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Beyond the Clouds

We all know that memory offers no guarantees.

—Antonioni

The origins of modernity are obscure, notwithstanding scholarly attempts to fix as key dates the Industrial Revolution, around 1750; the institution of railroad time and invention of the daguerreotype around 1839; the demonstration of vitreous construction and the new visible interior at the Crystal Palace in 1850; or the demonstration at the Eiffel Tower in 1895 of the efficacy of iron replacing wood in construction—a “nonrenewable resource [replacing] a renewable one” (Billington 29). Looking backward through history, it is less taxing to determine certain harbingers that prefigured the conditions we now call “modern,” such as the trial, in 1560, of the man called Martin Guerre. Having come to the Pyrenean village of Artigat four years previously, he gave himself out as a person who had run away from the place years before, soon after his marriage in fact; and then returned to live with the wife he had taken and the son she had borne him until it came to seem, for various reasons, that he was, perhaps, an imposter. He was subjected to judicial authority in Rieux, some thirteen miles away, this in front of a jury of strangers before whom his accusers needed to produce a claim entirely unattached to the folk and communal knowledge of neighbors whose understanding of the man had grown in the deeply committed, agriculturally based matrix of everyday life: a claim which, by contrast, stood upon the sorts of facts one needed no history to grasp nor any particular familiarity to clearly discern. The man, whose name was found to be Pansette, was found guilty, condemned, and burned at the stake, an early victim, historically speaking, to the faux pas and misconstructions that are always present in impression management (see Natalie Zeman Davis). To present oneself to strangers is a rigorous task, demanding the most constant vigilance not of what one senses oneself to be and hopes to become but of what one is projecting to the surveillers who form one’s social surround. And modernity, indeed, can be seen to develop in late Feudalism as a form in which strangers proliferate, mingle, interact, and structure a world where private knowledge, traditionalism, family history, and intimacy play a relatively marginal part. Modernity also opens gender, a favorite subject of Michelangelo Antonioni, to new perspectives and understandings, being, as Susan Sontag has said, “the only culture that makes possible the emancipation of women” (Time 114).

Beyond the Clouds is, in a way, an extended essay on the symptoms and possibilities of modern life, certainly insofar as modernity both cultures and bounds people’s ability to become intimate and engaged with, or sensitive and attuned to, the increasingly distant others who move past and around them in an incessant flux. A boy and girl cannot quite get together; crime does not sit comfortably in the seat of habitual behavior and friendship; a man and woman cannot quite speak the same language; religious passion hovers uncertainly in the precincts of an ancient city, whose stones reverberate with a sense of the deep past. It is superficial to say that this film is about love.

Antonioni’s project was to cull some of the substantial material he had written over several years (and ultimately published in That Bowling Alley on the Tiber) and fashion it for the screen as a quartet of episodes, each running a little under half an hour and each following the story of characters occupying different social settings. The first gives the story of a young fellow who meets a girl in Ferrara, but then loses her, and then finds her again. The second, set in Portofino, puts a film director into the presence of a girl who draws him out of his meditations with a chilling story of having committed a killing. The third begins with a marriage in trouble in Paris, and continues with a strange and perhaps fortuitous meeting over a problem with real estate. The last, in Aix-en-Provence, has a young man meet a young woman who should love him, and who perhaps does, except that she has plans he cannot interrupt. In these episodes, we see the interwoven and dominant presence of movement counterpoised against tranquility; strangeness challenging the desire for contact; urbanity in the face of traditionalism; etiquette interplaying with urgency; communication either broken or made painfully ambiguous; seasonless merchandising; and the deeply horrifying possibility that our unitary relations have been slowly, methodically exploded over time so that it is only as fragments and with fragmentation of spirit that we may be condemned to lead our lives.

For aficionados of Antonioni and devotées of this particular film, a brief apology, because there are parts of it I studiously avoid addressing here:

Having suffered a massive stroke in 1985, Antonioni was exhausted and partly debilitated when it came time to shoot Beyond the Clouds. The insurers insisted on the presence behind the camera of a healthy and competent director. Out of friendship, Wim Wenders agreed to play this role, and eventually himself directed certain introductory, transitional, and concluding narrative passages or bridges involving John Malkovich in the film-director role of episode two: a scene in an airplane “above the clouds”; a scene at a windy lonely beach; a scene on a train heading into France; meditative scenes in the streets of Ferrara; scenes at the Hotel Cardinal in Aix-en-Provence; and a hilltop scene involving Marcello Mastroianni conversing with Jeanne Moreau as, painting Mont Sainte-Victoire, he attempts to recapture the inspiration that had seized Cézanne (and also the inspiration of Borges’s Pierre Menard, whose “admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes” [66]). I work around these insertions by Wenders—which were photographed by Robby Müller (exquisitely, but not, I think, as Antonioni would have had them photographed) and written with a view to perhaps making more explicit the connections I cannot help but feel Antonioni would wish us to tease out on our own. That Wenders is paying homage to Antonioni is without question—in his diary of the shoot, for March 9, 1995, he writes of a particular shot, “He shoots it again and again, with tiny variations, as though to put off the end for as long as possible” (138)—nor can there be any doubt that the younger man held the older with the greatest of esteem and bore him a profound love. Yet for all this, he is not and was not Antonioni, and the interludes are distinct in every important way. In a proposed edit, writes Wenders, Antonioni sliced out almost all of the additions. “‘Leave my film alone! My stories don’t need any framing, they can stand by themselves.’ What he wasn’t capable of saying in words, he’s just told me in the form of his edit” (181). So I leave them to the reader’s pleasure, just as Cézanne’s mountain is left to the painter who must now find a way to regard it through another man’s eyes.

CARMEN AND SILVANO

Portico

Stone and stones. Receding from the camera, a long straight portico, with matched rows of cement columns topped by white plaster arches and a vaulted ceiling. A cobblestone walkway. Beside this to screen left, a road, bordering the modest green of what looks like a rugby pitch. Dense fog. Comacchio, the little Venice, town of more than a hundred arcades, near Ferrara, city of the House of Este; probably the Portico of Capuccini, in that late part of fall where winter can almost be seen.

We are peering at the single, advancing lamp of a bicycle—a typically Antonionian view, recalling immediately how in his cinema we are given what Gilberto Perez calls “partial views of arresting partiality” (368); certainly a view that tends to “render the uncertainty of modern life with elegant exactness” (369). Then, on the road, a car (with two lamps) advances. “Gendered” vehicles, then, one showing twice the light of the other. The car stops and a young man (Kim Rossi-Stuart) jumps out, excusing himself rather gracefully just as the cyclist, a girl perhaps not quite as young as he (Inès Sastre), stops pedaling and turns to face him in the stillness. He needs directions to a good hotel: expensive or cheap, he trusts her. Just there—she points behind. As he walks back to his car she regards him carefully, then rides on, and with a quick turn he discovers that she is gone.

Tall, thin as a whooping crane, expensively dressed in slate gray, he has long hair stylishly cut. Her long hair was neatly tied, and she had taken care to make up her face primly and cleanly. We will learn that he is an engineer, out here in the country on a job; that she is a teacher, cloistered until school closes, but under these measured, shady columns they were only a boy and a girl, a stranger and someone who knew the territory, someone who drove a car through the fog and someone who kept inside a portico making circles in the air with her feet. One searched only what he needed to know, the other was happy to be margined and marked, to guide herself in the columnar shade of art and civilization.

There is no reason why we should wish or expect these two to meet again, except perhaps the intoxication of their beauty, which suffuses us with a desire they perhaps do not feel. Yet it seems instantly true that when these two are in one another’s presence they are (even lightly) bonded, a single twosome, not two solitudes, and that they work in a sensitive negotiation to produce what has been called a “togethering” (Ryave and Schenkein 269ff). Watching them as, tentatively, they hold this coupling, it is not difficult to be reminded a little of the conversation in Vertigo between Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster outside his house near Telegraph Hill, the day after he has pulled her out of San Francisco Bay, when, reading her thank-you note he smiles and says, “I hope we will, too.” She waits a moment. “What?” He waits half a moment. “Meet again sometime.” And she says, very matter-of-factly, “We have,” I think to underline that there is no reason for us to hope they will have another encounter. “Only one is a wanderer,” Madeleine tells Scottie, “Two together are always going somewhere.” That strange voice does seem to be echoing from the depths of Carmen (we will see that the subtle invocation of Vertigo is no accident.) Silvano and Carmen are distinctly not going somewhere, yet there lingers the idea that they ought to be, will be, must be—a connection born in a thought.

