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Identification of a Woman

The investigation proceeded with vigor, if not always with judgment, and numerous individuals were examined to no purpose.

—Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”

LOVE STORY

I wonder what kind of love story can possibly have meaning in our corrupt society today.

—Mario, Niccolò’s collaborator and friend

In Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), the celebrated filmmaker Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), having had an enormous screen success, has entered a kind of creative crisis as he searches for the subject of his new film, a crisis in which his producer, his writer, the stars he has worked with, his wife, and the remembered salient figures from his childhood who now seem to have returned to populate his consciousness all swirl around him, suddenly sweep forward, and then ebb into the recesses of his thought without being able to leave behind the trace of an inspiration. Everywhere are women, each one a special magnificence, teasing, enchanting, cleansing, reproving, adoring Guido, but to no avail. He is tormented by possibilities. He cannot see what is coming next.

In Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman, the celebrated filmmaker Niccolò Farra (Tomas Milian) is searching, too: if not exactly for the subject of a new film then for the female presence around which such a film might take shape, perhaps in the way a crystal takes shape when it forms around a single vital granule or the way that from a material speck a pearl takes shape within an oyster. Niccolò, at any rate, has been cutting out photographs of women and tacking them on his board, patiently, a little peremptorily, a little hopelessly, in his capacious apartment that looks upon a pine-lined Roman street and outside of which a bird’s nest sits empty in an evergreen branch. He wants to make a film about “a feeling in female form.” It is this feeling for which he seems to be searching—his wife having left him, and he now frequently being in the company of a young woman named Mavi Luppis (Daniela Silverio) whom he presumes (correctly) to come from the class of the aristocracy, although she denies it. A feeling in female form. He has a sister, a modest gynecologist looking for a promotion at the hospital, whose little boy has been leaving phone messages about some special postage stamps Niccolò promised him. Mavi takes him to a party where everyone knows her, especially an older man who stops her for a private conversation on the staircase. Niccolò is uncomfortable there, and also, in a way, in his relationship with Mavi altogether, until and unless he is making love to her, which he does furiously and with a great hunger while she writhes in an agony of pleasure (but also shifts position during orgasm to watch herself in a mirror). She spent time at a college in Wales, says she, where with the other girls she practiced lifesaving in their canoes and where there was no sex. (Quickly we are shown the canoes in the splashing navy blue waters crested with creamy foam, and the sedate stone college in its green lawn.)

Niccolò has a rather vexing and mundane problem that is overwhelming him, transcending even his creative block. At home one night he received a telephone call from a strange man and an invitation to an encounter in a café the next morning. There, the bloke, sitting presumptuously with a dish of ice cream, told him that someone else was interested in “the girl” he was seeing; and that he should be “careful.” In outrage Niccolò left, but still cannot get this conversation and its implications out of his mind. Who is watching him? Who has hired this thug? Who is trying to come between Mavi and him and for what reasons? At the party with Mavi he therefore scans every face, even considers one genteel man, who is quickly retreating out of view, to be the culprit. Mavi is a little impatient with his continuing fears. At home, reading the newspaper—an article about the dangers of the sun expanding—he is discomforted, ill at ease. Learning from his sister that her application for promotion was unsuccessful, he is immediately certain his mysterious pursuer has arranged this defeat and is punishing him by hurting someone he loves. He feels that in general he is being watched. Indeed, one night, a man is outside his apartment eyeing him from the street. He escapes in his car, picks Mavi up, and flees with her into the country, where they are caught in a dense fog. She is frightened, and he is unsympathetic. She confesses her fear that she is being pursued by her mother’s lover, the man who spoke with her at the party, but in a flashback we learn that the man’s true purpose in drawing Mavi aside was to announce the shocking news that he is her father. Mavi and Niccolò drive to a villa he rented once, and to which he still has the key. But the place frightens her even more and she wants to leave. They make love. In the morning, he sees that two young women have in fact rented the place, and also that Mavi is gone. Back in Rome he searches for her, to no avail. He phones her mother’s house and the butler announces, “Niccolò Farra is on the telephone, searching for Maria Vittoria.” “Let him search,” the old lady replies. Mavi has gone off the map.

