Michelangelo Antonioni

In an era where movies about ocean-liner catastrophes make hundreds of millions of dollars at Christmas, how shall we make a case for an art-film writer-director whose chief claim to fame was being a middle-class soul in anguish? It may be hard to remember now, but thirty-five years ago Michelangelo Antonioni may well have been the most acclaimed filmmaker in the world. It is a spirit that Cinematheque Ontario is clearly out to rekindle in their exhaustive retrospective, Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni.

In a career spanning 16 feature films—he is 85 years of age but apparently at work on another movie—Antonioni’s critical reputation rests for the most part on three he made between 1960 and 1962: L’Avventura, La Notte [The Night], and L’Eclisse [The Eclipse]. These are the movies where he succeeded most completely in the two chores he set for his cinema: to chronicle the breakdown of modern emotional life, and to do so in a way uniquely cinematic and firmly under the control of the director on the set.

From a three-decade remove he looks to have been more successful in the second chore than the first. The critique of modern life running through Antonioni’s work can be summed up in a single phrase: “it won’t work”. The archetypal Antonioni film resembles soap opera for intellectuals who have been unlucky in love: it is full of love affairs that go nowhere and marriages that run on for no reason; people so emotionally delicate that a loud conversation might make them explode, and people so emotionally dead that the explosion probably wouldn’t wake them.

People in Antonioni movies don’t do normal, sensible things—like call the police when they find dead bodies in the park, or refrain from attempting impossible love affairs. They seem beyond rational self-control, as if life to them is just a movie they’re watching, where they are powerless to affect the plot and changing channels is not an option. Antonioni’s characters—and by extension, his idea of most participants in modern life—are quite simply unequipped to properly handle matters of any moral consequence. We merely go through the motions of a moral life, unaware of what we do and unhappy about it.

Introducing his classic L’Avventura to the public at Cannes in 1960, Antonioni was quite explicit about this, speaking of the “heavy baggage of emotional traits which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but rather unsuited and inadequate. They condition us without offering us any help, they create problems without offering us any possible solutions.”

Thus the main characters in L’Avventura are a man and a woman who become romantically entangled while searching for a missing person: his lover—and her best friend. “It can’t be right. It’s absurd,” cries Claudia. “Good,” Sandro replies. “It’s better if it’s absurd. It means there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Virtually all of Antonioni’s characters are similarly ill-equipped for surviving modern life, if not so similarly forthright about it: In Blow Up, a London fashion photographer whose life is as glossy and as emotionally substantial as a photographic negative is paralyzed with inertia when he realizes he has photographed a murder. L’Eclisse is an apocalyptic version of A Man and a Woman where a couple enters a relationship both know is doomed. In La Notte, a burned-out writer tries to convince himself that he still loves his wife—but his wife knows better.

(You get the feeling that if Antonioni had directed Casablanca, Bogart would have had an adulterous affair with Ingrid Bergman, suffered massive guilt, and then walked into the Atlantic ocean while Paul Henreid and Claude Rains got drunk at Major Strasser’s headquarters. What’s frightening is that it would probably have worked.)

Antonioni’s is a depressing attitude (and not even a particularly original one, reaching back to Neizsche and possibly even to St. Benidict) yet one so beautifully presented that it is utterly convincing—at least while the theatre lights are down. No other director hitches his philosophical wagon so completely to the image he puts on screen, and no other director gets as much benefit from it. A lot of Antonioni’s films look perfect because they look perfect.

It’s that look that stays with you, and it’s intended that way. The images, not the actors, carry the emotional load: what characters do is less important than the spaces the director puts between them. To a viewer raised on the orthodox Hollywood style (i.e., all of us) Antonioni’s camerawork looks self-consciously artsy, almost self-parodying. Yet, look at a still from any of his films, and you know exactly what’s up between his characters.

This is the most elemental communication cinema is capable of and it’s Antonioni’s bread-and-butter. He wants to use film the way we use English; not as a medium for the expression of an idea, (we don’t think up an idea and then express it in language) but with the medium as the idea. The man talks with his camera—what’s up there on the screen is exactly what he’s saying, not describable in terms any more basic than the images. You look, and you understand. (You may have trouble explaining to somebody else what you have understood, but that comes with the territory.)