He turns his car around, at any rate, and drives back the way he came.

Etiquettes

In a strange little scene Silvano checks in at the hotel: a scene that is strange in the way that only Antonioni’s scenes can be strange, seeming to go forward and backward in time and space at once. We are lingering in the forecourt as he enters a hazelnut green atrium and speaks to the innkeeper, a stocky man who gesticulates in a wearied, businesslike way. There are fancy iron bars over the door panes, such that our view is a little obstructed, and outside where we are positioned there is no telltale sign that proclaims this rather squat building a hotel. Room number 4, says the innkeeper, do you have any bags? The boy says they’re outside, then fluidly emerges to get them. The innkeeper gazes through the door but, losing this moment, we suddenly dissolve to the same lobby later on, our young man entering from outside as though from another world. The innkeeper is gone.

“Time in Antonioni,” Perez notes, “is a time of the moment” (370). With a real ferocity, one can think to pass by way of a memory into a history long decayed, or, in the magical spasm of déjà vu, think to have spied in a faraway past a secret event that has only just now transpired. Outside, it is quite as bright as when the boy checked in. Have only a few seconds elapsed? Where has Silvano been that he should now be returning as though steeped in the traces of some exploration? And why did we not accompany him? This transition that signals a change of time and attitude conveys a sufficient instigation to believe something is different about the boy, something we cannot see (and that is therefore catching).

He enters the breakfast room, where a man—one of those mushroom-colored souls who always fill the background when we travel to strange places—is devouring something with a glass of water near a window. In a second room, Carmen is seated alone, modestly finishing her meal. She gets up as though instinctually and joins him at the window, says ciao. Something of a Narcissus, he is surprised. The beautiful thing, says he, gloating a little because he finds her attractive and is tickled that she is paying attention to him, is that he came here by chance. When, formally enough, she asks why it’s beautiful—since in her perfect pudeur she does not leap to the conclusion that she could be found attractive—he rattles on about how he was supposed to go somewhere else and at one point let the car drive him, a car that we may like to believe had a personality and will of its own. One can recall Fred Astaire captivated by Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon, taking her for an evening’s ride in a hackney cab and letting the horse decide where they should go. Fate enters human affairs through the body of a substitute: a horse or else a car so attached to one’s person that one has no consciousness of guiding it. Silvano’s car is a spirit blown by the wind, and so his meeting with Carmen is ordained by the gods.

Silvano makes to nuzzle against Carmen’s tawny neck and, charmed and a little excited, she moves off, her lips and sweater red as berries. Turning her head away from him, she reveals a light smile of satisfaction. They sit down at her table and smile into one another’s eyes. He thinks he has caught her. She knows she has caught him. But Antonioni will show, here and elsewhere in this film, what it means to catch, and how equivocal experience can be.

Meanwhile, what universe do we inhabit with these two adventurers, the modern one? A girl behaves in a courtly fashion, conscious of her own demureness as though it is a garment tailored to her form, while a boy gives the impression, perhaps without affectation, of having come on a quest, while on the highway behind them, that through its echoes and its racing flashes seems to dominate their space, those modern symptoms, movement and mechanism, are indicated forcefully with every speeding cipher. A man in blue punts down a little canal near the road, an emphasizing contradiction, medieval in every effortless stretch of his arms as he plies his pole. And is Silvano not a knight, with his invisible baggage and his air of privilege? The architecture was built in the twentieth century no doubt, but on a Romanesque model. The walls of the breakfast room are chrysalis green. What imago, we have to wonder, is waiting here to be born?

Once again they stroll along that portico beside their road, sunlight streaming through the archways. Their pace is casual but relentless, as though a riddle is to be worked out. He speaks of sunsets (in what one irked reviewer calls a “witheringly silly” line [Atkinson]). (Young people always want to have something to say.) They look up and see an icon of the Mother and Child appearing to bless them. Carmen talks about voices, suggesting that the voice is a creature, nervous, secretive. It’s strange, he muses, we always want to live in someone’s imagination; I like your eyes, completely empty of everything except sweetness. They kiss one another hungrily, and—oddly, because there is nothing of presence or intimacy that is not already given in the touch of these lips that have so artfully held back from intercourse with one another while still entreating and invoking so much with their hints of discourse—we approach, approach and judiciously examine, approach with hunger to see or know more. Then the scene fades, a conventional love story: that is, a story in which appetites are subject to etiquettes, in which conventions themselves are loved.

The Kiss

That we should approach, lean toward, that kiss! We have seen kisses onscreen before. For decades, they constituted the royal icons of cinema. Plainly enough, this one comes from passion, is erotic for both partners, surprises, and deeply pleasures. It escorts us to a new, or apparently new, depth. Yet, to learn this we need not dolly in. Does the camera movement perhaps provide explanation for—thus cover—our lingering interest in a sight that should normally seduce just a passing glance, for to let the shot run long with a steady camera might embarrassingly reflect a viewer’s attention back upon himself (even in the dark, where it cannot be optical relish for others, the rush of blood to the face is a palpable experience)? But the movement inward (or outward, away from ourselves, into ecstasy) produces in itself an interest and a payoff: not that something might be detected in the kiss with a closer view but as though the smooth gliding form of our fascination is a direct biophysical response to the kiss’s solicitation. We take leave of ourselves to kiss the subject matter of the film just as, smoothly and effortlessly, Silvano draws Carmen toward him in this kiss.

“HOTEL”

Dissolve. We discover our duo walking into the upstairs hallway of the hotel. She is leading him to her door. Centered in the frame is a pair of French doors giving out into the night, presumably over the forecourt, and through them we can see a bright turquoise neon sign, possibly “HOTEL”—it is visible only as a fragment—eerily agleam. (Only from inside, that is, do we see a sign that this is a hotel!) A shimmering reflection of this colored light is behind the boy’s back, around the doorframe of the room opposite Carmen’s. While she waits, he goes over to the French doors, opens them, steps out into the turquoise night, turning his face momentarily so that it is bathed in the rich undersea color. Then he steps back in, closes the doors behind him, says good night. Before going into her room, she follows him with her eyes, and we can see plainly enough that she is hungry for him. This is no dance of suspension and titillation for holding off the pleasure of a sexual encounter, for winding up the audience, but a careful and ritualized outplaying of fruitful ambiguity and doubt, the commonplace etiquette of modern life, when anticipations need not lead to resolution, when invitations need not lead to happiness.

In his pale green room, with its comforting vaguely Scandinavian lacquered wooden furniture and brown wooden doors, Silvano stands undecided. In her pale green room, Carmen slowly undresses after turning on her television. Having doffed his overcoat, Silvano mops his face with a towel, muses for a moment, quickly turns and opens his door to scan her territory—maybe she has left her door open a little, a hint. Nothing. He closes his door and turns off the light. Carmen is pulling on a prim pink nightgown, oblivious to some drawings made by her very young students taped to the wall behind her next to a small framed landscape and the television. She sits on her bed thinking (presumably of Silvano): “What is he doing? When will he come? What will he look like when we are warm together, when his neutral gray skins are slivered off?” She is certainly not thinking, “Curious, unappetizing man.” Antonioni’s skill is to give us what feels like certainty about the most intrinsic and private realities—what they are musing, each of them, alone—while also showing these realities to be unimportant, insubstantial. Silvano is sitting on his bed fully clothed while we hear a car pass by outside. He stretches out, pulls a blanket over himself, shows some anxiety as the scene slowly fades. In the morning, from above, we look down on him still asleep as cars pass one another on the busy road outside and someone sounds a horn. He rises in a trance but while tying his shoes seems suddenly to remember a girl … a girl who spoke of voices and kissed him. He moves out quickly to check for her. She has gone.