Still, Niccolò thinks he is being haunted by a mysterious force that is drawing Mavi away. His sister comes with her son to visit, but is insufficiently sympathetic to suit Niccolò’s needs. The boy gets his postage stamps and is especially fond of a pair that show astronauts. “You should make a science fiction film!” says he. Niccolò hunts Mavi at a swimming pool, where he meets a young woman (Lara Wendel) whose sexual preference is masturbation, especially with someone who knows how to help her; and who admits to having slept with Mavi one night when the men they were with wanted to talk about soccer. Then Niccolò meets an old girlfriend, who agrees to spend a pleasant evening with him in town. She needs to find a place to pee, so they head toward a theater, where a young woman, one of the cast of the play, is disappearing inside. “Sexy,” says Niccolò’s friend. Later the same night, the old friend having left, Niccolò returns to the theater and meets this actress, Ida (Christine Boisson). They spend time together, especially at her villa on the outskirts of town where she keeps horses. He becomes her lover, and tells her all about Mavi and the strange case of being followed. A huge bouquet of red chrysanthemums is delivered for Mavi at Niccolò’s apartment; he sends them away. He goes off with Ida to her place, but soon she must go into town, only to return after several hours with the news that she has “found” Mavi, via an article in an issue of Time. How did she come by it? She went to the florist whose name was on the chrysanthemums, and found that they had been sent by a woman, probably the secretary of the person who had hired the man to follow Niccolò. And oddly, a copy of the magazine was at the flower shop. From an old contact, one of the editors of Time in Rome, Niccolò secures Mavi’s address, and drives there in his car. It is an apartment building with a marvelous curling staircase. He goes up and knocks on doors, one by one, but no one knows of Mavi. In one of the apartments he meets a young woman who regards him closely. He drives away but comes back in the late afternoon, this time climbing to the top of the stairs and waiting. Mavi enters the building and goes to the young woman’s door, but cannot find her key. He hears them conversing. “Niccolò is here, he came into the building,” says the voice from behind the door. Mavi looks up and sees him. She goes into the apartment and shuts the door.

He becomes closer and closer to Ida, takes her to see the empty lagoon at Venice in the winter. In their skiff, on the waters which are as gray as dust and as sleek as silver, they embrace. Returned to their hotel, she gets a telephone call and comes to him elated. She is pregnant, has been since before they met. He responds coolly, it becoming clear immediately that for him this relationship has no future.

Niccolò, finally, has made his film, about space explorers using an asteroid-ship to voyage near the sun in order to make calibrations. This ship is made of “a rare mineral, that resists a million degrees.” The little nephew’s voice asks why we go to the sun? “To study it,” Niccolò explains off-camera as we watch the asteroid approaching the great ball of fire. “The day mankind understands what the sun is made of … and the source of its power … perhaps we’ll understand the entire universe … and the reason for so many things.” “And after that?” asks the boy, with perfect composure.

Identification of a Woman is over.

A CHANGE OF LIGHT

Nothing is ever lost in space: toss out a cigarette lighter, and all you have to do is to plot its trajectory and be in the right place at the right time, and the lighter, following its own orbital path, will with astronomical precision plop into your hand at the designated second. The fact that in space a body will orbit about another to infinity means that sooner or later the wreckage of any spaceship is almost always bound to turn up.

—Stanislaw Lem, Tales of Pirx the Pilot

But in the middle of this, there comes upon us an astonishing transition, one of those movements by which Antonioni (in various films) shows us that space is time. (Film is all transition, all continuity.) Space exists to be moved into, moved away from, moved through. When we care about people, we are curious about space because they exist in it: visiting Niccolò’s apartment, Ida says it’s him in this place she wants to see, not merely this place. When, like Niccolò, we are not so capable of caring about people (Mavi makes it clear to him that he needs her, but does not love her), it is objects moving through space that enchant us, and perhaps people become objects in this regard: the clay-pale asteroid-spaceship in Niccolò’s movie gliding through the dark intergalactic void toward the sun. Niccolò has been hunting for Mavi and has driven to the address that his friend at Time has provided. A narrow street, with old stone facades in front of which he can draw up his vehicle near the doorway to Mavi’s apartment building. After he has investigated the apartments, we see him leave the building, check out the neighborhood a little, get into his car, and drive away, off-left.

Now, the scene does not change by so much as the tiniest fraction of a degree, compositionally. The light fades some. He drives in from the right, and parks exactly where he had parked before.

This is a strange and delicious infusion of dimensions. The camera has been locked down, so that the frames match precisely. The road has undoubtedly been marked for the car’s position. And the cutting has been managed securely because the lighting conditions in the two parts of the shot are not so very different that a splice would be noticed; yet, at the same time, the day has clearly waned, hours have passed, between Niccolò’s departure and his return.

And between this departure and this return what seems a whole world is eclipsed. In the first sequence he is desperate, hopeful, eager, filled with the feeling that at last he has found her again and can at least expect an explanation for her sudden termination of their affair. When the occupants of the various apartments offer their various portrayals of ignorance about Mavi, he is increasingly doubtful, not so much about her presence in this place as about these agents. In the second sequence he seems possessed of a sad certainty, a knowledge he would rather not have but which, like a recurring melody, must be played out to its finale. In this transitional shot in the street, which has a magical quality because the editing is so seamless and because we cannot imagine how in so brief a spate of time a man who has just driven offscreen left can possibly be driving onscreen from the right, there is a sense in which time has a palpable essence, the same essence as that of light, and that as the light slowly drops away, time does the same, yet visibly. And in this tiny hiatus, of course, Niccolò travels the entire universe.

