L'Eclisse: Still-moving in time

For years of being a film buff, Antonioni has always been my bane. I could never get his films (those I've seen anyway - L'Avventura, La Notte, Blow-up, and that incomprehensible segment of Eros), and could never understand how anyone could. His films always struck me as beautifully shot, but cold, illogical, and most of all, interminably boring. Like a kid straining his neck to see into a party that he's left out of, it always baffles me the amount of praise and respect he gets from critics and directors I hold in high regard (Tarkovsky, for instance).

So I put in L'Eclisse yesterday, as a sort of final effort to tackle his films before branding him forever into that category of directors whose films I will never touch again. I have to admit that at first, as is the case with all Antonioni films, I had to try very hard to like it, or, at least, I tried very hard to understand why everyone reveres it. L'Eclisse is not so much different from the previous two in his loosely formed trilogy - for the most part, the film wanders around without a plot; gloomy characters indulge in stark black-and-white melancholy without much dialogue to even hint at any form of exposition. The most surprising thing to me is that as the movie went along, I actually found myself liking it more and more, and by the end I was completely sold. I will try as much to list down my thoughts on this film, though I must admit being a non-Antonioni fan I might be seeing things the 'wrong' way,' so feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong.

The images in L'Eclisse remind me of ancient Greek sculptures, or the marble replicas made of them by the early Romans. There's a fluidity in his camera movement that contradicts the rigidity of his mise-en-scene that makes each scene like a living tableaux – constantly moving within a still frame.


This notion is succeeded by the sense I get that, like ancient Greek sculptors, Antonioni is trying to capture the action and vividity of life within a regal, austere structure. Like the Roman sculpture that Monica Vitti briefly touches in Alain Delon's home whose eyes are carved upwards in a bid to capture immortality, Antonioni seems to be interested in preserving something forever. This can be seen in the deliberate 60s fashions and landscapes in the film - it seems that Antonioni is not interested in making a timeless film at all (a film with recognizable emotions and characters), he seems to be making an anachronistic film, a film that can be pressed into a time capsule and opened years later as testament of a past long lost. If this is so, molding these intentions round a plot or sympathize-able characters would only contradict them - the effect is to be cold and distant, such that the viewer will always be kept observing.

Film has always been a contradiction, a manifestation of the past continuous. Anything put on film is instantly dated, and yet film proceeds in a linear rhythm mirroring the flow of time in real life. Watching old films, we don't feel time as much because most films are experiential and are designed to get you into them, such that we don't feel the incongruity of time in any way. Antonioni's films, on the other hand, seem to be designed to be artefacts, films with which you'd always feel the long presence of time elapsed from when it was made and when it is viewed - in my case, 44 years after its release. I don't know how it was viewed during the 60s, but as a modern viewer, it almost feels like it was made then sealed in its own glass casing to be preserved and looked at by people from a different era.

I said earlier that Antontioni seems to be preserving something, and it seems to me that he's capturing an epoch, an era where morals have been unhinged by money and modernity, and mattered. Now that an even more diluted era has been shaped by the digital revolution (and its subsequent information overload), this artefact becomes, to me, even more precious, fragile and beautiful. He captures the surburbia of modernist buildings and smooth ascetic lines and juxtaposes it with the chaos and decaying stones of the streets of Rome, where ancient architecture like the coliseum still stands proudly against the flow of time. He captures the materalism and amoralism of modern characters like Alain Delon - to whom women are only as valuable as smooth flesh and chic threads but not as valuable as the solidity of cold hard cash - and the romanticism and disillusionment of characters like Monica Vitti (whose gorgeous cheekbones make her look like a Greek goddess herself), to whom, as in her own words, love has become so difficult in the modern world, complicated by lifestyles and words. But I don't think Antonioni captured all this with any sense of regret or judgment, and that's the main thing that sets him apart and, I think, makes him problematic for me most of the time – his freeform method is usually a little too sparse and bare for a restless viewer like me. He is more interested in pointing out the distance between past and present, how much we've changed and how comfortable we've grown living with the past, so much so that we don't feel the weight of the millenia of time that has gone by.


Yet, despite his stoicism in the handling of these themes, Antonioni seems more aligned with Vitti than Delon, as only a romantic would strive for something permanent and attach importance to any ideal like immortality. And seeing Antonioni carving out his immortality in stone with this movie is just as moving as seeing how Vitti, in love with a person she hates and despises like Delon, struggles in herself to hold on to something real in the face of blind and shifting time. He is interested in capturing and preserving life, with his camera meandering in a Ulysses stream-of-consciousness manner that makes random people sitting outside a café, nuns walking down the streets and an old man who loses millions at a stock market just as important as Vitti or Delon. It is a film dedicated to the people we pass by everyday but pay no attention to, people of whose memory is scrubbed from our lives and from time just a few moments later. In one particularly poignant scene, Vitti looks outside the window from Delon's apartment and sees the people of everyday life, knowing that in a few minutes she (and the world) would forget them, and that she too would eventually suffer the same fate.

The last five minutes - one of the most brilliant revelations in cinematic history – beautifully condenses all the sadness and helplessness in the film. [Potential spoilers from here] Silent and without the two lead characters, it shows us the places where Vitti first falls in love with Delon, now meaningless and everyday - the indifferent passing of time and life. What was there is now gone, and what is now there will be gone tomorrow, leaving no trace of its presence before and no permanent marks on the course of time. The 60's (as with any era), along with all its characters and their loves and lives, has gone by, and we can only watch it like smoke trails left behind by airplanes passing on a clear blue sky.