He asks the concierge to buy her some flowers. But it’s too late. Carmen and Silvano do not find one another again.

Two or three years go by.

In the modern world, which is the world in which yesterday has no hold upon tomorrow, the constant and enervating circulation that throws strangers against one another without introducing them produces a situation described by Georg Simmel, in which we experience a particular fear or perplexity that comes with seeing people we cannot hear (“Visual Interaction”). Carmen had told her knight earlier, “Voices never become part of you like other sounds.” She says you end up not hearing the sea, for instance, but “a voice you can’t help listening to.” Yet at the same time, these two say very little to one another, afford one another only briefly and superficially the opportunity to hear and know each other’s voice. They seem continually to pass like cars on a road, in a reflex that materially embodies our modern experience of social relationship: we see others without knowing them, relate to them only in a specific and particular way, applying ourselves to only a slice of their capacity and being. These two have no grounding beyond the hotel in which they spent the night, a dazed, neutral experience of the cars speeding by on the road outside, the soothing green walls that presumably relax and comfort them (as they do us) but that have been designed explicitly to soothe strangers who can be presumed to require soothing. No childhood memories in common, no labor, no plan for the future. Their lives are structured and scheduled according to different principles, on different tracks as it were, and once the night has passed there is little possibility—little reason—for them to connect again.

Two questions present themselves:

Why in the middle of the night does the boy not steal into the girl’s room? No one else is around to disturb them, she is directly across the hall, there is no reason to doubt that she has desire but in any event she would extend him every grace and gentility even if she refused. Is he afraid of sex? The nature of the kiss shows he is not. This question becomes increasingly perturbing when we note how slowly and self-pleasingly she slips off her underwear and her stockings, how she moves upon the bed in the silk nightgown, conscious of her body and its sensitivities, and when we reflect that as a schoolteacher devoted to her students (the drawings on the wall) she might not have many opportunities for meeting men, especially young and attractive men such as this one. As to him: without getting directions from her, he would never have found this hotel. Why does he hesitate? Could it be that he is thinking of making love to her, imagining the sensation of her body against his, wandering through the corners of a pleasure that has not yet been his, anticipating it with such concentration that the imagined pleasure, swollen, overwhelms him? Could the etiquette and shyness which is holding him back, coupled with the beauty of the anticipation, not produce a state of affairs in which, for him, the thought of romance is more pregnant than the act?

That is one. Another:

Why should Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo be invoked, as, surely, it is? Scottie Ferguson has followed the salesgirl Judy Barton to her home in the Empire Hotel on Sutter Street, a shabby environment with a turquoise neon sign outside the window. Having cajoled her into allowing him to dress and style her (so that through her he may invoke Madeleine Elster, his former object of fascination and obsession taken too early in death), Scottie is waiting in her hotel room for Judy to return from the hairdresser, and as he stands to look out her window he is bathed in the light of the turquoise sign. It is the same “hotel” light that bathes Silvano for a moment as, standing outside her room, he contemplates the possibility of love with Carmen. Might it be that there was another woman for Silvano, before, in another life, and that she is dead or vanished; that Carmen has animated pungent memories of her, and that through Carmen the woman is haunting him? Amazed that he has found her, he fears that if he comes to her in the night he will be able to detect how she is different from the other, detect that she is only herself. Or he knows that if he comes to her, the actuality of the love will fail to match the anticipation. More chilling still: if he comes to her, he will learn that she is the other one, reborn. That the dead live. That he is making love to a ghost.

(Antonioni knew and often reflected the work of Hitchcock, who was also charmed by memory in this way.)

The green light may suggest that every love is a haunting, that every man at each moment with a woman is haunted by his memories of other women, by their persistence and reflection; or if not of other women then by his memories of this woman at some moment before, as she was when first he realized her. Every man looks backward, at any rate, while every woman looks to the future, and even though they seem to be staring into one another’s eyes they see at cross purposes.

The green love in the green room, next to the green sign, has chilled him with remorse and fear, with deep need, to such a degree that he must hide from it in a pocket of selfishness. Or else, riddled with memories of loves gone awry, he must patiently make plans, think things over, decide whether he may permit himself to admit the feelings that possess him, as we can see, as we have already seen.

The turquoise light that now bathes—if not his body—the thought of his thoughts: glyphs, parts of a word, something primordial. Frame lines of the French windows slice and interrupt the sign: interruption is modern. This sign is also reminiscent of another turquoise neon sign, in no known language, that illuminates the magical park setting in Blow-Up. In both cases, illumination emanates from, and constitutes, meaning itself: no message is conveyed but conveyance, a meaning that is meaning, the process of metaphor which is bringing (the fire) across the chasm. Not a particular metaphor, but metaphor: the possibility that one thing can be another. The fact that every thing already is what it is not.

After a Film

Two years later in another town. In a public hall a film screening is concluding. The film may be difficult for some viewers to identify, given that we see only the end credits and that these name only actors involved in an Italian dubbing, but Jonathan Rosenbaum gives it as Nikita Mikhalkov’s Urga (1991), a story of cultural and experiential tension between a shepherd and a truck driver. A single smokestack is seen in a long shot, rather similar to what is shown at the end of The Red Desert, where “birds learn that the smoke is toxic, and do not fly there anymore.” Carmen and a girlfriend are leaving, and so is Silvano, who discovers them in the courtyard, as if by “miracle.” “Nothing,” says Carmen a little archly, “happens by chance.” She is pointing to the force of modernity that guides and guards our lives, notwithstanding our innocent conviction that we are blown by the winds of fate. The two walk off, and find her apartment in a building that strikes him—wrongly, it turns out—as expensive. She makes it plain that a woman needs to hear words, and, in a more mundane light, that a boyfriend has recently broken off with her. For his part, Silvano walks around her simple apartment, gazes out the kitchen window, tries to nuzzle against her neck as he did in Ferrara. Once again, swiftly, she withdraws. Now, of course, it is impossible for him to gauge whether she is teasing or rebuffing and he chooses the conservative path, courteously taking his leave.

We observe him walking down the echoing stone staircase outside her door. He stops and takes a beat: not an actor taking a beat, but a character taking a beat. “Maybe I misinterpreted.” Slowly he returns. Inside with her, he becomes passionate. They are unclothed. He is running his hands over her skin, yet not in such a way as actually to touch. His fingers explore, but remain a quarter of an inch away. When she jumps forward to take his lips he pulls back a little so that the delice of contact must remain a hope, an imagination. He dresses, walks out, passes through the colonnade downstairs and into the street, looking up and backward as from her window she follows him with her eyes. The tale of Carmen and Silvano is over.

Why—how—does he not touch her? She is ready, she desires him. She is ripe. For one staggering moment she hesitated and held him off, but now it is evident she has made up her mind to forget that past, embrace the present as a road to some blissful, or at least stable, future. Silvano, however, lives in his reflections, nourishing himself with not desire but memory of desire. Also, he is unable to say his need, to make the utterance that constitutes a voice. Or: mute, his voice is only in his hands. How alone we are when we cannot speak across the incalculable void that separates us from alluring strangers, how imprisoned we are by our world when we cannot depict it. Perhaps, however, Silvano’s entire world has taken the shape of Carmen’s hungry body. Her body and his understanding have the same boundaries. In running his hands over her with such precision, such delicacy—Rosenbaum suggests that this scene “paradoxically makes one more acutely aware of the warmth of both their bodies than any conventional coupling would”—he is engaged exactly in speaking his world to her; and she cannot grasp what he is “saying” because she does not take herself seriously enough to presume she could be so much for him.

At any rate, time has run out for them. (“Their diffident natures and the idealization of their romances prevent them from actually consummating and, thus extending their encounter,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter, coolly, as if without remorse [Byrge].)