The evidence that lies before Niccolò before he drives away from Mavi’s building and the evidence when he returns are precisely the same: (a) a vague, rather ugly warning to “be careful”; (b) a fact: that someone else apparently has designs on Mavi; (c) another fact: this someone is at least connected to the voice of a woman who ordered the chrysanthemums; (d) the strange tale of the girl at the swimming pool; (e) Mavi’s curious self-regard during lovemaking, her libidinous passion, her general lack of interest in Niccolò and recognition that he lacks interest in her. The rest of what Niccolò is worried about is pure supposition: that the mysterious enemy has taken steps to disenfranchise his sister at the hospital; that this stranger attended the soirée and had an eye out for Niccolò, then fled; that the stranger means to do Niccolò, or for that matter anyone, harm. If his vanity were ripe, after all, he might well assume that the comment, “Be careful,” meant, “You are about to be endangered,” but that is not all it can mean.

Further, we are given direct reason to query the strength and fidelity of Niccolò’s troubled suppositions and fears. In that dense fog, when pacing outside the car he hears that there has been an incident at the river, with shooting, with the police, he leaps immediately to the conclusion—it is really astonishing how Antonioni leads us to be able to see this, by the expressions on his face, by his movements—that Mavi has jumped to her death, or been shot, or that she is involved in something horrific and indescribable. But Mavi has nothing to do with this, and is already—as we very soon discover—sitting back in the car, waiting for him with her cigarette. (Her cigarette that she does not really want to smoke, like all the cigarettes she asks for, and begs help in lighting, then quickly stubs out.) His terror, then, is rather like a fog that descends in an instant out of nowhere. For Mavi, if we look objectively rather than through Niccolò’s analysis, we can see that Niccolò has certain attractive qualities: he is well known and intelligent, if neurotic; he is a fine lover; he knows how to treat her to a pleasant time. Nor need any of this dislodge a certain trepidation she seems to feel in his presence throughout, as though, tasting gingerly from his cup of plea sure she is nevertheless always like a bird on point of flight, a bird ready to leave a nest. His attempts to frame her departure as a conspiracy are overdrawn: she is fragile and flighty in the first place. When finally she does disappear, in that morning at the country villa, it is not really alarming or surprising except to Niccolò, who—she was correct the night before in pronouncing—needs her more than he loves her.

If the evidence available objectively to Niccolò rests the same before and after his departure that afternoon from the precincts of Mavi’s apartment block, what accounts for the change in his view, his attitude, his expectation? How does his hopefulness become acceptance and detachment? He is not simply a man who returns for a second look to a scene where a lost article has not been found; he is another man altogether on his return, come to see a world he previously could not imagine. It can only be time itself that has changed him, or light, both of which signal the voyage around the universe that Niccolò makes in his little car while we wait, calmly, arms outstretched as it were, for the object that he is, having finished its revealing orbit, to return.

What, in the end, is this universe in which Niccolò has made his circuit as the scene subtly changes? One, clearly, in which if he orbits, he is yet a kind of sun, with creatures circling him like planets obedient to his pull. His sister has had her career either ruined or seriously interrupted, for all intents and purposes, yet his sole response is to see some reflection upon himself: that a nefarious stranger pulled strings in order to hurt him by hurting her. The thug eating ice cream in the café: it does not occur to Niccolò to actually listen to him, even though in all his utterances so far, in person and on the telephone, the man has been the soul of courtesy. He is only a brute, employed by another brute, who brings menace Niccolò’s way. The writing partner and chum Mario (Marcel Bozzuffi), who cannot imagine what kind of love story could possibly make sense in a corrupt world: for him Niccolò has little time or conviction, since only his own desire occupies him. “Corruption is what unites our country,” Niccolò says rather glibly, “and corrupt people are the first to want love stories.” Yet Niccolò does not see that his own immense attractiveness to others is a form of corruption, and that he is among those who are first to seek love. The women with whom he surrounds himself are certainly parts of his universe more than he is a part of theirs. Mavi, Ida, the girl at the pool, his former girlfriend, all of them exist in order to function, and function as potential subjects for his characterization. “Looking for a character means looking for contexts, facts,” claims he, but he does not look for the reality of their experience. Mavi becomes more and more important to him, though she has disappeared, because the riddle of her pursuer has not been solved, not because of anything intrinsically interesting to him about her.

In the end, Niccolò treats himself as the glowing orb being approached by the exploratory probe (who inhabits that asteroid-ship, what their intentions for the knowledge they will surely amass, he does not know), but it is the ship, in truth, that is his. Well protected against harmful radiation, he seeks proximity to a sun that we may imagine as the quintessence of feeling in female form.

The former girlfriend has a lesson of sorts that Niccolò is unable to apprehend when, wanting to find a place to pee, she walks with him up the steep dark steps toward the theater. “I think you’re happy,” says she, “when your body is in tune with your thoughts. Mine is used to being near fields, rivers, trees, frost. Thoughts are different there from thoughts in the city. The laws of nature don’t count here, and I feel … empty.” The body, then, is part of a physical world, subject to temperatures, winds, visions, colors, textures, waves, obstructions, objects. But Niccolò is an obsessive, persistently unaffected by the physical scene, persistently concentrating on locating his “woman,” a character with whom he can be “silent” and “have with her the kind of relationship one has with nature.” Underneath that villa he imagines is still his, to which he brings Mavi out of the fog, is a Roman atrium, and when he takes her down there, coolly disinterested in history and locale, he is moving to another universe, but without consciousness. She is terrified by a flying creature—perhaps a giant bat, more likely an owl. He seems not to have noticed.