What he talks about with that camera, in a word, is isolation. His frames are full of empty space, inhumanely and architecturally divided. Streets and public spaces always seem to be empty; his characters alone in the world, isolated for closer observation. People cling unhappily together for comfort against the isolation, fearful of solitude yet unable to handle intimacy. You get the feeling that Antonioni’s ideal film set would be a desert, populated by two people who are afraid to look at one another.

Sooner or later, though, enough alienation is enough. Two decades ago, critic Pauline Kael wrote that she wished Antonioni would, just once, use his talent frivolously—perhaps in a trashy mystery or something.

He came close in 1975’s The Passenger. Here, Jack Nicolson inhabits what for another director would be an action movie scenario: a journalist, sick of his life, trades identities with a dead man he fortuitously resembles. The dead man unfortunately turns out to have been an arms dealer, and dangerous people soon come calling. Things proceed at a very leisurely pace (this is a movie that you can transcribe in longhand as you watch) towards an enigmatic conclusion that makes you wish Antonioni would go even further and do a movie with Bruce Willis—Die Hard: An Outline of Identity.

That not likely being in the cards, we are left with a canon of unmatched seriousness, best taken in moderate doses. At his best (which is often) Antonioni has made films that are beautiful, intellectually challenging, and—provided you are a delicate liberal—emotionally engaging. If they are old news they are at least true news; beautiful artifacts produced by the best eye for cinematic composition since Orson Welles.

How will the hard-nosed 90’s respond? Antonioni might note that all the problems he speaks of are still with us—perhaps even more acutely than ever. On the other hand, easy transcendence seems to be a way of life for us now. If Antonioni were to show up for a press conference in front of CITY-TV tomorrow, the Speaker’s Corner crowd would probably grab him by the shoulders, give him a gentle shake and say, “hey, just get over it, buddy!”

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1998

Pietro Germi

In all the standard cinematic reference books, one looks in vain for the name of Pietro Germi. A popular and renowned filmmaker in Italy during his lifetime, he achieved international fame during the 60’s, winning an Oscar for Divorce, Italian Style and the Cannes Palm d’Or for The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. Yet after his death in 1975 Germi seems to have vanished from the collective memory of international cinema—passed over especially by those of us whose business it is to remember.

How can a filmmaker who made so many memorable movies have been so easily forgotten? Giuseppe Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso and The Legend of 1900, recently hazarded an explanation: “Germi’s offense was that he made films that the public at large wanted to see. An Auteur was somebody who devoted himself to a single theme right from the start and stuck with it to the end. A director who moved around, changed, and then went back to a previous theme or genre wasn’t considered ‘deep’.”

Germi was dubbed “the great carpenter” by Fellini, a co-screenwriter of several of his movies from the early 50’s, and the tool-belt fits: Germi’s movies are splendid works of craftsmanship—structurally taut, visually striking, and possessing a splendid sense of time and (especially) place. His cine-carpentry produced distinctive films in a variety of genres—the neo-realism of The Way of Hope; In the Name of the Law, a western with debts divided equally between John Ford and Sicily; the detective story (The Facts of Murder), and the series of dazzling social satires with which he closed out his career (Seduced and Abandoned et al.)

Yet even a brilliant carpenter can raise a sense of unease in the heart of the Auteur taxonomist, partly because he resists integration into the grand scheme of authorship by which so many critics understand cinema. Critics like their great filmmakers to be artistically obsessed—all else is mere craftsmanship.

Such a critic’s plight is not an unsympathetic one. Confronted as a series, Germi’s is not an integral body of work; you don’t get much help understanding the artistic merit of a particular film by looking at any of the other movies he made. After a while, they start to look like the product not so much of a distinct artistic sensibility, as they do of a particular psychological profile—many seem to be the work of a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.

There is therefore no benevolent artistic place to pigeonhole the films that don’t connect with you; you tend to write them off, rather than think them through more carefully as you might the work of a capital-A Auteur. Robert Bresson’s weakest film can still ride the credibility of the rest of his catalogue. Pietro Germi’s weakest films have to stand on their own.