Yet it is also true that, failing to possess Carmen, Silvano nevertheless inhabits her, and she him. It is remarkable how intimate these two become, between glances, between phrases, in these quiet places, given that they basically do not unite. Perhaps they will not forget one another, but they are on the move, he onward and out of her life, she, at her window, to the destination of all those unknown folk whom we meet through a glance as they shuttle toward something we will never see.

A DIRECTOR IN PORTOFINO

Before

A film director (John Malkovich), who talks to himself rather articulately about a film he is thinking of making, goes to Portofino with a character in mind, and one morning in a little shop by the water, where the choppy green Ligurian sea is slopping onto a quay, and when the shutter has been lifted and the door unlocked, he finds a young woman (Sophie Marceau). She is, we must say, “perfect.” Her eyes are hazel, her hair long and evanescent; she wears a taupe suit, she looks at him looking at her and shows anticipation, as though his gaze has made her catch her breath. Later, they talk at a pink café spread with green-and-white chairs under lush green trees, and it’s misty. She’s arrived in blue slacks and a beige coat over a fisherman’s sweater, having told an English boyfriend in a yellow slicker to get lost. “It’s better that I speak to you plainly. whatever you have in mind, I’d better tell you who I am,” says she, announcing a little sententiously that she stabbed her father twelve times. She holds her breath some, speaks without any particular expression. We hear the water splashing in. She is looking out to sea. She walks away a few paces, and a cat sits and placidly watches her. “When?—” he asks calmly. Far too calmly. Only John Malkovich ever exhibits this calm in the face of horror, onscreen. For three months, she replies, they kept her in prison, and then she was acquitted. She will not say why she did it, but he surmises that he knows, and also that twelve times is “more domestic” and “more familiar” than two or three would have been. All the while we see the charming little village, its houses piled vertically up the lush green hill all the way out of this world, the crisp but at the same time overcast sky, the jiggling sailboats at anchor. He cannot get over the magnitude of her crime, the twelve stabs: “You counted them?” “They did,” says she. She runs off and dances on a pier beside the jade green water: “Are you going or staying? Do you want to see me to night?” She almost touches his face. He reaches out and almost touches hers, but playfully, like a cat, she runs off. Slowly, thoughtfully, he follows, as only John Malkovich does. “You remind me of … somebody,” she teases. He wants to know whom. “I’m not sure yet,” she answers, in a riddling and slightly pretentious voice.

During

At prodigious length they make love—“the body never lies” (Feeney)—twisting and coiling and groping for something in one another that no one ever has a real hope of finding, a lovemaking that recalls the Alexandria Quartet in its hunger and its hopelessness. “It was never in the lover that I really met her” (Durrell 63).

After

Without much satisfaction they part, and for a moment he looks back at her through the window of her cottage, unable to get out of his mind that she stabbed her father twelve times. The sun is shining, they wave to one another amicably, she leaps up and stands naked looking after him. The fact that she stabbed her father does not, alone, intrigue him, but again, and still: why twelve times? No doubt the father raped her, and thrust himself into her twelve times before finishing. Or: he raped her, month after month, every month in the year. Or: twelve different times she was raped by this man. Or: she did not count and did not know. Since it was the police who determined and made it public, she learned as everyone else learned what it was that she had done. We do not know what it is that we do, we are apprised by listening and watching. When in modern life we do something, we are lost in the panic of our action, and in this way she was lost.

There is no signal that the girl’s life is changed by her meeting with this director, no signal that his is changed by meeting her, except in this one respect, that, having come to this place in search of a character, he found a story, and now “the story let me think of nothing else, not even of my own.” The familiarity of that chilling number twelve! He sits thinking/talking beside a turquoise swimming pool—a turquoise that one can taste!—bitterly minty—sliced by the camera so that we see only a triangle of it, stretching away from him. There is no point staying in this place.

Stories wait everywhere to speak through the voices of their characters, and we can have no idea when one of them will speak to us.

CARLO, PATRIZIA, HER HUSBAND, AND HIS LOVER

Un Café

On the Right Bank of Paris, in a plush little café, a young woman in pink (Chiara Caselli) introduces herself to a man who is caught up in a newspaper (Peter Weller) by saying that she has just been reading something fascinating in her magazine and wants to talk with someone about it. “J’avais envie d’en parler avec quelqu’un”—very polite, sweet, formal. He is American, she is Italian, so they speak in a deliciously awkward French that makes it easy for us to understand. “C’est moi que vous avez choisi?” he asks: “And you chose me?” She tells him a story of how in Mexico some scientists hired porters to carry bags for them to an Incan city in the mountains. At one point the porters suddenly stopped in their places and wouldn’t move. The scientists got angry and tried to rouse them, unable to understand the delay. After some hours, the porters started up again. The leader decided to explain. (She looks at the American, and he smiles, now beginning to be engaged.) He said they had been “marching too fast. They’d left their souls behind.” It’s terrific, says she, because the way we run through our affairs we are in peril of losing our own souls. “We should wait for them.” Now the man is skeptical. “To do what?” And she pauses before answering, letting a modest smile, an embarrassed smile, itself a little pink, creep into her face. “Everything that is pointless.” Surely this is a come-on, an approach? She is so young, suffused with such an air of innocence that covers her like a talc. Or, she is acting out of civility and a little loneliness, the quintessentially withdrawn European. Given that in this bustling world attraction is based on what is presented immediately to the eye, there is probably little difference between civility and flirting: either way the impression will not, cannot, last.

The man comes home to his (much less effervescent) wife, Patrizia (Fanny Ardant), who is strained with both boredom and anxiety in their lavish modern apartment. Tall and wraithlike, she sits in a dove-gray dress with her legs crossed nervously, in front of a painting of a ballerina standing in second position and bending over to massage her shin. Have you been with her again?, she asks wearily: it’s been three years since that story in the café about the souls. Some things, says he in irritation, can’t be called off overnight: the old, old story. Patrizia strides away, the tails of her swank garment fluttering like those of an undertaker’s tuxedo. “It’s her or me.”

Since at least in cinema we have come to accept interactions like this as commonplace, the torn, desiccated marriages of the monied class, we can move quickly through the chess that these two play, his breathless expressions of ennui, her increasingly taut fear of loss, his swelling apathy, her anger, all reactions to the central fact of impermanence (or that blurry prospect visible from a moving train), which is what the experience of life amounts to for these movers and shakers. Swiftly now, after a cut, the young lover pulls him into her apartment with a voluptuous (and starved) kiss. “We have to talk,” says he: the old, old story. He wears gray, she wears red: cardinal red, poppy red. On her kelp green velvet sofa she straddles him. “Talk … but caress me.” He closes his eyes: “I forget …”

It is telling the way we bounce back and forth between the different habitats that seem to occupy a single cultural and experiential space, without observing (engaging in) the transportation that leads from one to the other, as though locomotion is so prevalent as to be invisible. Did he walk to the lover’s place, did he drive, did he take the Métro or bus N° 72? Now, we look down from a balcony in their foyer as, coming home, the husband calls out for Patrizia, plays a few bars of something vaguely baroque on his jet black grand piano, and methodically climbs the stairs, a man in motion but without prospect. In the bedroom she is happily, drunkenly smashing a celadon vase. He finds her standing on the other side of a plate glass shower partition in the bathroom, leans forward to press his lips against the glass where hers are. Gently their lips peck at one another by way of the thick glass. Although he’s been phoning for days, she won’t say much. “Vase … fleurs … couleurs … beauté …” And we all fall into the trap, she adds: the old, old story. There is such a resignation in her voice, as though being trapped is the main preoccupation in life (the philosophy of Norman Bates: trap as modern condition). He says (in English) that it’s sad to see her like this, “drinking, drunk, desperate.” They’re on the vanilla-cream bed. He protests that he was on a trip. (Didn’t you take her?) He didn’t take anyone. She bites him, then laughs. “Last night,” says he—this would be a confession in virtually any other circumstance, but here it seems a banality and a ploy—“Last night, I realized how much I miss making love to you.” A difficult admission, since it implies and invokes nostalgia, the ability to carry traces of an experience across time and space and a dangerous state of affairs when mobility is at stake. She climbs on top. “I’ll come back if you leave her.” “Today,” says he, surrendering, “This morning, now, right now.” As they kiss, she murmurs, “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me,” again and again, through tears, “Ne me laisse pas,” a mantra but also a child’s song. “Ne me laisse pas, ne me laisse pas. Ne me laisse pas.” Traffic is moving on a boulevard, people leaving people, even as the echo of her plea wears thin. Indoors again, watching the (same?) cars, the man turns to his lover, who, in a silver slip against a blue wall and next to a painting of a blue man hanging upside-down in agony, pouts, “Do you still make love behind my back?”

