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Individualistic: Michaelangelo Antonioni.

‘Blow Up’ is the film which was a commercial success and brought international fame to Antonioni. ‘The Passenger’ was not that successful, yet followed the same strain in film making. ‘Beyond the Clouds’ was made after he had a stroke and he lost his power of speech. All the three films, though reflecting the theme of alienation and stagnation in an industrial society, adopted a different style of film making from that of his trilogy films and ‘The Red Desert’.

These three films have the unique quality of being simple at first sight and seemingly adopting a narrative style. But, at the end of the film, one cannot shake away the feeling that they are aesthetically complex, and elusive in meaning. Classical narrative patterns collapse in expressive abstractions and dramatic action is displaced leading to a creation of stasis occupied by vague feelings, moods and ideas.

‘Blow Up’ relates one particular experience of a London fashion photographer, who while developing some negatives of photos he had taken discovers that accidentally he may have photographed a murder. But before he could do anything concrete about this discovery, the negatives and exposures are stolen. The film investigates the “possible, but redundant existence of an object.” It is a search that turns inward and finally finds nothing.

The film has an ambiguous openness; is independent, wandering; and investigative techniques dominate the film. But eventually it turns self reflexive, consciously exploring how reality and meaning are constructed.

‘The Passenger’ deals with what happens to a burnt-out news photographer who takes on the identity of a dead acquaintance to escape from his own dissatisfaction with the kind of life he was leading professionally and personally. But the new identity takes him to unexpected situations and places. And before he realises what is happening he once again flees from his changed identity and personality. He meets with the same end, namely death, like the man whose mask he wore.

The film has an open text full of self-reflexive concerns such as perceptions, reality, identity and truth. The narrative techniques used are doubling, journeying, constructing and unseen death.

In both these films Antonioni explores the uncertainty that plagues an individual at a certain stage in life, the dissatisfaction with what is, and the desire for a change of identity and goals. However, the pursuit only results in further uncertainties and maybe eventual death.

‘Beyond the Clouds’ is substantially different from these two films. There is the presence of the director and his observations on random events which creates a film within a film feeling. Sometimes the director/observer turns voyeuristic and even participates in the events of the narrative.

‘Love’ in its myriad and fluctuating expressions is the subject of the search. There are doubts and questioning; there are violent passions and quarrels; there is constancy and inconstancy in love; there are new solutions and moving away from the past. Romance, attraction, fidelity, infidelity, inability to sustain love — all play their own roles in this saga. And there is the director who is an observer of this nexus of love stories, these momentary and transitory love stories that are probably lost stories disconnected in time and space.

ICAF did well in choosing to show a different genre of Antonioni films, rather than his famous ‘Trilogy’ or ‘The Red Desert’. These revealed that Antonioni did not only belong to the Neo Realist or New Wave phases of European cinema but the later Hollywood genre films, however retaining his individual flavour and identity.

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