278 L'eclisse

[ellipsis7]

THE MYSTERY OF OBERWALD (1981) is a reunion for MA with an older Monica Vitti in a period piece (unusually for him) shot on SD analogue video, where he used the then state-of-art video effects (mainly manipulation of colours) to further his exploration of the cinematic medium and chromatic range... It was commissioned as a piece for Italian television, RAI... The effects and image quality can be seen as pretty primitive now, given the subsequent advances in HD digital technology & CGI effects... Another exception for MA is that the drama was based on a preexisting work by fellow filmmaker (& artist) Jean Cocteau, L'AIGLE A DEUX TETES, written as a play in 1943 and then filmed by the Frenchman in 1948, and again produced by French television in 1975... It is essentially a melodramatic narrative and less characteristic of Antonioni's overall oeuvre... A more familiar trope is however apparent in the concept of two characters doubling or substituting for one another...

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

Thanks! Doesn't sound too thrilling. I guess you would place it in the lower tier of his work? Being a completist, I will have to get around to watching it, although it doesn't sound like a must see...

[ellipsis7]

If not essential, it is nevertheless a key link and interesting engagement with the video culture & technology of the early '80s... Closest comparison I guess is this pop video FOTOROMANZA he made with Gianna Nannini in 1984...

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

Interesting. Thanks, I will have to check it out.

By the way, I was lucky enough to catch a 35mm showing of Chung Kuo. Even though it's a documentary, I think that it's a shame that it is too often neglected in his filmography. Quite a striking, sometimes disconcerting, and in many ways unique look at China that no Western director would be allowed to film today, I think.

[ellipsis7]

That 35mm print would have been a blowup from the original Super 16mm negative on which it is shot... I was in Beijing last November (my eldest son is based for work in China & speaks fluent Mandarin) & it was fascinating to see some of MA's locations in the flesh & old men playing Mahjong oblivious to any political climate or cultural change while the ancient & modern are unjarringly juxtaposed in cause of progess forward rooted in the past, a lot of contradictions coexisting if not reconciled, so I don't know if I agree with your point... This Senses of Cinema article gives an interesting perspective on CHUNG KUO CINA from a Chinese point of view...

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

Thanks for the link - I'll have to look into that when I have the time. And yes, it was blown up from 16mm, but still amazing to watch it on film.

[criterionoop]

This preorder page appeared on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/LEclisse-Blu-ray ... PDKIKX0DER

I'm guessing that Criterion is doing a Blu-ray only edition (though it lists Sony Pictures Home Entertainment as the studio)

[FrauBlucher]

I think they mean Sony is the distributor, who distributes the physical media for the Criterion Collection.

[Yaanu]

I noted in the "Criterion and Dual-Format" thread a few days ago that L'eclisse is listed on the website as "Buy on Amazon.com", so your guess is probably accurate.

[oh yeah]

I guess this explains why the Criterion dual-format edition was out of stock and going for a minimum of $300-400 from Amazon sellers about a week ago, and is now gone altogether (though Best Buy seems to still have it listed for $27.99 in case anyone's interested!)

[black&huge]

So I've been wanting to get the current blu but I read studiocanal did a restoration in 2015 and to my knowledge there exists no physical media releade of it? Isn't studiocanal letting Criterion license again? I know the criterion blu apparently uses the master as their old dvd just wonderimg if I should hold off

[tenia]

Criterion uses indeed their older HD master, and Canal used the same master in France in 2015. I'm not sure if a new restoration exists.

[therewillbeblus]

I agree Murdoch with this being one of the scenes where Vitti’s character Vittoria manages to lose herself for a moment in abandon at being another person, in another world with other values, though I would disagree about Marta being totally ‘imperialist’ in her attitudes. I feel this is quite a complex and fascinating scene if you can look beyond the superficially shocking image of our lead character blacking up and performing an African dance.

Marta does not just have these pictures and mementos of her ‘trips’ abroad - she was obviously raised in Kenya herself from her comments about her father still having a farm there and making the effort to return to have her son in the hospital there “because it’s home”. She also does not shoot the rifle out of the window on a whim but when her urban Italian friend Vittoria asks her to shoot the balloon while she and Piero watch.