BLIND KNOWLEDGE

Our words become increasingly impenetrable.

—Niccolò to Mario

As Alain Bergala points out, Mavi and Ida both keep secrets, and so identifying them is a matter of difficulty (part of what makes this film, for John Powers, merely “another evaporating detective story”). In this they typify any “other,” who is unknowable because in possession of an inaccessible inner life: Niccolò’s struggle to know them, for the purposes of either love or characterization, represents any person’s work at intersubjectivity. Mavi knows, but does not reveal, the shape of her desire. Ida does not know she is pregnant when she takes up with Niccolò, but she suspects it, and has clearly planned going for the test the results of which are announced in Venice. (Mavi is the one who makes an appointment to see a gynecologist, Niccolò’s sister.) Nor does their secrecy exhaust the impenetrability of the film. Barriers to understanding are everywhere around, especially for Niccolò, so that he must send out interrogatory probes into social space to investigate the foreign bodies that hover before him in order to have any hope of increasing his knowledge, rounding off his understanding. Niccolò himself does not grasp his own working method, except to say he wishes to find a certain kind of woman. He certainly does not understand the confusions that beset him as he searches for this ideal character.

Every action is something of a question for Niccolò, every step a possible augmentation of experience. Yet at the same time, every presentation is a riddle. Mavi has bathed and is drying herself with a carmine red towel. She notices, high on her thigh, cellulite, and comments that a woman her age shouldn’t have that, yet she does. How to interpret this? Does she, for instance, have knowledge about the cause of cellulite, and is she suggesting that something in the way life is lived today favors women developing this—in short, telling us that she is like many young women, all different than their mothers were at their age? Or is she puzzled, because all her friends have smooth skin and she cannot imagine how this happened to her? Is she concerned about herself, or is she thinking that perhaps Niccolò will notice and find the ripples unattractive? Is she making a light-hearted comment, or a humorous reflection on her own condition—saying she is older than she feels? Niccolò is listening carefully to her, perhaps too carefully. Indeed, at the party scene he chides her at one point for not taking seriously something he’s said and gives a tiny lecture: “Mavi, we must listen to one another.” As he listens, what does—what could—he apprehend that is of any use to him in deciding where he will go next, or what he will do? To be extremely sensitive to one’s universe is a kind of (delicious) passivity, a force that makes one stand in a doorway with eyes wide open drinking in the pleasures of a soirée but unable to move. Situated human action, after all, shares with other instances of organized production a reliance not only on appropriate materials, available spaces, and talented performers but also on knowledge, or at least what simulacrum of knowledge seems sufficient and credible. And just as being able to go somewhere or do something—something complex, for example, like making a film—hangs upon knowing one’s world in a certain way; so, too, does knowing one’s world hang upon motive and reason.

Yet—and this is the central thrust of Identification—Niccolò does make his way forward. What this film suggests about human action, then, is that we commit ourselves ongoingly, without having real knowledge at all. One could say that knowledge is a dramatization, and thus that a film is a way of knowing the world or a demonstration and collection of knowledge, a library. Unable to access the world, cut off from contact, from direct perception, and restricted to the apprehension of surfaces and our conventions for guessing what surfaces may cover, we know by picturing, and the act of picturing is always an attempt, always fallible. Niccolò is trying to get a “picture” of Mavi, and later of Ida, and in both cases it could be said that he fails, yet it is also true that he makes—that Antonioni, acting for him, makes—a sufficient picture for us to believe we have seen them and can come to know them. He makes way.

For each of us, understanding is beyond. This is why at the end of Identification, we must imagine that Niccolò is aboard that asteroidcraft. Somewhere, near the sun or near some other part of the universe, he will find what he needs.

SCIENCE

To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.

—Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

The argument can be made—is often made, in fact, in the most commonplace ways as well as the most sophisticated ones—that the right and proper approach toward expanding human knowledge is science, which to most people means a system of methods with its history, its taxonomy, its devotions, its rigors, and, to be sure, its enemies. We think of scientific progress, scientific revolutions, scientific laboratories, mad scientists, and so on, following more or less from Francis Bacon’s theorizing at the end of the sixteenth century. For him, the world had previously been accepted as a completed creation with its laws implicit and open to deduction, but now and henceforth it was to be seen instead as an aggregation of facts which were open to discreet observation. Just as the laws according to which nature moved had to be induced from an accretion of suppositions based upon clearly observed facts, so, too, was the power of the observer now held paramount in the formation of knowledge. Seeing clearly, discerning with refinement, measuring with assiduity—these were the powers involved in learning the world. And such a world, structured so as to be learnable, shone in its special visibility, its openness to measurement and observation. In this enlightenment, as Jean Starobinski described it, the processes of the reasoning mind “appear to have been closely akin to those of the seeing eye” (Invention 210; qtd. in Jay 85). Martin Jay describes the difficulties of apperception as they applied to politics: the court of the Sun King (Louis XIV) “at once theater and spectacle, was a dazzling display of superficial brilliance, bewildering to outsiders but legible to those who knew how to read its meaning. Here courtiers learned to decode the signs of power, distinction, and hierarchy in the gestures and accoutrements of bodies semaphorically on view” (87)—a type of situation handily described again and again by Dumas, of course, in Le Comte de Monte Cristo.