He is both alluring and lured. She wants to know if he has told the wife he will leave her. Today I pitied her, says he and she stamps her foot on the ground breaking into a bitter and impatient sob. As he moves across the room in a long shot we notice that in the painting there is a second figure, a line sketch, sitting on the ground and staring out at the viewer. “For three years you’ve been bringing her smell here,” she barks, “the stale smell of a cheated wife!” They fight, and he throws her onto her bed (a tangerine-and-white checkerboard duvet), tears off her panties and her platinum slip to reveal her tiny, pert breasts and hungry thighs, brings himself toward her belly and then her crotch as her legs spread and the scene fades. Desire is not only a fuel, it is a vehicle.

A car. It pulls up outside a decidedly modern apartment building on the Right Bank, and Carlo (Jean Réno) is delivered with an expensive black valise. Tall, purposeful, maybe a pilot. He enters, takes the lift upstairs (in the company of a girl who cannot take her eyes off him), lets himself into his pied-à-terre with a blasé sense of ease. But: the place has been cleaned out, almost every piece of furniture removed, and the gleaming parquet floors are an accusation. The huge plate glass windows all round present Paris as a bleak mist. In a closer shot, we see the man’s seriousness, his well-tanned but perturbed visage. Outside, the city is brighter, white and domed, rather like Durrell’s Alexandria—“A camel has collapsed from exhaustion in the street outside the house. It is too heavy to transport to the slaughter-house so a couple of men come with axes and cut it up there and then in the open street, alive” (Durrell 54). Jars and boxes of food have been arranged neatly—too neatly—on the floor. The phone rings, rather persistently. When he answers, we hear the voice of his wife remonstrating with him for being so long away. “You emptied the place?” says he. “You could have left a note!” she answers. “It’s because of my work!” he explodes. She says, “Don’t try to find me.” This is the title of the story from which Antonioni made this section of his film. “One afternoon she comes home with a truck, loads it with some furniture and two suitcases, and leaves. Without a whisper, almost stealthily. An hour later on the telephone she tells him why. At any other moment he would have known what to answer” (Tiber 204). Furious, Carlo stands by the window and we hear a steady rain falling. He throws himself disconsolately onto a black leather chair. We cut to a shot looking down on him in his midnight blue suit and black t-shirt as he rises from the chair after his nap, paces around to the sound of a siren in the street, Ee-or ee-or ee-or ee-or, finds a torn photograph on the floor of beautiful Claire, naked, trailing a pepper red scarf over her crotch, staring languidly or haughtily into the camera. She’s a peppery one, and this is how she had the guts to pick up and vamoose. He’s assembled the pieces of the picture, gashes in the photographic paper slashing across her mouth and breast, but now the doorbell sounds. When he opens, he finds Patrizia in a chocolate ganache overcoat and with her oxblood leather bags. “Madame est là?—” Next to her feet a framed orange print has been standing on his floor: the black shape of a woman’s head, closely shorn, looking away. “—I spoke to her about renting the place.” Carlo is nothing if not confused, says it was undoubtedly his wife’s idea, that personally he is not sure he agrees. She walks in anyway, rather as though, at this moment, he suddenly does not exist, looks around, puts her bags next to his black chair, sits to appreciate the space, the view: “Don’t say that or I’ll go crazy.” She tells him the story of her marriage. The door again, this time probably it’s the furniture movers, bringing her husband’s furniture. She has taken off her coat and stands in a vanilla-white suit. She walks around the stripped bed, goes into the bathroom, turns, stares back at him through a thick plate glass partition. “I guess I’ll have to go away again,” says he, “I was planning to stay put … Maybe that’s why she went to live with him.” She recognizes that he, too, is in a precarious position. He shows her the torn photograph. The phone rings, not so persistently. This time it’s for her. She listens for a moment, then says into the receiver, “Don’t try to find me.” Looks around, a cat establishing its territory. “There’s a cure for everything,” says he, and she tells him it’s this that disturbs her. They hold each other’s hands. The rain has stopped.

Change proceeds at such a pace that adults are disconnected from the sentiments of their own childhood. One is continually meeting people, continually thrust into the close proximity that makes possible readings of human intent and alignment. If the universe has not yet been evacuated of its aesthetic qualities—in Antonioni the universe is invariably such a place—the proximity invokes a kind of erotic studiousness, with the result that people are often, if swiftly, appraising one another and presenting themselves as possible partners in physical adventure. The contract, constraint, and discipline of marriage are a contradiction of the speeding allure of the world, and the characters we meet in this episode are all, to some degree or other—Carlo perhaps least, yet still appreciably—projected into the air that surrounds things, caught in transit as they move through the social space that supports their commitments and perceptions. The constant movement leaves emotion behind, replaces it with promise. Thus it is that we can be said to be marching ahead too quickly, to have left our souls behind, if our souls are our capacities for feeling and wonder. However, there is no practical way to stop and wait “until the souls catch up,” since territory itself has gained a new complexion as a space through which advancement can be achieved rather than a place of habitation. Locomotion has replaced habitation, anticipation has replaced experience.

When Patrizia moans “Ne me laisse pas!” she is surely already imagining a number of possible future considerations, that the American might disappear, as for three years now he has been threatening to; that she might be the one who does the leaving (as turns out to be the case). The “don’t leave me” is an utterance in regard to future possibility, not an outgrowth of present experience, a prayer not an observation, since at the moment he is comfortably wrapped in her arms and she in his. Even in warmth she can imagine the chill of motion. The chill of motion dominates her life. She and her husband are culturally, emotionally, and psychologically passengers, “human parcels who dispatched themselves to their destination” (Schivelbusch, Journey 38–39).

Everyone in this tale possesses or regards framed paintings or lithographs, and the artwork bespeaks the condition of those who exhibit it at the moment we see them. Perhaps the reflection is of a permanent or enduring condition. Carlo is perennially confronted with the back of a woman, a woman receding, a woman in departure, and this is why, although he is perturbed and angry, he is neither impossibly confused nor shocked. The young lover is perpetually in the presence of an inverted figure in agony or a watcher, perhaps always herself suspended in hunger or staring uncomprehendingly at the world. And Patrizia is to some degree always haunted by the specter of an artful, tasteful woman, a woman of style, who bends to take care of herself. Do the images predict the behavior that we see, or have the characters, living long with these images, learned to imitate them? Film, however, passes by and does not linger to haunt us as these framed pictures and forms do. We move through film much as these characters move through the city, through their time with one another. Time is “nothing but a disquiet of the soul” (Sebald, Emigrants 181).

Un Feu

It is not so much that feeling is impossible during the rush of modern experience, as that only feeling is possible, feeling but not the awareness of feeling, feeling but not the ability to speak of it. So, Carlo, Patrizia, her husband, and his lover make utterances that are notoriously practical—“I have come about renting the apartment”—or feverishly displaced—“For three years you have been bringing her smell here”—but in any event inarticulate about the true state of affairs overwhelming the inner world. Patrizia and her American husband straining to kiss through the plate glass partition of the shower stall, the partition that distends the lips and darkens the faces: what is this doomed project but an icon of the separation of men from their gods (who reside, of course, inside the creatures they serve)? Eager to negotiate and map territory, identity, position, possibility, miscalculation, the modern personality cannot connect with its own primitive hunger. The second glass partition in Carlo’s apartment: through it, a sighting takes place of moving personalities one and the other, a vacancy and an image where there might be a fire.

