recapture the inspiration that had seized