Surrealism of the Actual
HERR, MIKE
ON SCREEN Surrealism of the Actual By Mike Herr La Notte ("The Night"), Michelangelo Antonioni's second major work to be shown here, confirms what L'Avventura suggested: He is the best...
...It is not as pure or as subtly made...
...the sterile stretches of cement blocks or panelling that crowd the actors out of frame...
...In La Notte there are many moments that stick in the mind...
...the impression of intimacy one gets from seeing a group at a distance, dissolving as the camera approaches within hearing of their banalities...
...The protagonist is Giovanni Pontano, a successful novelist living in Milan with his wife Lidia...
...Antonioni can account for every foot of film...
...Husband and wife are no longer in love, but retain a kind of reflexaction intimacy, a nostalgic affection based more on habit than immediate feeling...
...Mike Herr regularly writes on the world of film for The New Leader...
...You could stop the projector a hundred times, and the still image you would be left with would be epiphanous...
...ON SCREEN Surrealism of the Actual By Mike Herr La Notte ("The Night"), Michelangelo Antonioni's second major work to be shown here, confirms what L'Avventura suggested: He is the best director working today, and one of the few genuinely important artists in any medium...
...Pontano has come to believe that in the mid-20th century, the writer is an anachronism, living and working in a vacuum between two epochs...
...His scenes are not the catalogue of an unengaged esthete...
...Sometimes it is obvious or too much like its predecessor in theme and characterization...
...Later, as they drive to a party being given to celebrate his new novel, he tells his wife of the encounter...
...At dawn, they are left together on the lip of a sand trap on the industrialist's golf course to face the dreadful pointlessness of their lives...
...All the unexpected things that oppress, or set off a mood, affect us almost as acutely as they do the characters...
...The opening shot, a lovely but dilapidating old structure set flush against the cold sleekness of the new Pirelli Building, implies what is to follow with all the precision of a great poem's first line...
...His characters move against backgrounds that reinforce their professional and moral predicaments...
...Each attempts an affair, but cannot work up enough feeling to follow through...
...This is the most valid way to make a movie that I can think of, the whole point, in fact, of the medium...
...We see the couple (brilliantly played by Marcello Mastriaonni and leanne Moreau) visiting a dying friend...
...and one stunning, vaguely discomforting shot of a cat raptly staring at a Roman bust lying on a lawn...
...they relate directly to the drama and the people he gives us...
...With them we see and hear sudden changes of light, the appearance of landscapes or the looming of architecture, the quick, nasty intrusion of alien sound...
...Eventually they reunite, go to a nightclub where they watch an erotic floorshow, and then on to a party being given at the estate of a wealthy industrialist...
...But to see the way Antonioni constructs his story and develops the characters and their environment is as exciting and as immediate an experience as you could hope to get from a created thing...
...But ultimately La Notte is no rehash, no indication of a limited talent...
...When you think back over Antonioni's pictures (and you do think back), it is almost always in terms of the images with, which he makes his story...
...I particularly recall the anarchic reaction of the crowd at the party when a sudden cloudburst interrupts their dancing, with one woman wildly caressing a statue of Pan in the rain...
...He can create a surrealism out of the actual without violating the actual, maintaining that first-level authenticity of setting and behavior without which art is practically worthless...
...In outline, the story conveys little...
...On the way out of the hospital alone, Giovanni is accosted by a nymphomaniac...
...La Notte advances Antonioni's concept of the plotless film, building in episodes which, within themselves, seem not to build at all...
...La Notte is not as good as L'Avventura...
...It is a beautifully logical extension of Antonioni's basic themes, often bolder and more meaningful than L'Avventura, and clearly a masterpiece...
...Fed up with the Milan literati, Lidia leaves the party and begins a long, solitary walk...
...And the climax (which is drawn out anyway) is a little false...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 8