Let us imagine as we see them on both sides of this thick glass that Carlo and Patrizia will finally meet—meet, that is, after the few moments of preamble we have been entitled to see—and that they will remain in one another’s company, perhaps married, but certainly together in life, for a long time, a very long time by comparison with the abbreviated sentences which have filled the scenes so far, so that in the end, looking at the gross field of their lives and experiences, everything in this little filmed story will turn out to constitute only a caesura, a pause, a pit stop. Perez notes that L’eclisse begins at the end (367), so why might not this story, in an equally adumbrated fashion, present only the beginning, a beginning that is like an end? It becoming necessary for Carlo to explain to friends how he met Patrizia, he recounts this whole story, all of it given, no doubt, by her recountings to him of what she remembers—the twisting urgencies upon the bed, the smashed celadon, the repeated questions never answered—and her traumatic, exaggerated imaginations of the scenes she cannot possibly have witnessed. In the event, Carlo and Patrizia are a perfect couple, handsome, professional, businesslike, matter-of-fact, attuned to the moment, well-balanced (if precariously positioned), sane if not happy in their matching expensive suits—his the blue of midnight, hers the color of ice cream in the Tuileries—standing face to expressionless face, his darkness absorbing her brightness, his hopeless calm drinking in her sad frenzy. He speaks, this Carlo of the future, of what she recounted to him, but it is all a vision: the craven little mistress who dresses for seduction, invents improbable stories, desires endlessly, enacts jealousy with a fury in her blue apartment upon her green sofa in her red chemise; and the husband who plays something not quite Bach on the dark polished piano, who says almost nothing when the moment for speaking has come.

Each of these persons is a stranger to the others even—perhaps especially—during lovemaking. Modern life brings us close to distance, surrounds us with people we recognize but do not know. “Was [Antonioni] just fashion?” Michael Atkinson wondered with youthful irritation in The Village Voice, describing the film’s episodes as “dreamy, pretentious fickle-finger-of-fate mini-tales” containing “preposterously casual … sex” that “seems only to invoke an itch the 83-year-old film-maker can perhaps no longer scratch” (“Snoozes”). Antonioni is showing how lovemaking is the most distant act of all, a fact the young are too distracted by the promise of pleasure to apprehend.

On the Boulevard

That cozy, colorful, well-lit café (the clean, well-lighted place) in which at the beginning of this episode the husband meets the girl who will become his lover (the prowler, the mover), is on or near one of the great boulevards of Paris, magnificent post-Haussmannian thoroughfares that through the nineteenth century, as Hazel Hahn writes, housed those sententious organs, the newspapers and were thus made into “a centre for news and communications that reached its peak at the fin de siècle”:

The newspapers themselves not only reported in minute detail on events on the Boulevards, but were read in the cafés along the street so that much of what was advertised was available just around the corner. The proximity of the places where newspapers were read to the boutiques, department stores, theatres and café-concerts advertised in their pages underscored the centrality of information and consumption to life on the Boulevards. (156)

A particular urbaneness must have characterized the denizens of the café, an openness to advertisement as a mode of speech and a vulnerability to strangeness and the exotic. Not only is the habitué of the café continually on the make, shuffling along beside the traffic, meandering through the crowds, entering and exiting shops for a relatively brief sojourn and experience; but he is also continually prone to being influenced by a world brought from afar, an imported universe, for that is what the newspaper offered on a consistent basis. While the girl’s reaction to the story of the Mexican porters is surprise, the fact that she is surprised does not surprise her, since surprise is precisely the fruit of the sort of casual encounter one has through reading in a spot like this.

Nor can her surprise at the punch line of the story—that the porters felt they were moving so fast their souls had not caught up with them—fail to indicate the intensive degree to which, as an inheritor of the culture of the nineteenth century and an inhabitant of Paris in its stage of hypermodernization, she casually takes her own motion for granted and does not quite see in her own jittery dispensation the same tendency to displace an inner and more ancient world, even though she points, with a certain slack liberalism, to the “peril” of losing her own soul. It is clear if we look carefully at her open, but also modulated and articulately controlled, features when she speaks to the man; and at his guarded, but also unreservedly eager, features when he responds, that more than experiencing interest and fascination, these two are advertising availability to one another, playing skillfully where the presentation of a claim is an expected immediate feature of the environment. They are like posters for a pretense, and, like what is reproduced upon the typical French poster of the fin de siècle, neither face, as it will turn out, has a “direct link” with the “announced object” (Hahn 169). That here and throughout the episode the girl wears relatively bright colors hardly mitigates against our interpretation of her as a spectacle offering itself to a view.

The same publishing industry that brings the husband and his lover together at the beginning has the responsibility for linking Patrizia and Carlo at the end, since she discovers him only because in the want ads she has discovered the apartment in which he lives (and from which he, apparently with too much frequency, travels). No less than the other two, Patrizia and Carlo are thus gullible to advertisement and committed to a lifestyle in which claims and presentations, traveling at the speed of newsprint, take precedence over feelings. The intent of the Haussmannian boulevard, first and finally, was to make possible a great urban fluidity, to let the masses shift position from one neighborhood, horizon, and perspective to another; it worked to link—as Wolfgang Schivelbusch shows in The Railway Journey—the new railroad transportation with the transactional domain of the department store. The café in which this tale begins is suffused with the atmosphere of the boulevard, designed to facilitate this motion and structured as a business enterprise to encourage both the quick conversations that epitomize rational calculation and the quick transactions that make for uncontaminating profit. Movement was inexorably bound with shopping, and shopping bound with the glance. What the characters are engaged in here: a shopping spree.

NICCOLO IN AIX

The Pathway

A young hopeful, Niccolo (Vincent Perez), emerges from an architect’s office in an apartment building in Aix-en-Provence and holds the door for a young woman emerging behind him (Irène Jacob). He catches up with her and they walk together, speaking of religion because she is going to mass. He tells her it is evident to him she is in love, and insists she is like a cherry tree he read about in a newspaper, that eats its own cherries. The word “aloof,” originating as it does in military taxonomy, does not do justice to her abstractness, which is like that of a nurse ready to give an injection, or to the boldness with which she demands to know whether he believes in God, the humility in which she retracts that question, and the renewed boldness in which she withdraws the retraction. He makes it plain he’s interested in her but she tells him he would do well to abjure physical desires, using the tone of a moral guide, quite as though she recognizes that his search is for truths and goodness, not architecture. The church, finally opening at the end of a narrow street, is the Église Saint-Jean-de-Malte, from the thirteenth century. She sits apart from him and loses herself in prayer—“Throughout the entire mass she remains on her knees,” Antonioni had written originally (Tiber 33), though we do not see her do this—and having wandered among the columns, observing the choir, he sits and falls asleep. When he wakes the church is empty and he must run to find her, but she has disappeared. He scours the glistening nocturnal streets. Then, blocks away at a little fountain, there she is, innocently chalking flowers onto the pavement. He tells her he does not find flowers beautiful because they last a few days and then die (and that is why the Japanese do not grow them). “You are afraid of death,” says she, “I am afraid of life”—meaning, the life that people are leading nowadays. It is night. Rain begins to fall. He continues to follow her, admitting that he could love her, and she slips on the pavement and gets her coat wet. Rather than crying, however, she laughs. Back at her apartment, she enters by way of great wooden doors. He races after her. The stairwell is painted a vivid angelica green and pale Béarnaise yellow, and the carpet is deep Beaujolais red. Outside her door he stands awkwardly, until their eyes meet.

Both of these people voyage without awareness, in a way. She was going to mass, and did not expect to encounter this young man. Now she has fallen into something of a relationship with him, so that before she can make the transition she is planning for the morrow—the culminating moment of her life at this time—she must first account to him for it, must experience his reaction either directly or in her imagination. For his part, he was on point of delivering a portfolio, perhaps opening the door to a future, with no thought of meeting a young woman he might wish to accompany. “I should accompany you,” he proclaimed at one point. Heading toward a mass, as he surmises, he cannot know that he will fall asleep and awaken lost, disturbed, dislocated in time and space, or that he will be desperate to find her, or that in finding her he will continue a journey upward to a summit that brings, instead of perspective, a riddling fog. “Mental suffering is effectively without end” (Sebald, Emigrants 170).