There is a colonialist aspect to be noted from Marta, as there is the sense of feeling in her comments and collection of photographs and mementos that she ‘appreciates’ the environment more than the black people, who being natives of the land with little opportunity to see the outside world, know nothing different.

She is obviously homesick for Kenya but appears to be in Italy because she fears the situation has become unstable as black people start wanting rights to the land and to hold positions of authority themselves. Yet she also feels a stranger and isolated in urban Italy, tied to waiting for her husband to come home in a way she probably was not in Kenya – another form of urban alienation.

This contrasts interestingly with Vittoria who is an urban character. She is fascinated by all of the artefacts in Marta’s apartment – the pictures, the elephant foot table, the music – and in the blacked up dance seems to be enjoying the idea of being part of a more ancient culture with clearly defined roles that contrasts so much with the confusing modern world where the emotional aspect of life is cut off and starved by perceived lack of importance over ‘physical’ goals like making money (which eventually in the stock exchange scenes seem extremely intangible and illusory in themselves). Vittoria seems to be wishing to be part of a society where the spirit and the body are more in harmony with each other, and so loses herself in the play acting.

Marta seems well aware that her urban Italian neighbours are having fun with playing Africans and learning about Africa but have no real connection to the country itself. Marta may be feeling that Vittoria and Anita are using Africa, the objects in Marta’s flat and Marta herself (as in the scene where her shooting skills are called upon later) as another casual distraction – an exotic but momentary distraction. Much as Anita taking Vittoria beyond the clouds on an airplane journey proves a transcendent, but fleeting, experience too. The presence of the two African pilots at the airport café also seems to link the two sequences together in filmic intent as well as in Vittoria’s mind.

That leads to Marta cutting short the African dance, and maybe the causal fun of Vittoria and Anita also touches a nerve, not just of seeing beloved objects and settings that you feel a deep connection to used in an offhand manner (although Vittoria and Anita likely didn’t mean any offence to Marta in their actions), but also that perhaps her own attitude could have been similar – projecting her own ideals and fears onto a nation and its people who she may soon realise have an entirely different set of ideas about what and who they are as a nation or a culture than she does.

This leads to Marta’s cruel comments when they are relaxing on the bed about the lack of ability of Africans to govern themselves, apart from a few who have been educated abroad (and therefore taught the ‘proper’ values of the modern world). These comments are likely based on Marta’s real feelings but perhaps the overly cruel and blunt nature of them is intended to shock her insulated, complacent friends with their comments about it being the correct thing for Africans to govern themselves – accepted wisdom, but perhaps something Vittoria or Anita have not really had to think about too deeply because it is not something that has directly impacted on them. It feels like more of an attack on insulated complacency of her companions than on Africans themselves which in most other ways she feels more of an, albeit landowning colonialist, connection to, as well as the comments containing an element of self comforting about the need for white rule to maintain order.

This also finds humorous expression in the scene which follows as Marta’s dog, a black poodle, makes another of what seem to be many attempts to escape from her apartment, and then when caught up to does a little standing-on-its-hind-legs show for Vittoria’s own private amusement!

For the film itself the connection to Africa is also a well made one – in Vittoria’s fascination with the distant country it makes explicit the comparison of the beautiful but hostile environment with Rome’s own achingly beautiful, but hostile to life in its own way, environment. At one point Anita wonders if Marta was ever scared of being attacked by a hippopotamus and Marta laughs and asks if Anita was ever scared of cars, as they are as much of Anita’s environment, and as dangerous, as hippopotamuses were for hers. I often think that this parallels with the later scene of the drunk stealing Piero’s flashy sports car and then being pulled dead from the lake in which it crashed. There are people in peril and dying even in this modern world as their inner turmoil overcomes their common sense to potentially dangerous situations.

It is another perfectly judged sequence in an absolutely magnificent film as a whole – raising a whole range of inflammatory and complex issues, sketching in all these contradictory attitudes and actions the characters show and, as throughout the rest of the film, showing the way emotions affect actions and attitudes without the film itself becoming over emotional in its perspective on the situation.

