Essential Reading

A conversation starter

Luc Moullet on Michelangelo Antonioni: Rockefeller's Melancholy

"It is funny to note how Antonioni—who denounces in his writings as well as in his images the inhuman side of a world invaded by industry and the industrial landscape—succeeds in evoking all the plastic beauty—unknown until then - of the world of factories. He’s always the filmmaker who swallows his own tail. Through the image that he gives of the modern world, Antonioni glorifies it. It is the same thing for Buñuel and Fuller, who say they are attacking religion and violence, but, as filmmakers, live only by them. Could Buñuel exist without Catholicism? I don’t think so."

Moullet

Identification of a Woman (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982)

Notes on the ending: The last scene in the film reiterates the corruption of modern Rome that Antonioni is trying to convey. Niccolò walks into his home and goes to the window and stares at the sun with his sunglasses. He proceeds to close his eyes and imagine telling his nephew about the science-fiction film he is making that his nephew had requested. Niccolò begins imagining: it is about a spaceship that will travel into the sun, the nephew asks, “Why towards the sun?” and Niccolò answers, “To study it. If man can discover how matter is distributed in the sun and its dynamics he’ll know how the universe is made and the cause of many thing,” to which the nephew asks, “And then?” and then the non-diegetic haunting music gets turned up followed by the film’s credits. This conclusion fits perfectly into the alienation theme evident not only in this work but all of Anotinoni's. Niccolò feels so alienated from modern Rome that he is forced to make a film that has nothing to do with it. A film as far away as possible from the decadent society he lives in, a science-fiction film in space, not even in the same world that he is a part of. Another important aspect of this scene is Niccolò’s interest in finding out the cause of many things. This is more proof of the confusion he feels from modern Rome. Niccolò feels like he has to go into the sun to find out the answers to the world’s mysteries. The ending with the nephew asking, “And then?” is also worth noting. The nephew, in all his innocence, is asking what many artists are still trying to figure out themselves. Even if you do have all the answers, what can you do with them? With the film ending on that note it is almost as if Antonioni himself does not quite know the answer.