Science understood in this (limited) way involves calibration, measurement, recording, publication, testing and retesting, doubt, hypothesis, experiment, controlled variables, and so on. The observation upon which it stands is very old as a process. “All early natural philosophers acknowledged that vision is man’s most noble and dependable sense,” claims David Lindberg (qtd. in Jay 39). In the Enlightenment, writes Patricia Fara, “seeing was closely allied with knowing. Progressive thinkers often claimed that they were living in an enlightened age, when the bright flame of reason would dispel the dark clouds of ignorance and superstition” (15). Scientific experiments became rationalized as a superior avenue to the truth, even though they weren’t always successful, even though “people make mistakes, ignore results that later seem significant, or persuade themselves—and others—to adopt theories that turn out to be false” (Fara 10). Beyond wanting to understand the world, “Enlightenment philos ophers wanted … to promote themselves by displaying their command of apparently inexplicable phenomena” (20–21), and “hoped to gain authority over society by proving their dominion over nature” (22), ultimately beginning to professionalize themselves as did Joseph Priestley, the “electrician.” What comes to be constituted in this shaping of “science” is a particular institutionalization of the more general process of human science, which has always been the human quest for knowledge of the world, or the repository of knowledge that any person may possess. Jay gives one illustration of the warping quality of such institutionalization, for example, when he writes that “space was robbed of its substantive meaningfulness to become an ordered, uniform system of abstract linear coordinates. As such, it was less the stage for a narrative to be developed over time than the eternal container of objective processes. It was not until the time of Darwin that narrative regained a significant place in the self-understanding of science” (53). And Michel Foucault gives another, as he discusses the pre-Freudian discourse on sex, wherein “we could take all these things that were said, the painstaking precautions and detailed analyses, as so many procedures meant to evade the unbearable, too hazardous truth … and the mere fact that one claimed to be speaking about it from the rarefied and neutral viewpoint of a science is in itself significant” (53). That “rarefied and neutral” viewpoint couched and covered, among other things, “a refusal to speak” and in this way bolstered “a science made up of evasions” (53). This “science” of sexuality, Foucault says, is “geared to a form of knowledge-power” (58), that is, it connects knowledge with control, mastery, superascendency, discipline, and, ultimately, class.

By contrast, Vincentio opens Measure for Measure by reflecting to Escalus upon a different and broader way of knowing, suggesting that as to the properties of government “your own science/Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice/My strength can give you” (I.i.7–9). For Shakespeare, science exceeded observation and data collection, exceeded the amassing of “facts,” and included any and all aspects of knowing and apperceiving. The more limited “science” of white-coated technicians heavily equipped and wrapped in secrecy, that largely informs our view of this process today, valorizes certain professionalizations and class restrictions, accredits and sanctions some seekers as “legitimate” and “authoritative” while others are relegated to the marginalia of history as charlatans, dilettantes, skeptics, and so on. We may think of the sacred tasks of scientific philosophers touted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows” (47). And for a “would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge” one would reasonably have “the greatest disdain” (41).

But all thinking creatures have their respective scientiae, and working upon our relation to the world we do scientia routinely, if unevenly and unrepeatably; even and especially is this the case for those whose science is articulated as an art. Auteurism is something of an equivalent to science, utilizing different methods and rigors and with an altogether separate history and taxonomy. For example, if David Bordwell suggests that the credits of an art film “can tease us with fragmentary, indecipherable images that announce the power of the author to control what we know” (43), it remains true as well that the author is being teased by his world, and is responding in kind. The artist explores the world, searching with a different kind of eye than our typical “scientist” uses; what the artist sees must be accepted as though others can also see and understand it, but this acceptance, this recognition, must be immediate and does not depend upon careful replication of experimental technique and comparison of results. The artist must speak in a language that is instantly apprehendable.

