The Shape of a Pocket

Those who criticise his films often accuse them of being abstract, over-aesthetic, formalist. It seems to me that if one wants to enter the world of his imagination, one should first think of him as a painter. Human behaviour and stories interest him, but he begins with what somebody or somewhere
looks
like. His most important perceptions are pre-verbal. (This is perhaps why he can use silence so well.) Kieslowski, for example, is a real novelist of the cinema because he thinks about the consequence of actions. Antonioni gazes at the
silhouette
of an action, with all the painter’s desire to find in it something that is timeless. I would even go so far as to suggest he often forgets the consequence.
    Since Antonioni exhibits as a painter, I’m not pointing out anything very original here. But if we go back to the Po and the Madonna of the Fog, and if we remember how he’s a painter, we discover, I think, a clue to his life’s work.
    Antonioni’s films question the visible until there’s not enough light to see any more. The visible may be Monica Vitti or Marcello Mastroianni or a river bank or a ship’s hull or a tree or a tennis court. Unlike a true painter he can’t touch the image with his hands; he has to worry it in other ways – by lighting, by movement, by waiting, by a kind of cinematic stealth. His purpose is to make us peer into his films as one peers into the Po as it flows, as Monet peered into the depths of his water lily pond, as one walks peering through the fog.
    The hope which, I believe, sustained him as he made each film, was that, as we peer, something will come to meet us, something that almost escaped him, something so real that it doesn’t have a name.
    Halfway through
Gente del Po
a peasant on the river bank sharpens a scythe and a line of women, dressed in black, rake hay. One of the women straightens her back to gaze at the river as the barges pass. She is young. She is like nobody else. She has slightly protruding white teeth when she smiles. And she smiles, because whilst she gazes at the wide river with its colossal will to reach the sea, something comes out of it to meet her. We can read it on her face. But on the film we can’t see it.



15
Giorgio Morandi
( for Gianni Celati )

    He was a solitary who lived all his life surrounded by people. The opposite of a hermit. A man closely linked to the everyday life of his neighbours and town, who nevertheless pursued and developed the purity of his own solitude. This is a very specially Italian phenomenon. It is what can happen behind the shutters and the sunblinds. The solitude not of the forest or the cave but of sunlight reflected from a perfectly built wall.
    He remained unmarried in a way which is also particularly Italian. Nothing much to do with celibacy or sexual predilection. Rather a hazard determined by statistics – as if each city (in this case Bologna) needs a required number of bachelors and spinsters. What is particularly Italian is the way the hazard is accepted and finally enjoyed as if it were a wrapped sweetmeat served with strong bitter coffee.
    His face became like that of a sexton, but a sexton for whom the modest role of looking after the precious objects in the sacristy was not a second-best but rather, the chosen vocation. The face of a virile not timid sexton.
    In the late 1920s he believed wholeheartedly in fascism. Later he believed in the discipline of art. This is probably why he did not resent the economic necessity of teaching. He taught engraving and the discipline had to be spotless. Today it is hard to imagine an art less political and more intrinsically opposed to fascism (because totally opposed to any form of demagogy) than Morandi’s.
    My guess is that, with his solitude, with his pursuit of reticence, with his daily routines and the lifelong repetition of the motifs he chose to paint (he only had three subjects), he became during the last years of his life a fairly difficult man – in the sense of being obstinate, crotchety and wary.
    It may be, however, that just as each city requires a certain number of unmarried citizens, each moment of art needs somewhere a furiously obstinate recluse, inaudibly muttering against over-simplification. In art the temptation to please too easily is ever present: it comes with mastery. The obstinacy of the recluses, familiar with failure, is art’s saving grace. Before Morandi, in the nineteenth century there were Cézanne and Van Gogh; after him –