Cézanne

Sebald writes that there is no past or future. I was given one day, as a boy, by a gentle piano teacher, a small book containing black-and-white reproductions of paintings by Paul Cézanne. I had no idea who Cézanne was, or why it was this that I was given, or why, for that matter, I was given anything, but certainly there was a mystery to this book of all possible books, and I found many of the pictures ungainly and aggressive without being convincing and also what a boy’s mind would think disorganized. But the fact that I had been made the gift, and with no pretext and on no particular occasion, haunted me for years, and I treasured the book and bore it with me wherever I went, off to school at a big city in Ontario, then to a small Midwestern college town and afterward, as the 1960s wound to a close, circulating through the cities of the East, still, in all this time, not a particular admirer of the painter whose shadows filled its pages. It was only many years later that I saw his canvasses unmediated by printer’s ink and my own limited imagination—freed possibly by having heard Debussy’s L’îsle joyeuse but also entrapped by a swelling galaxy of curiosities—and found that they constitute the epitome of order and beauty. I was helped some in appreciating Cézanne by Guy Davenport’s four Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1982, “Objects on a Table: Still Life in Literature and Painting,” lectures soon enough invoked—yet only invoked—in a charming publication called Apples and Pears but not, as it happens, to appear in print themselves for some sixteen years—a depressingly long time, since I had been smitten by them and much of what I wished to read was only hanging in the mist. He had graciously given me a moment to say hello before one of these talks and had seemed delighted that anyone in his audience might have been genuinely stimulated by the connections he was so rapidly and voraciously making as he spoke. So stunned had I been by the range of his scholarship and the mystery of his attachments to paintings, paragraphs, poems, colors, and ideas—his personal warmth in the pewter chill of Toronto’s November seemed to augment and color my already rich experience of listening to him at his podium—that years later, when I mounted four groups of Polaroid SX-70 photographs as an address to Debussy’s Bergamasque Suite, and included for one of the movements a series of still lifes of apples, it seemed obvious to me that I should dedicate the show to him. Accordingly, I sent him slides and he was most grateful, but that was the end of our tangential and charged contact. When sometime after his death in January 2005 I learned that he had arranged for the donation of his organs to medical science, I remember being both struck by the nobility and simplicity of this gesture and deeply confused to realize that the person I had met was in fact now divided; or had always been quite remote from the body he inhabited and was thus more than the eyes smiling at mine or the voice gently but disconnectedly encouraging me or the gracile penmanship—a skill retained from the early twentieth-century days when personality and conviction had to live in markings upon paper—that characterized his little note of thanks. The recurrence of the female form of the apple and the male form of the pear in literature particularly interested him—he spoke of apples and pears as being “married” (Objects 55)—as did the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, and much painting. Cézanne’s still lifes, Van Gogh’s 1888 picture of his bedroom in Arles, and Monet’s work on the waterways around Paris occupied the central position in these 1982 talks, which ranged over a tremendous amount of material—to me at the time, an entire world—and made a chain of startling connections that I could not now reassemble without the help of a notebook I have stowed away somewhere, or lost, I cannot be sure, a notebook that was red, apple red. At any rate, I came to adore the still lifes of Cézanne, and to marvel at how he had accomplished giving the fruit bulk but also weightlessness, and of course at the shockingly simple and complex ways in which he positioned the peaches and oranges and apples around one another to make compositions that echoed Bach. Cézanne, at any rate, lived in Aix as Niccolo does, and, like Antonioni, was deeply moved by color. In late Cézanne “the sketch is the painting” (Davenport, Gracchus 275). Color, for Cézanne and for Antonioni and also for Davenport, was a reverberation of past events, an echo of echoes, and it occupied time, that same color that Picasso said “is a distraction in a painting” (qtd. in Gracchus 183).

Aix—old Aix, at least—is a city of sandstone buildings, tiny streets, and a thousand fountains, with the grand, confrontational Mont Sainte-Victoire on its eastern edge among modest, shady groves of pine. It is a place—at least the Aix that Antonioni photographs in Beyond the Clouds is a place—that offers itself to the spirit of the wanderer without making any imposition. As we follow Niccolo and the girl, as we listen to them address one another in an extended dolly that moves down blocks and turns corners and crosses little squares, we have no anticipation of arriving at a summary destination but only, with each of their steps, contentment at the experience of penetrating and then relinquishing a space. Satisfaction is beyond consideration. “Are you satisfied, madame?” the young man asks a middle-aged woman who is passing by, and she smiles indulgently at the ridiculousness of the question; yet we see that she is entirely pleased with her condition, even though it is not a condition of satisfaction. She is hardly bored, or irritated, or even displaced by her lack of satisfaction. Aix removes the question of satisfaction from the equation.

To experience art is an act of faith. To make art, to paint a canvas, is innocent, an abandonment while also a consumption of the self. Everything is the subject, its distance, its roundness, proportion, history, implication, its weight—which is to say, in Cézanne, its lack of weight, its light. (Color is light, and that is why color is everywhere.) But to look at a painting is an affirmation of the self, because in this act we struggle to believe in the existence of the qualities we admire. We elevate art, but not without the expenditure of effort that also produces an elevation of the self. To see the world clearly, as Cézanne saw it, is to diminish the self to a point, but in order to admire someone else’s vision of the world one lifts it onto one’s shoulders. One is working, after all, to convince oneself that this is an Original—special, worthy of considered attention—but then suddenly, as though on the opening of a door into a grand arena, one sees or hears all of it with a new and surprising clarity, and it is all present and accounted for, effortless, pristine, full, in a flash, and then originality disappears as a consideration, becomes trivial in the face of what the work actually is. Yet is this vision or this audition not something like what occurred for and to the artist at work? For an instant we have the opportunity to share that vision or audition by performing it again, by repeating history. (In the brief interlude directed by Wenders, when Mastroianni painting the Mont Sainte-Victoire is interrupted by Moreau stepping up to converse with him, this is what he tells her, too: that the meaning for him in copying the original Cézanne resides in trying to experience what the painter experienced, and this is not copying.) The artist, it is certain, labors with the conviction that such an audition, such a perception, is possible, surely for the artist who regards the world but also for those who come to the work of art. He shows or perhaps sings the world in such a way that others can know how he saw it, or heard it open itself and sing to him, through the obstruction of daily life—and not just obstruction but continual obstruction and darkness, that rent to be paid, the paint dry upon the palette, the bon mot slipping away into those moist blue recesses of the absurd and the undiscovered. Or the opinions of the strangers standing next to one’s elbow, always too informed. The world must finally vibrate so that it rises off the map: Mont Sainte-Victoire ceases to be that stalwart lump at 43° 32' N, 05° 39' E and becomes an ineffable presence. If one listens carefully to a choir in a church, if one gives oneself entirely to each voice and the combination of voices, one can also hear the stones from which the vibrations of these voices are recoiling. It is the stones, as much as the music, that have the power to put one to sleep, since by way of those who sing the stones themselves have voice, just as by way of the painter the mountain speaks or as by way of the filmmaker the space of the urban intérieur (which Walter Benjamin described, “furnished and familiar” [Gunning 106]), its cherished objects or its lack of things, its paintings even standing upon the floor, its plate glass partitions, is permitted to enunciate the world.