Consider The Railroad Man—a 1958 entry in the strange and hard-to-adapt-to genre of the Italian political weepie. An amalgam of neo-realism, bitter libertarian politics, and industrial-strength Hollywood-style soap, The Railroad Man is a popular entertainment seemingly designed to drive proletarian Italian family men to tears. (Enough tears were elicited to make it one of the most popular films in Italy the year of its release.)

A man commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. The unfortunate engineer who was in control at the time—Germi cast himself in the leading role—is demoted for his negligence. His union doesn’t support him, and during a subsequent labor dispute, the engineer briefly becomes a strikebreaker. For this, he suffers terrible guilt and his life falls apart. As seen today by a North American, there’s little for a modern viewer to fasten onto; the tension between Hollywood-style melodrama and Italian slice-of-life begins to feel anachronistic and the film becomes a curious time capsule; neo-realism brought to the level of television.

By all accounts a solitary and difficult man to deal with (off the set he would often respond only to notes pushed under his door), Germi made films that feel like the work of an outsider. He displayed a great sympathy for the worker thrown out of a job; the man forced by poverty into crime; and above all for people whose lives are made absurd by their country’s even more absurd laws and codes of honor. His comedies were bitter and satirical; his dramas pessimistic. Billy Wilder said that he found in Germi a kindred spirit; probably because the work of both filmmakers points to a universe largely broken beyond repair.

His style was deliberately out of step with the international Italian cinema of the time; he was unsympathetic to Visconti (to whom Germi’s melodramas are often unfavorably contrasted) and downright hostile to Antonioni (for whom the feeling was apparently mutual). Yet if his yoking of popular Hollywood forms to local cultural realities was largely a device to please his audience, the combination also produced some unique artifacts of international cinema.

For example, In the Name of the Law, Germi’s third film, is an out-and-out western set in contemporary (1948) Sicily: A new magistrate comes to an isolated town and finds it’s local government corrupt, and the local aristocracy in cahoots with the Mafia to keep the citizens unemployed and powerless. In the classic western tradition, the lone man cleans up the town. But the film’s charm comes mostly from its confounding of our expectations: this is a western where there is no concept of a frontier and where strapping on the guns is not an option for the law-and-order man. It is both Hollywood and Sicily; perhaps the only real Italian western ever made.

Made a year later, The Way of Hope follows a dirt-poor group of Sicilian miners as they make their Grapes-of-Wrath way to France. It is a singular film—not least for its combining the ethical urgency of neo-realism (Rossilini called it “being on the side of those who suffer”) with a sense of visual composition that would find a home in Battleship Potemkin, and a Hollywood sentimentalism worthy of Spielberg at his ickiest. The Way of Hope is both brutally frank about the misery to the Sicilian poor—the best hope of a Sicilian is to escape to France—yet it ends with what in cinematic terms amounts to a miracle. Hollywood wins out over neo-realism in the end: the good guys must win, even if they really couldn’t.

Best of all is The Facts of Murder, dubbed by Variety magazine on it’s 1959 release as “the first successful crime picture ever made in Italy”. This is faint praise: Hollywood-tough and Italian-characterful, The Facts of Murder is as good as any detective movie ever made, and better than most. If it’s cinematic cabinet-making, it’s great cinematic cabinet making—you wish the man had turned out more of them.

The list could probably go on. The collection currently being presented includes just over half of the films Germi directed and makes a respectable case for the carpenter as worthy subject for a retrospective—although not without a certain irony. Taken as individual films, a gratifying number of Germi’s works stand the tests of both time and watchability. But as a body of work, they are collectively just obscure enough for the man who made them to be lost between the frames.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2000

Marcello Mastroianni

It is rare for a cinema-society to stage an actor retrospective, but Marcello Mastroianni was a rare actor. He was pretty, prolific, and profound, and starting tonight Cinematheque Ontario presents 22 Mastroianni titles selected by Anna Maria Tatò, his companion of 22 years. It is a presentation that goes a long way towards illuminating Mastroianni’s particular genius: the actor emerges cinematically triumphant while portraying every imaginable human failing.