Is Niccolò autobiographical, Antonioni was asked by Cahiers du cinéma; “What happened to him never happened to me …. A film is autobiographical to the extent that it is authentic and, in order to be that, it has to be sincere” (Cottino-Jones 368). Our attention is being directed to Niccolò as a filmmaker, and to the process not of forming an artistic crystal but of finding the seed around which, if conditions are right, the crystal will unavoidably form. The “seed” in this case is a certain female sensibility that seems open to some form of continuance (sadly lacking in both Mavi and Ida). To the extent that we may view the filmmaker’s quest as his science, Identification of a Woman turns out to be, actually, the sci-fi film that the little boy asks for; a sci-fi film, indeed, about the ultimate making of a sci-fi film, that “new mysticism” (Kelly 42). Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana said to Antonioni, “The little boy asks Niccolò, ‘Why don’t you make a sci-fi film?’ We ask the same question of you.” And he replied to them, “It’s a question a little boy like that can ask, but not you!” (5)

Niccolò’s search for his character is a voyage with, but also around, women who constitute not only his alien “other” but also his universe, a universe, in the filmmaker’s view, of startling moral discontinuity:

Today the world is endangered by an extremely serious split between a science that is totally and consciously projected into the future, and a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice or sheer laziness …. Science has never been more humble and less dogmatic than it is today. Whereas our moral attitudes are governed by an absolute sense of stultification …. we have not been capable of finding new ones, we have not been capable of making any head-way whatsoever towards a solution of this problem, of this everincreasing split between moral man and scientific man, a split which is becoming more and more serious and more and more accentuated. (Film Culture 31–32)

Niccolò’s is likewise a universe that is sure to be changed: “In the future—not soon, perhaps by the twenty-fifth century—these concepts will have lost their relevance. I can never understand how we have been able to follow these worn-out tracks, which have been laid down by panic in the face of nature. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them” (Samuels 82). Antonioni admitted to Seymour Chatman that he had begun to read more and more about science: “As soon as you talk about the universe, everything is involved” (Chatman, “Interview” 156).

In the last scene of the film, this link between science fiction, the filmmaker, his world, and his women is apparent. Coming home, he stops to listen through the door of his apartment. Who can he be listening for? What is he thinking? That she is inside. She? Not Mavi, to be sure, because Mavi is with her lover, Mavi has forgotten him. Not Ida, because he has abandoned Ida. He is listening for the sounds—female sounds absolutely—that will identify his world and connect him with it, the sounds of his truest nature, indeed a sound, distinct, that will address specifically and only him. Then we go inside. Jauntily he tosses his coat away. A landscape hangs restfully upon a wall, seen from an acute angle. The door to his study—it is marked with a Greek key—he steps past it, places his hand upon the wall, lets his fingers creep toward the handle. Quickly, without a reflective pause, he opens. No one is in there, but through a beautiful vertical rectangle the window light spreads in, and, far off, a rolling hill is covered with cushions of trees. “In each of Antonioni’s films, especially those in color, there exists a proportionate relationship between the sheer beauty of the images and the terrible reality contained in them” (Kelly 42). He grabs some sunglasses and positions himself in the window. We cut to a close-up of his face as, shielding his eyes a little, he peers outward. Delicate sounds of exploratory music. The sun, informing and blinding, floods in upon him as his voice is heard narrating the story of the asteroid-ship that is his film. Indeed, as his image dissolves away, certain hot spots linger on the screen and become dark green, parts of the space void that the ship haunts. “Individual time accords mysteriously with that of the cosmos” (Antonioni; qtd. in Cardullo 154).

ATTENTION

The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him.

—W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

Seymour Chatman is neither at ease with Identification of a Woman nor able to escape the temptation to imagine how it could have been improved, when he writes,

There is no discernable answer to the question that Niccolò writes in the steam on a window of his apartment (in the treatment only): “But why am I so attracted to this woman whom I cannot manage to respect?” It might have been well if the question had been asked in the film. At least it would have helped focus the issue a little more clearly. Whether Milian was not quite up to the subtleties of the role or Antonioni did not provide him with sufficiently explanatory lines and action, the basis for Niccolò’s absorption with Mavi remains unclear. (Surface 225–226)

Nor when he suggests that “Part of the problem with Mavi’s characterization may lie with the actress who plays her. It is all very well to depict a character whose psyche is chaotic, incompletely formed, inachevée. But clearly the role must be played by someone who is herself clear about what she is doing” (227). Nor when, discussing the notable wordiness of this film in the director’s oeuvre, he remarks, “Too many lines are spent establishing the believability of Niccolò’s erotic charm” (233). Nor when, in regards to the finale, he chides, “It is sad that Antonioni’s budget did not permit him to end the film with the kind of finale that he wanted (and that it seems to need). For if the science fiction sequence had been realized with effects of the caliber of 2001, Star Wars, or Blade Runner, one’s feelings about Niccolò and his situation as an artist might be entirely different” (237). There is never much sense in reconfiguring an artist’s motion picture along the lines of one’s own tastes and predilections—of pretending to be the filmmaker oneself. The only film ever worth studying is the one the filmmaker has put upon the screen—worth studying only because it is in our desire to study it—and our challenge is to understand how all of its aspects cohere beautifully and meaningfully into a statement that might not at first be intelligible to our limited reception. There is no doubt that we can be wrong, in myriad ways, but any other project of the self is ultimately an evasion of the facts. Rather than squabble with a film, we must adjust ourselves to it; and that adjustment is the true adventure of cinema-going. Antonioni told Pierre Billard, “Mistakes are always sincere, absolutely sincere” (Cardullo 51).

