I was wrong. I did see the new "Antonioni" film, Beyond the Clouds, in which Wim Wenders nobly seconded the instructions that Antonioni was unable to deliver. It's flawed; it's mannered; it's dated; I loved it. It is not a masterpiece like L'Avventura, but it is a piece (or pieces) by a master; in almost uncanny retrieval, it re-presents the cinematic world of angst, beautiful women and lingering pauses which the success of Star Wars and Raiders banished from our screens. Today, a movie has to "open," as the insiders say, which means it must take, oh, $14.5m on the first weekend to qualify for the advertising push which bucks it into profitability.
Beyond the Clouds has its longueur, in the director-impersonating person of John Malkovich, who was once a persuasive actor until he heard that he was sexy as well as baldly asymmetrical. He cruises through Beyond the Clouds, which is all right until he becomes sexually involved enough to take his clothes off and get artistic with one of the several beautiful women who, as they disrobe, turn angst into something we can all look forward to. Truffaut said that cinema was about pointing the camera at beautiful women and he was right, although we must never tell Mel Gibson, Brad Pitt and Kevin Costner et al, because they always have to be more lens-worthy than their co-stars.
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In a recent interview, Monica Vitti (still great-looking) recounted how she had been turned from a light comedy actress into a diva by the way in which Michelangelo looked at her. From the same excellent Arena programme (they'll kill the slot if it goes on being that intelligent), I learned that Antonioni is also a painter. It should not have been a surprise: Stanley Spencer once said that faces are like landscapes, the painter has to crawl over them like an insect. The beauty of Antonioni's work is that he dwells not only on faces, but also on objects, and the spaces between them. The particular is what preoccupies him, while its generality makes it elusive: the fact that we call something, or someone, by a name gets between us and its "reality" by falsely rendering it knowable.
The sense of life's elusiveness is more emblematic of Antonioni's work than the "uncommunicability" which was his supposed theme. His "pretentiousness" has everything to do with the director's suspicion that reality is itself a pretence, like nature, whose naturalness he questioned, when he could afford it, by tinting the landscape (the director's ultimate "re-write" is greening the grass). Beyond the Clouds is a notebook which acknowledges, by its meditative approximation to a finished work, that at the end of a great artist's life, he can (must?) still be perplexed, unsatisfied, teased, provoked, frustrated, alive.
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If Antonioni was pretentious, so much the better. The contrast between him and Joseph Losey is that he was genuinely mystified by reality and its recessive strangeness, whereas Joe thought he could read everything off against the calibrations of his vacuous Marxism. Losey's treatment of Monica Vitti, on the one occasion he directed her, in Modesty Blaise, was as glib and disrespectful as any cheap audience might demand. Losey had qualities, but individuality always escaped him, and beauty with it, because he could never trust his own responses or follow them to unlikely destinations. He had to conform to what might be expected of an unrepentant fugitive from conformity.
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The idea of a "reality" beyond what is available to our senses or accessible to reason is, to those who knew the afterglow of the grands jours of Cambridge philosophy, pretty well absurd, but Pierre Watter's new essay, Towards a Critique of Production (Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh) attempts, with heroic single-mindedness, to challenge consensual modesties. One of its epigraphs, taken from Antonio Machado, sets the unsmiling tone: "That two and two necessarily make four, is an opinion many share. But if someone truly feels differently, then let him say so... And we may not even demand that he give proof of his assertion, for that would be forcing him to accept the rules of our thinking, on which the arguments that might convince us would have to be based. But these rules and these arguments can only prove our thesis. They can in no way prove his."
Watter's text is of a complexity which, if spoken aloud, might defeat the tongue. But there is a wonderful solemnity here, as indifferent to difficulty as to readability, in which something of importance is struggling to be born. If I understand him, Pierre (a very distant acquaintance) maintains that we cannot revise the world without first seeing that the distinction between nature and man, from which derives all cant about "alienation," is misguided: what we (especially Greens) call nature is "second nature," a man-made concept which has no independence from the construction human beings put on it. What is finally argued for is, I think, that we cannot remake society without realising that there is no nature to go back to.