Is Mastroianni the most important actor in the history of cinema? He has certainly left the most attractive legacy. More believable than Bogart; more attractive than Brando, he has bequeathed to us the truest cinematic icon of the 20th century’s closing half: the ineffective male in all his many varieties.

No other star has been so attractive exhibiting doe-eyed inadequacy, although Cary Grant was occasionally allowed to came close. Mastroianni’s stock in trade is being overpowered and overmatched, whether as the intellectual labour organizer out of his depth in The Organizer; as Sophia Loren’s hopelessly outclassed ex-lover in Marriage, Italian Style, or in Dark Eyes, as a wastrel at the end of his life who has abandoned romance for simple inertia. What emerges from his work as a whole is Mastroianni’s closely-observed three ages of Man: as perplexed by the world, by women, and ultimately by himself.

Mastroianni is most famous in North America for two collaborations with Federico Fellini from the beginning of the 60’s: La Dolce Vita, and 8 1/2. 40 years later, both movies provide a startlingly up-to-date portrait of the man of today—or at least the way the man-of-today feels about himself. Mastroianni gives us men to whom things happen, who have lost the power to meaningfully initiate action. In 8 1/2 he is Fellini’s self-portrait: a burned-out filmmaker no longer in charge of his life or his creativity, who desires nothing more than to stay upright in hope that somehow, clarity will reassert itself.

It does not—although Fellini is more optimistic about the consequences at the close of 8 1/2 than by the denouement of La Dolce Vita, where the battle against disorientation is deemed hopeless. There, one character sums up the struggle: “We need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art; in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside time, detached.” Unfortunately, they succeed. All that’s left to do is give up on life altogether.

As intractable (if ultimately more bemusing) a struggle is the Mastroianni Man’s tortured association with women—call him the reluctant ladykiller. If he seems bewildered by women, women are certainly not bewildered by him: Matinee-idol good looks, a voice so beautiful as to make the dubbing of foreign-language films seem a crime, a sense of worldliness held in check as if by memories of pain.... What’s to resist? The Mastroianni Man can have any woman he wants—except, as it turns out, the one he loves.

Take Visconti’s White Nights—a superior weepie from the director of such light classics as The Damned and Death in Venice. This is soap-opera for guys, with Mastroianni suffering in the Jane Wyman role: Boy, out wandering the evening streets, rescues girl being harassed by bikers. He’s interested in her, but she’s preoccupied. We learn that she’s carrying a torch for Mr. Wrong—a tall, tough and handsome guy who had to go on the lam from the law but who promised to meet her on a bridge over the local canal at ten o’clock some night in the indefinite future. Every evening, she goes there. So does our boy, who gradually sways her towards himself. Then, the very night she finally falls for Mastroianni, who should show up and whisk her away? No, it’s too terrible to even contemplate....

What is surprising is how easily the second-billed Mastroianni dominates the movie, even though he’s in the passive, secondary role. Showing a kidnapper’s ability to get his captives emotionally on side, he effortlessly co-opts us into his suffering.

It is a skill he relies on, nowhere more effectively than in Il Bell’Antonio, another good, healthy measure of industrial-strength suds. (Confounded by the Catholic guilt attending every good Italian boyhood, Antonio can perform sexually only with women he doesn’t like. With the woman he loves, he is impotent. In a society that demands children, he must therefore renounce love.) Yet, with an alchemist’s expertise, Mastroianni turns this purplest of melodramas into the purest white satin.

There is technique to his alchemy as well as truth. The technique is simply the actor’s knowing exactly how to make himself look cinematically good. When he’s on, he doesn’t simply look good, he looks perfect. He is the only possible subject in the frame, and he draws your eye, no matter who’s around him. (This is an extremely useful ability in a movie like Fellini’s Ginger and Fred, where an actor could any time be upstaged by a group of singing and dancing midgets.) Your sympathy is his, and he will make you care even when you shouldn’t.

It’s an ability he found even more useful in his later career. Actors, unlike directors, must grow old, and with age it seems the Mastroianni Man gives up the fight against bewilderment. The wolf, having worn sheep’s clothing for so long, decides he likes the life, and settles in to the role of the philanderer aging gracefully. “Let me tell you a story” he says to a stranger in a restaurant in Dark Eyes. And he tells us of the time where he almost experienced the great love of his life but that somehow it slipped from his grasp.

