Chapter 10 "Making Space a Character": Eclipse, 1962

"Making Space a Character": Eclipse, 1962 0 Teacher Xu Feng from the Central Academy of Drama once gave a wonderful lecture on Antonioni. At the beginning, he talked about Italian films in the late 1950s. He quoted Bazin’s very accurate explanation, saying that Italian films had two new trends, namely, Antonioni and Fellini finished.Antonioni's trend is psychological neorealism, and Fellini's trend is ethical neorealism.This is also the biggest difference between the two Italian film masters. There is no Fellini-style ending with an "ethical point" in Antonioni's film, because he does not believe in God, but is a man who guards moral boundaries. people. (In an interview in the appendix of the DVD, someone asked this question, and Antonioni probably answered it like this: There is a morality in this world that can appease and calm one’s soul. If this moral entity is regarded as God, I believe in God ).

For most audiences who are accustomed to the ending of "ethical landing point", they often have a strong resistance to the ending where Antonioni is completely open and the characters disappear.My own intuition for his work is: cold, hard, abstract, slow, and profound, but the visual picture it presents is so perfect, charming, sensitive, and accurate.This makes me often have a contradictory viewing experience.For, I only give a "cautious" record based on what I have seen, understood, and known, and I do not expect a new or correct interpretation of it.My notes divide the film roughly into 9 sections.

1. Victoria, played by Monica Vitti, decides to disown her lover Ricardo.The time is a summer morning, and the location is an apartment on the outskirts of Rome.The film gives some static pictures of some parts of the room, and shows the relationship between people and people, people and space, and people and objects.There is very little dialogue between the two, mostly silent, and occasionally looking at each other.This creates a dull, tense atmosphere.In the slow beginning of ten minutes, Antonioni gives a detailed analysis of the space of the apartment, and also shows Monica Vitti's body, but these shots "do not have the meaning of fetish worship and voyeurism" , which is completely different from Hollywood movies.During these ten minutes, the position, line of sight, dialogue, and so on of the two people are all expressions of state, which are constantly and subtly changing.

When Victoria opened the curtains, we suddenly found a mushroom or mushroom cloud-shaped building outside, so surprising and incomprehensible (even today).In the second DVD, academic Aggiano Appra says: This scene makes the film feel like a sci-fi film - while actually like some other Antonioni works, it seems to say that we are not of this world, We are as alien to this world as aliens.Ricardo, meanwhile, sits on a chaise longue behind his writing desk, in the same tone as his interior furnishings: refined, complex, unemotional, "he is like a piece of furniture". In the first paragraph, from indoors to outdoors, Victoria walked out of the apartment, and Ricardo drove to entangle her, and the new city she passed was like a desert.This is a passage in which Victoria longs to be free from her physical and professional relationship with Ricardo.And the man seems very powerless, he doesn't understand what a woman needs, or how to make her happy, he thinks it would be a good reason for her to fall in love with someone else, but she just doesn't want to continue, not love or not love, To marry or not to marry.The emotion of modern man is a certain uncertainty.

2. Broker Pierrot, played by Alain Delon, appears on the stock exchange.The space is full of noise, madness and inside information.Huge marble columns seem to support modern temples, enshrining numbers and money.There is a scene in which the exchange observes a moment of silence for the sudden death of a colleague. After the moment of silence, the transaction breaks out again, which shows that modern people lose their rationality in rational transactions.Pierrot's face is like a sculpture, and every part of his body is full of vitality and used for gambling.It can be pointed out here that this stock exchange is actually in Milan, not Rome, but this is not important, because most of the scenes in the book take place in the suburb called EUR, an "abstract modern space", while the old familiar The city center and residential areas did not appear.

3. Victoria took refuge in a friend's house and chatted with a girlfriend who had returned from Africa.This space is composed of pictures and dolls, full of imagination of distant and strange countries.Victoria pointed to a landscape photo and asked: Where did you go?But in reality the photograph is not a map, and her psychological landing point is rather empty (or just disorienting).Then, suddenly, as if dreamlike, Victoria, dressed as a black man, begins to dance hilariously to background (inner) drums beating.This piece of performance and status is in complete contrast to the dreary modern city life. In the documentary part of the DVD, there is a segment of the "shoemaker's game" deleted from "Adventure" - the narration says "games are the eternal element of Antonioni".But the brief moment of pleasure passes quickly, and Victoria steps out to find a dog for her girlfriend at night, at which point she re-enters reality, lost and small against the backdrop of spatial architecture.

