Screen

...Into her chamber on the anniversary of his death steals a would-be assassin, Sebastian (Franco Branciaroli), whose resemblance to the king-he appears from a secret passage behind the king's portrait, as if he were a male Galatea brought to life by this female Pygmalion-prompts the queen to fall instantly in love...

...It only means that I was lucky enough to be in a position to appreciate them...

...In America, Hitchcock released Psycho, a movie that was to have as much impact as what the French were doing, and whose use of techniques adapted from television was in its way just as revolutionary...

...Video has in general a potential for color aberrations and garishness that television productions take care to avoid...

...The film begins, literally, in Sturm und Drang...

...While it is a parody of the silent screen, it is also an homage to the nineteenth-century's own mass imagery...

...It's the story of the whole nineteenth century acted out on a single stage...

...Oberwald is loosely based on a Cocteau play whose title, The Eagle Has Two Heads, already suggests the Janus-like vision of the film...

...Over-saturated in some scenes, the color becomes desaturated in others, and takes on the look of a mezzotint...

...It's true that looking at still photography encourages metaphysical reflection, as Antonioni demonstrated himself in Blow-Up...

...That that's where he wants to be is suggested by the fact that he didn't make Oberwald on film...

...It gives us something visible to be alienated from...

...Antonioni is now nearly seventy years old, and the times don't seem so propitious for revolutionary new ideas...

...The American press has ridiculed the film so thoroughly, I'll be amazed if it gets a run even in the art houses...

...He sat at an editing table and played the video medium like a genius of baroque music at the keyboard of his organ...

...With so much going on that was unprecedented and would clearly be influential, it was as if the time demanded someone with a new comprehension of movies, a thinker with a large vision who would be able to grasp the historical and aesthetic significance of what was happening...

...At times characters move around in private envelopes of color, so that, for instance, a blue queen might be talking with a green Sebastian...

...They are an expression of Antonioni's own historical awareness, an admission that you can't go home again...

...If so, I'm the only person I know who is...

...Antonioni appeared to be that person...

...The title refers to the imperial eagle, and the play concerns a nineteenth-century queen (Monica Vitti) who has sealed herself off in her mountain retreat to mourn her long-dead king...

...It is an indication that he remains in the avant-garde, out on the edges of the medium's potential, beyond the limits of the contemporary audience...

...Maybe these coincidences just prepared me to look at Oberwald in a unique way...

...Sebastian is being pursued through a violent thunderstorm by soldiers who have wounded him...

...The vulgar colors in which Antonioni tells his story are a kind of acknowledgment of Romanticism's fate in our time...

...But gradually blue came to mean a love scene as well, while red might be used for anger, etc...

...L'Avventura showed him to be a metaphysician, a philosopher as sensitive to the nuances of modern feeling as he was to the technical possibilities of sound tracks, an innovator who could leap ahead in the argument that the history of the movies was working out, and who was not afraid to leave the audience behind, if necessary, in order to pursue the kind of wild, original ideas for which the time seemed so ripe...

...I think the reason I respond to this film is that Antonioni has a great and rare gift for thinking in images...

...In light of that experience, Antonioni might be justified now to take the poor response to Oberwald as a good sign...

...But when exposed to extreme lighting conditions, like sunlight, videotape has very harsh contrasts and the color becomes difficult to balance...

...I' ve spent a good deal of the last year thinking about the nineteenth century myself in conjunction with a book I'm writing on the history of photography...

...L'Avventura was also hooted and jeered when it was shown for the first time at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival...

...The original passion becomes mired in intrigue, power struggles, doubt, mistrust...

...Maybe it's just that I'm the right audience for this movie...

...Taking refuge in the castle, he emerges from behind the portrait and thereby inflames the passions of the queen...

...But I don't think that's it...

...What Antonioni does with it is to make his film a remarkable meditation on Romanticism itself, or rather on the nineteenth century, whose origins were in the Romantic movement...

...But then her attempts to conceal and • protect him are increasingly compromised by her retainers...

...That was over two decades ago...

...Anton-ioni's use of color filters makes a witty allusion to such conventions...

...And last summer, also in connection with photography, I made a television program that was shot on videotape...

...Since Antonioni is an imperious, at times arrogant man, as aloof from public reaction as his camera stays from his characters, he may be taking some perverse satisfaction in the bad reception Oberwald has gotten...

...Its high melodramas were a last gasp of Romantic fervor, a final vulgarization of Romantic agony and ecstacy...

...But on the other hand, by being a proper analogue for extreme emotions, the extreme color is also sympathetic to the story in a sense .It is a primitive image that fits primitive Romantic feeling...

...WESTERBECK, JR...

...There is a certain obstinacy in Antonioni' s use of videotape, which is the aspect of Oberwald that has most offended reviewers...

...The New Wave continued to build in France, Godard and Truf-faut both following their extraordinary debuts the year before with new films- he Petit Soldat and Shoot the Piano Player-that confirmed their international importance as directors...

...There is an aesthetic purpose to his use of videotape, for at the same time that it is a way to project the visual future, it also allows him to work his way back into the past...

...However obstinate Antonioni may be, though, he is not merely arbitrary...

...The most startling thing he did was to refuse to be limited by videotape's rather narrow properties...

...No medium has proven this more painfully than the movies, during the days of the silent screen...

...It is as if he were accepting a given level of ugliness and vulgarity as an irreversible condition of modern life, and he insists on making his art out of that instead of resorting to archaic ideas of what is beautiful...

...In places it looks as if Antonioni has transcribed his videotape by filming it right off a television monitor...

...Even if that's so, though, it doesn't detract from Oberwald's originality and visual complexity...

...The TV scan lines are clearly visible, and give the image even more of the appearance of nineteenth-century engraving...

...And perhaps most stunning of all, an Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, burst upon the international scene with a feature called L'Avventura...

...In effect, Romanticism gives way to Realpolitik...

...Yet his most recent movie, The Mystery of Oberwald, which premiered here at the New York Film Festival, demonstrates that he is as daring, as original, and as advanced a thinker about film as he ever was...

...Tinting began simply as a way to indicate time of day, night scenes being given a blue cast so 'the audience would know that it was night...

...He shot it on videotape and then transcribed it, Indeed, he took the opportunity to experiment with the full range of visual effects that video makes possible...

...They make the image cruder and more primitive, yet refine it, too, enriching the historical associations it carries...

...One way or another, all modern art has resulted from the failure of Romanticism...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...The monotones isolate the characters in their absoluteness, in the Romantic purity of their emotions...

...It's possible that I was attracted to the subject of still photographs because my mind is, like his, predisposed to work in that way...

...They also seem to be a direct reference to the silent screen, whose conventions included color tinting as a code for emotions...

...Used under carefully diffused light, videotape develops even more lush, saturated colors than the richest color film stock...

...No modern audience could identify with these Romantic types anyhow, and the garish color concedes the fact...

...As even this brief outline reveals, the plot is a heavily Romantic one...

...As a consequence, Romanticism itself has been for us unapproachable, unrecapturable...

...Cocteau himself did a movie adaptation of the play in 1948, but I've not seen it...

...As of the Festival, it had no distributor...

...On the one hand, all the electronic tinkering is a way for Antonioni to keep his usual distance from his characters...

...What makes Antonioni's use of video striking is that these are precisely the qualities he has explored and emphasized...