What kind of science—what kind of eroticized science—is Niccolò doing, that we should understand his charm? And his science fiction film, which is certainly not Star Wars or Blade Runner but which offers a stunning, if abrupt, vision and draws the film to a profound conclusion—what about its significance exactly and wholly in its own terms? When Antonioni spoke with Daney and Toubiana, he did not regret that he lacked the funds for making extravaganzas like those American ones, he merely indicated that in Italy filmmaking was done in radically different terms than in Hollywood. Moreover, the asteroid-ship isn’t the true sci-fi figure in this film, Niccolò is. And the glowing sun only signifies the mysterious universe that is thrown up more concretely in the presences that Niccolò confronts.

Two fascinating features of the film are indeed valuably invoked in Chatman’s critique: the incomprehensibility and vagueness of the world that fascinates our protagonist (to such an extent that one might question the merit of that fascination); and the nexus between fascination and erotic appeal. The world’s incomprehensibility is one thing as regards knowledge and another as regards perception. We have a long history of seeking to apprehend structures and relations that are not immediately given to the senses, and in this respect it can be argued that the quest for knowledge is a continual negotiation with the world’s mystery or incomprehensibility. After the Enlightenment, science of any sort attempts to illuminate, thus to make experience more understandable and to dissipate the darkness: where id was, there shall ego be. But the world as an incomprehensible datum changed at the end of the nineteenth century, with William James’s theory of active perception. Prior to this, philosophers had posited “the mere presence to the senses of an outward order” (James, vol. 1, 402), which in the case of perceptual difficulty implied either a damaged or an improperly attentive perceptual apparatus, absent which the apparent (and complete) structure of the world would have been directly perceivable. For James, early writers were “bent on showing how the higher faculties of the mind are pure products of ‘experience’; and experience is supposed to be of something simply given” (402). James suggests that perception is bound up with attention, and attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” (403–404). He goes on to stipulate that in paying attention, we must accomplish “withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others” (404). Part of what is troubling Niccolò, seen through a Jamesian lens, is the decision, in regard to both Mavi and Ida, as to what he should attend to and what he should disregard. In causing him this trouble these women also spark his concern about other aspects of the world and the decision he must make, always, in seeing. This is why the title of the film is so appropriate. As much as the problem is women, it is also identification, and, indeed, identification of a woman, that spirit so ineluctable and enticing: woman as the motive of science (not in the crass way that scientists, who are frequently men, objectify women and try to control them through knowledge; but in the spiritual way that scientists, who are humans, seek the ineffable knowledge of their own origin, the place of no return).

One signal consequence of the shift to thinking of active perception, writes Jonathan Crary, “was that the functioning of vision became dependent on the complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer, rendering vision faulty, unreliable, and, it was sometimes argued, arbitrary. Even before the middle of the [nineteenth] century, an extensive amount of work in science, philosophy, psychology, and art involved a coming to terms in various ways with the understanding that vision, or any of the senses, could no longer claim an essential objectivity or certainty” (12).

Niccolò can err in his calculations and estimations; as can every other character in the film. Language can seem ambiguous. For example, when the girl at the swimming pool acknowledges that on one occasion she and Mavi slept together, it can be totally unclear what, ultimately, she is saying: that Mavi is a lesbian? That circumstances led to a fortuitous experience, once? That Niccolò has no hope with Mavi? That men tend to misunderstand and misrepresent women? The world’s ostensible “incomprehensibility” can result not simply from inaccurate or faulty (that is, correctible) sight of an object that is fully given, but from a biased observer’s position or attitude in the face of an object that takes its form only in being apprehended. But, suggests Crary, the independence of subjective perception comes to be challenged in further ways: “The rapid accumulation of knowledge about the workings of a fully embodied observer disclosed possible ways that vision was open to procedures of normalization, of quantification, of discipline. Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly the other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation” (12). The vision of the discrete observer is thus measurable and quantifiable, and can be schematized, so that perception can be fitted into a broader calculus of hegemonic control and knowledge. Vision could be instrumentalized “as a component of machinic arrangements” (13). To the extent, then, that the visionary act was externalized as a social entity (through the action that eventuated from it), even as a public resource, any act of identification or discrimination could stand obediently to order within a matrix of predictable and exploitable observations and thus gain its place among what Crary calls “the delirious operations of modernization” (13). A move was induced culturally to “discover what faculties, operations, or organs produced or allowed the complex coherence of conscious thought” (15). Perception and knowledge became rationalized as a system of control.

Looking at attention as “an inevitable fragmentation of a visual field,” Crary cites John Dewey to the effect that the mind is concentrated “in a point of great light and heat. So the mind, instead of diffusing consciousness over all the elements presented to it, brings it all to bear upon some one selected point, which stands out with unusual brilliancy and distinctness” (24). In bringing consciousness to bear this way, moreover, we come to accept the reality of the thing observed, engaging in “belief in a thing for no other reason than that we conceive it with passion,” which commitment of attention and conviction, writes James, Charles Renouvier calls “mental vertigo” (James, vol. 2, 309). In showing Niccolò’s visual field with sharpness and precise illumination, and in showing him wrestling with the problem of attaining focus upon any such “thing,” Antonioni produces a Deweyan escapade, offering us a chance at each moment to see that the selected field of vision is arbitrary and potentially hopeless even as he shows that it is stunning and alluring.