4. Victoria and her friends went out on a small plane.The picture of the wings passing over the clouds is naturally reminiscent of "Days Above the Clouds" thirty years later.Only above the clouds can one obtain a moment of tranquility and peace.On the plane, people seem to be separated from the city in which they live.At the same time, we can overlook the whole of New Rome, or overlook the "blueprint of New Rome", a huge, modern desert of reinforced concrete.It seems to be a metaphor: "Humans have created the modern city - the supreme monument of civilization, but this city may have survived longer than human beings."

5. Panic after the stock market plummeted in the stock exchange, including Victoria's mother who went bankrupt.At this time, the spatial scenery is extraordinarily huge and oppressive.Victoria saw a man who had lost all his belongings draw a few small flowers on the table of a cafe outside the Exchange.At this time, the relationship between Victoria and Pierrot changed. ——Antonioni's films are not "plotless", but "anti-plot", that is, his story sequence and development are not in the audience's imagination and expectations.And the stories lack drama, no outward action.Antonioni himself said in an interview that in my films the determinant of emotional development has always been internal.

6-7． Pierrot had spent a tiring day dealing with countless bankrupt clients, and after berating the people who came to beg him, he came downstairs to Victoria at night.It can be seen that the indifferent Pierrot is getting bored and empty in his heart at this time. He and Victoria standing at the window are testing and cruising each other. Obviously they need each other, but they are not sure. Pierrot's car was driven into the river by a drunkard, and the car crashed.For Pierrot, the death of a stranger equals the loss of his engine, his money, his time.Immediately afterwards, he and Victoria wandered aimlessly, finally kissed, and soon encountered her struggle-this kind of struggle from the body, this film has from beginning to end, obviously this is also a manifestation of psychological state .

8. Victoria's only date with Pierrot.The scene of dating is piled up building materials, unfinished buildings, empty and boring streets.At this time, the weight of space (environment) as a role begins to increase, and in a sense, only space is the eternal protagonist.Agiano Appra said about this: "This objective world already exists, and the characters/characters are just passers-by. There is a saying (the relationship between space and characters) that is alienation. We feel alienated from the world around us. "In addition, Antonioni himself had a vivid statement when he explained the concept of "space is character"-"Shouting a word to the corridor and shouting a word to the street are two different things."

Victoria followed Pierrot home, kissing and then struggling. She carried the clothes that Pierrot had accidentally torn, wandered in his indoor space, and looked out from the window.These have been named "Antoniennui" (Antoniennui).He and she use finger flirting instead of sex.He and she lay on the grass and talked about unanswered love and marriage.He and she simulate other couples on the couch in the exchange office.Then, it was a farewell, and he and her agreed to "see you tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the day after tomorrow... See you tonight, the old place." But this scene was filmed as if it was parting from life and death, which foreshadowed ominous and uneasy.After Victoria left, Pierrot rehooked all the receivers that had been set aside, and real life continued.It means that his love with her is isolated and short-lived. 9. Finally, one of the most famous endings in film history, consists of several, intermittent empty shots.Here, "the location is not used as a scene or a foil, but obeys the plot setting, but becomes the object of shooting."Transcribe a description of this passage "No dialogue, only broken sounds—sprinklers, water flowing from graduated buckets into sewers, buses, children shouting, and Giovanni on piano, wind instruments Fragment of Fusco's atonal music. While people are in the shot, people driving a carriage, nurses pushing prams, people waiting for the bus, people getting off the bus, people on the balcony, turn off Sprinklers, but most shots are empty."What can be pointed out here is the people - there are close-ups of faces passing them, but they are only part of the scene.Monica Vitti and Alain Delon didn't show up. What is presented here is the space in which the protagonist passes and exists.While the protagonist disappears, the space becomes the character that ultimately dominates the film.These spaces are connected together with the most perfect editing group. It is said that Deleuze made this ending myth, saying that the shots of these spaces capture the "eternity of time".This group of montage shots, the standard company DVD version is seven and a half minutes, it is said that some versions are five minutes, the reason is that after a screening in Cannes in 1962, the audience made a "terrible reaction" to it, so the producer Tom shortened it.In Christine Thompson, David Bordwell's "World Cinema History" described Antonioni's works, they all "take a slow pace, and add many 'dead moments' between events. Some scenes unfold before the performance of the action, and still linger after the performance of the action." At the extreme end of the film, the so-called "dead moment" completely replaces the performance of the action, and it seems to last for eternity. 9+5 They have different interpretations on the title of the film. Aggiano Appra said that the name of the film is because the film is about a modern industrial society. In the film's New Rome, women's emotions are ups and downs like a lunar eclipse .Carlo Di Carlo said it was because of a solar eclipse that year when the film was filmed, and Antonioni filmed the whole process on the road in Florence, but it was not used in the film.But the last shot of the film, the close-up of the street lamp lighting up, is undoubtedly the same as a solar eclipse. It illuminates the entire screen and quickly brings darkness into it.And so the movie ends.