Loved rereading this look at the blackface scene, which played for me this time in a very different way. Regardless of what's offensive externally, in a vacuum Vitti is successfully able to fit into a role that is allowed (through 'play') to be nothing more complex than a stereotype. There's a problematic element to how and why that is, but it's also a beautiful moment for her character. She gets to escape the pain for just a moment and connect to something, if not someone. I think of the line directly prior, when Anita comes over, and Vitti says something like, 'sometimes having a man around and having a needle and thread are the same thing' - and how reducing significance to objects, including the process of objectification, seems to be the resilient way Vitti can engage with her world.

And that leads to the depressing kicker - the only meaningful way to participate is to do so with figures that cannot reciprocate, but it's safer to engage with them because it's easier to accept this. We don't expect a stone wall to return our affections, but we do expect a human being to, and so there's less room for disappointment. It's also a theoretical basis for colonialism - in the absence of true community and affection that can satisfy, man is isolated, individualistic, and lonely, and thus turns to power through conquering submissive societies. Just as one can do by moving through physical space without a voice, or embodying a culture without a presence to object. Vitti loves and hates these things, and everything in between - she doesn't know how to feel any more towards 'things' than people, but at least she can arrive at a concrete decision and leave it there without consequences - she clearly loves fashion, and yet will say. "when clothes tear, it's their own fault" - though this feels like just as much of a metaphor for how people diffuse opportunities at responsibility as a stand-in for a chance at connection. In the blackface scene, Vitti's actions are externally offensive, if not for racist reasons at this period than for stealing a host's thunder, usurping her culture, diluting its value to her, or whatever. Social intimacy has barriers everywhere because we're so on edge and untrusting, partially because we don't really understand the emotions driving us.

This has never been a top Antonioni for me, though I do think it's a great film. What I find particularly amusing is in how the scenes in L'Avventura of Vitti playing around in the less-contained back half contrast with her meandering moments in this film. In the earlier movie, she's most captivating when reacting on the island on the hunt - perhaps because we're watching the beginning of an evolution take hold; irreversible sobriety settling in - and the second half piles on the banality, until it becomes immense suffering and breaks the couple, as it did Anna.

Here, in L'Eclisse, that's been established well before the first scene, and so we get a very strange intro to this film, where the entire first half is devoid of the central romance and functions like a fascinating version of L'Avventura's second half - where Vitti basks in her environments more resiliently, an air of novelty coats each moment that she greets life with such curiosity, attention, and enthusiasm. She's still depressed and suffocating, but breaks free from the lifelessness still suffocating Vitti's character in L'Avventura far more (her moments of joy are fleeting in both contexts, but -outside of active lovemaking in L'Avventura- feel more prevalent here; excluding her pre-'awakening', pre-disappearance in the first film, of course). Then the actual romance in L'Eclisse comes off as boring and unimportant, which may mirror relationships in Antonioni movies, but structurally works as a more concentrated episode like L'Avventura's first hour. Except that it quickly breaks from that, becoming more like its first part, Antonioni so disinterested in the utility of the relationship (which, I'd argue, is because both parties immediately acknowledge to themselves that there is little known, partially a sensation they fight against in the quest to understand emotions and connect), leading to more meandering engagements.

It's as if Antonioni was only allotting so much utility to the actual 'relationship' in L'Avventura because it was a vehicle for existential whiplash, and now that we're dropping in on characters who have acclimated (if not quite 'adjusted', because what red-blooded creature fully can?) to this kind of sterile isolation, "serious" attempts at connection refract back into defensive play. It's a less jarring contrast between sections, bleeding into one another like a vicious cycle of Vitti's relationships we never saw the start of before it ended for the film's first quarter. I get why Scorsese calls this the most ambitious Antonioni, even if it's not my favorite. Though I like how Antonioni can ostensibly imitate himself but - as Sloper said on the same page as colin's post - dish in divergent tones so as to give these scenes entirely novel feels. I don't feel the same kind of distress in this film as I did in the first of the tetralogy, but I do feel a lot more tranquility and aggression and irreparable obstacles to connection permeating the ennui. Even if the central couple has more fun together, they're also clearly more 'broken' by now, and the bare thread of hope that still exists in L'Avventura has been pulled out.