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.
"There is a superstition - or belief, or scientific truth supported by experiment - which says that cinema is the art of stimulating a part of the brain that normally functions during sleep, by bombarding it with static images juxtaposed so as to create the illusion of movement. Video, on the other hand, in which the image is liquid, is said to stimulate another part of the brain which functions only while the body is awake. Whether the distinction is scientifically valid or not is irrelevant here. What is interesting is the suggestion that we can intervene to provoke virtual images by using the brain's compensatory mechanisms. A group of people who are involved in manufacturing special effects for the Lucas company in Hollywood discussed with me the possibility of making "personalized" animated films exclusively out of such images. The principal obstacle is that the brain needs twenty or thirty seconds to process the first image, but once the first image is reconstituted the others can run off in animated series using the same basic pattern. We went further, though, and from these flux-images we imaged film sequences in which abstract animated images would provoke different responses in each one of us."