He has a great storytelling face, and the director returns to it again and again, the face now providing the counterpoint to the matinee-idol’s skill. Suddenly we notice the truth in that face, especially at the climax of his story, when it displays a sudden self-awareness that, for reasons he still can’t fully grasp, our narrator has just lost everything of real value to him. It is the semi-perplexed look of a man realizing that he has had the best moment of his life, but he has mostly missed it. It is a look of amusement and regret, of mastery lost and not to be regained, a look of farewell.

It is the truth in that look, more than anything else, that connects him to us. It sums up a character’s life, and it sums up Marcello Mastroianni’s career. His screen life documented for us the passing of credible cinematic manliness. His face on the screen is a snapshot of ourselves.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 1999

The day Napster died

To those of us for whom Napster offered a welcome glimpse of the bright future of the distribution of recorded music, all the record-company high-fives the other day over their appeals-court judgment against Napster look like a Jurassic convention of brontasauri celebrating the death of the first mammal. They may not have noticed how few of the critters scuttling around at their feet share their enthusiasm. Most of us are now looking about for a more robust warm-blooded creature to take care of us.

Personally, Napster brought me a lot of joy, and whenever I talked to anybody else about it they’d come alive: Their enthusiasm for the service was exceeded only by their enthusiasm for the music they’d discovered. It was as if recorded music had suddenly become meaningful again.

Discovery is the key word. The complaint voiced by the record companies about Napster is that it undercuts the mass purchase of popular product, which they see as their own turf: They’ve created the demand for Britney and Christina; now they worry that they’ll move only 5 million albums instead of 10.

This doesn’t square with the experience of anybody I know. Generally, we’ve used Napster to explore, educate ourselves and chase down obscurities—areas either badly served by the record companies, or not served at all. Napster gives you access to music at the speed of intellect; I can recall more than once a quick download settling a musical argument.

I never actually bothered to downloaded an album. Napster traffics in individual songs, so downloading an album requires a lot of work. This inclines you evaluate as you go along, and ditch more than you listen to. Thus, one unintended result of Napster’s ascendance is the destruction of the myth of the long-playing album as the ideal medium of delivery.

And surprisingly, I kept very little of what I downloaded. Record companies rend their garments about lost sales, but I doubt I would have bought most of the music I downloaded and saved anyway. Before Napster, I wouldn’t have known a lot of it existed.

No, the real threat Napster poses to the record companies is in the knowledge that its easy sampling provides. Napster is radio-on-demand with an accessible catalog. In the record companies’ ideal world, knowledge about the products they sell may only be purchased with the product itself—to hear something once you must own it. The ugly little record-company secret Napster has exposed is that if you are able to find out what you really want and liked, you consume less of what they have to offer you.

In that regard, Napster at it’s best worked like a well-stocked universally-accessible public library. (The underlying principle is exactly the same: A single purchased copy held in trust for multiple users—Napster’s crime was merely one of being more efficient and effective at carrying it out.) It gave you access to a huge catalog of music—on a good night, seemingly the entire history of recorded music. As with any good catalog, you often end up making aesthetic connections you might not have thought of before. Using Napster was the first time I’d ever been able to see music as an intellectual resource.

Ultimately, Napster reminded me how much I love music—not the music the record companies want to sell me—but recorded music as a vibrant, cultural phenomenon. It also showed me how little of it I actually need to own. It’s the social element of discovery that comes with sharing, which is a world away from buying and possessing.

So, the record industry has burned down the library of Alexandra. What now? Personally, I intend to boycott: I’m never going to buy a compact disk again. (This is incidentally no loss to the record companies—compact disks have always been such an outrageous rip-off that I hardly ever bought them anyway.) But now I’m going to violate copyright whenever I can. I’ve bought myself a CD burner and I’m going to use it any chance I get. I will of course share everything I have with everybody I know.

But mostly, I will look for and support any online service that aims to provide the kind of service Napster has provided. I have seen the future when musical life is not entirely under the thumbs of a few corporate types fighting for their gold-plated bathtub fixtures. It’s worth fighting for.

-Published in the Globe and Mail, 2001