Voices

It is rather evident to the eye, even disturbingly so as we watch, that as they walk through the city, the girl almost never looks at the young man. Speaking through the voice of an off-camera narrator in To Make a Film Is to Be Alive, a documentary about the making of Beyond the Clouds that is published on the DVD, Antonioni explicitly draws attention to the fact. She needs, says this narrator, “no reassurance from him. Security is not what she needs. A serenity verging on indifference seems to pervade her.” This is surely difficult, if only because serenity is sacred while indifference is mundane. The girl is unruffled, but she is also a little stiff, as though the force of attraction exercised by his hungry ministrations and gaze has made her capable of falling from a kind of pedestal that is gliding beneath her. The boy certainly thinks she occupies a higher plane, perhaps because her lips are the precise Iranian pink of a Gloire de Guilan rose. She tells him she wants to escape from her body, and at that he pauses to slake his thirst. By easily satisfying his body, has he escaped from it? Is she trapped in the fact that she insists on denying herself? What Antonioni typically wishes to escape from is the prison of rationality, the abject quotidian use of intelligence, or at least the use of words that, “more than anything else, serve to hide our thoughts” (Cottino-Jones 21). Her self-contentment, her private love—these are not rational. Later, this narrative voice that is both Antonioni and not-Antonioni mentions the sound of the water running in the fountains as a voice, gives evidence that he hears voices everywhere, a voice but not mere words. “The voice is a ‘noise’ which emerges with other noises in a rapport” (Cottino-Jones 49). The voice is the expression of the spirit of the moment through the fact of the body, and what is said, the message to which words are tantamount, does not summarize the voice but merely localizes it. The voice, indeed, is presence and fullness of the act of speaking itself. Goodman says, “When speaking intervenes in the world and shapes experience, it often is, or is taken as, a direct action in the environment, an energy or even a physical thing, rather than the use of the common code for communication” (19). Speaking itself is the voice. In this part of the film, for example, the boy and girl speak to one another, from the moment of their meeting until the moment of their parting, rather as though at cross purposes, and certainly following two apparently discreet lines of intent that do not promise to intersect. Yet here, as in the story of Carmen and Silvano, the voices of two human beings gradually approximate to one another, just as the rationales upon which they insist on basing their lives move apart. Does one follow the voice or the message?

“This Body of Filth” is the name of the little story from which this segment of the film is taken. It has an interesting ending:

Only now does he notice her strong sensuous figure. It seems to him that he’s never felt so intense a desire to possess a woman. But it’s a different desire, with a certain tenderness and respect. It’s ridiculous, he thinks. And yet there’s a quaver in his voice, and he can’t help it, when he says,

“Can I see you tomorrow?”

She keeps on smiling in the few seconds of silence that precede her reply. And her voice is devoid of all emotion when she speaks.

“I’m entering a cloistered convent tomorrow.”

What a stunning opening for a film. But for me it’s a film that ends here. (Tiber 35)

And we can imagine it, indeed, ending precisely there. On that top landing of the flat of apartments in which she lives. The angelica green, so dense and sweetly gummy one feels the color warping through one’s flesh, and the wine red carpet, red as sacrificial blood, transubstantial, interior. She at her door, looking directly into him, then the door closing. Fade to black.

But onscreen this is not how Antonioni ends his story at all.

We cut to Niccolo frozen in place, his mouth open in shock or amazement, in disappointment or incomprehension, his eyes trained upon her door. Then clumsily he turns, makes his way to the stairwell, and we look down the opening to see him pass all the way to the bottom level—Orfeo searching for Eurydice in the nightmarish bureaucracy in Orfeu Negro (1959), where papers fall down such a stairwell like snow, or Antoine Doinel running away from Fabienne Tabard in Baisers volés (1968)—and stride out of the building. Down the golden street he goes, golden after the rains have washed the sandstone buildings, the street studded with golden light, and walks faster, and breaks into a run. Perhaps, stunningly, he has decided that she is altogether not the person he hoped she would be, that the voice she had kept hidden deep inside, the voice of all truths, the voice he hears only at the end, is a radically strange, even inimical, voice. He is running to save himself. Or he has accepted the impossibility of his love in the face of the definitiveness of hers for something beyond the mortal, and he runs now in freedom, having released—perhaps not her but—the hope of her that he has cherished and targeted. Or else that hope of her has chained him to the rocks, his gaping wound open to the sky.

It doesn’t matter, because also possible is that she has not yet spoken with her truest voice, that she has only made a little speech to fill in the map of her days, to put him off a little, to suspend him. She may well be bypassing both her feelings and what she wants. And this boy: perhaps at her doorway he could have stepped forward instead of remaining in place, extended himself across the gap. So it is that the final moment of Antonioni’s film, in which Niccolo scampers down the street, perhaps singin’ in the rain, is full of optimism and hope, not a moment of closure at all, since both of them may yet find the voice that speaks a companionship. He may stop, just after we can no longer watch, and reconsider: “Maybe I misinterpreted.”

BEYOND THE CLOUDS

Beyond the Clouds, a “box-office smash” in Italy (Rosenbaum), found a more rational appreciation among the American critics. Jonathan Rosenbaum noted “a lot of beautiful things” in the film, saying that it “isn’t so much sexy as erotic … every bit as involved with the erotics of place as with the erotics of flesh” yet does not manage to get beyond desire (“Return”). In The New York Times, Michael Holden wrote—enthusiastically but also without the clarity that comes with conviction—that “you are all but transported through the screen to a place where the physical and emotional weather fuse into a palpable sadness” and also that the vignettes “portray characters caught up in romantic obsessions presented as metaphors for the artist’s pursuit of an elusive truth” (“Transformed”). But the central glory of Antonioni, after all, is that in his films truth is not elusive, that he depicts a truth quite clearly, although it is perhaps a far more complex truth than we crave in an era of uncommitted movement, promise, pulse, and surface.

Much as when we fly above the clouds we sense ourselves to be “beyond” the society churning below, out of touch and in fact hopelessly, if also deliriously, unable to make contact; and sense that our movement is dependent on our status as outsiders; so all of the characters in the four stories Antonioni has filmed for Beyond the Clouds are separated from one another and, thus, from shared direct presence and experience. All of them are, in some deep and evocative sense, alone. It is perhaps the case that in this, they resemble and even mirror the condition of every person, always, trapped on one or the other side of some barely substantial essence that keeps people away from the human race. We cannot fully know the world, even though we can recognize its surfaces, and so the surfaces become the world: a thematic that Seymour Chatman attributes to Antonioni’s filmmaking. Gilberto Perez very perceptively writes of a kind of separation in Antonioni’s camera’s vision, to the extent that “we observe the man and the woman from the point of view of a stranger who somehow has come upon them” (367). But it is not this that I have in mind when I invoke separation, since strangers, too, have homes, and all strangers can imagine a country in which they are neither separated from those they watch nor set apart from the rituals of the flow of life. I have in mind, much more, a kind of nostalgia for an irrevocable but unforgettable past, such as was felt by a diarist Sebald quotes, who is remembering a “distinctly creepy” house to which her family moved: there, she writes, “I leafed through a page or two of the blue velvet postcard album which had its place on the shelf of the smoking table, and felt like a visitor” (Emigrants 210). In Beyond the Clouds, it is exactly as though, in some “distinctly creepy” place, and looking at images of some irrevocable but unforgettable past, we have become visitors, arbitrarily and knowingly accelerating out of that familiar orbit from which we might see a world presented in its telling details, so that, moving more quickly than our souls can move, we stand outside ourselves and look back with the eyes of some well-meaning inconnu. All this horribly sweet turmoil is artfully measured and evidenced in Silvano almost touching Carmen while not touching her; in the director and the girl making love with movement and tension, with drive and hunger, while yet seeming to be on different planets, their bodies unaware that they are gliding against one another in our view as we busily note (to quote Durrell again) not them exactly but the act in which they are engaged; in Carlo and Patrizia navigating through the waters of the memory of their marriages, their lost furniture, their betrayed dreams; in Niccolo running away from someone who is also running away, in Aix. In all of this, the relation of touch, which is the oldest relation, and the one that confers upon objects their identity as “things” (see Ortega) has long dissipated in favor of promise, which is also that glint in the eye with which we detect the periphery of a world in its continual unfolding and a voice that rushes like water and says, “I search.”

• • •

Al di là delle nuvole (1995), photographed by Alfio Contini (and, for sequences by Wim Wenders, by Robby Müller) in the 1.66: 1 format at Ferrara, Aix-en-Provence, and Portofino and printed as an Eastmancolor positive; 104 m. Released in the United States as Beyond the Clouds, October 8, 1999.