Erotic sensibility is a potential escape route from the controlling uniformity of rational vision. Crary argues, for example, that socially organized perceptual schemes develop and shift through time, and that “film, photography, and television are transient elements within an accelerating sequence” of changing visual forms (13); this very regularity in perception tends to couch and motivate the sort of critique one finds in Chatman, who bemoans the fact that Antonioni’s Niccolò didn’t have the production funds for a (presumably) authentic—and regular—science fiction film. Filmic forms, such as the science fiction type to which Blade Runner so handily conforms, are only part of the rationalization of public perception, only a result of the operations of measuring, tabulating, regularizing, constraining, filtering, and emphasizing conventional modes of perception. Niccolò’s film, a piece of which we see in a sequence that links the footage directly to his gazing eye—and thus to the personal quality of this vision (its eros)—is his attempt to see independently of the controlling system. Chatman is merely pointing out how deviant Antonioni is. Oddly, writing about the sex in Identification of a Woman, Chatman has no trouble spelling out this same revolutionary stance, noting that Mavi reveals her personal sexual attitude (keeping her underpants on until the last possible moment) “with the confidence of one instructed by her society that every person’s sex is his or her own affair, not subject to moral or psychological evaluation. She is simply explaining her preferences, not excusing herself for having them” (220). (It could also be argued that society did not instruct Mavi, but simply failed to provide instruction in this vital area of experience.) Our society also “instructs” us that the artist’s vision is problematically beyond social instruction: Niccolò’s way of filming is a part of his own erotic life, a part of what he endures that cannot be fully calibrated and regimented through the system. He is scrupulously personal (as is Antonioni), more so than the Ridley Scott who made Blade Runner or the George Lucas who made Star Wars or even the Stanley Kubrick who made 2001, all of whom finally sacrificed their own inner tensions and lacunae, doubts and interruptions to the grammar of a system that could rationalize their address to a diffuse and hungry public.

It is not because he has taken a vow to maintain principles of searching, labeling, knowing, and illuminating that Niccolò seeks to “identify” a woman as the center of his creative operation. He is neither monk nor bureaucrat. He is not committed a priori to a dispassionate and (officially) scientific gaze. Every step he takes in this film is tied to breathing, hopefulness, anticipation, disappointment, reawakened desire, and movement toward a resolution, and so there is an eros implicit in his very act of looking: not as though he gazes to find a sexual object, but as though his gazing is an absolute form of his sexuality. In his science fiction film Niccolò is finally divorced even from himself, not in the way that Crary, following Deleuze—and also a little eagerly—suggests the perceiver must ultimately be after cinema: “It is precisely the nonselectivity of the cinema eye that distinguishes it from the texture of a human attentiveness” (344), but through a careful and devoted selectivity, an all-absorbing selectivity, that throws him out toward a universe. This, too, is why Niccolò—a human, but also a maker of cinema—is continually ill at ease with the fact of his own gazing, since although he attempts to see the world around the core of a woman’s experience, to focus on a “point of great light and heat,” he knows at the same time that ultimately his film will produce a field, not a point, a field that is bounded, to be sure, yet one in which the depth of his concentration will not find a marker. Baudelaire, writes Sartre, had a similar obsession, with infinity, “something which is, without being given; something which today defines me and which nevertheless will not exist until tomorrow” (37–38).

NEITHER NIGHT NOR DAY

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul—a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key.

—Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle”

At the soirée, Mavi and Niccolò are standing in conversation while in an adjacent room (that is painted avocado green) well-dressed aristocrats, some of whom have lots of money and some of whom haven’t a bean, chat the night away. “We don’t have one single idea of a society,” complains Mavi. We cut to another room (also avocado green, that soothing but also alarming color) where the voice of a woman praises François Mitterand as a “nice man” whom she hopes “will do well.” (I stood once in the lobby of a hotel while Mitterand padded from the elevators to the door, a silent gentle little gnome, it seemed, surrounded by gruff security men who did not appear to recognize him.) At one point an old man escorts a much younger woman through the frame, gloating to her in a whisper, “One of my ancestors invented the double-bass!” (This is perhaps an invitation to rest awhile upon his lap, since the earliest bass was a violone da gamba and the speaker may be referring to a certain familial “expertise” [See Stiller, 462]. It is also, most surely, a genealogical claim dating back at least four hundred years.) Standing in front of a massive canvas (Tiepolo? Caravaggio?), Niccolò and Mavi are discovered by a doyenne:

MAVI: Niccolò is trying to find someone.

DOYENNE: What has the poor man done?

MAVI: Nothing.

DOYENNE (taking her leave): Why look for him then?

What is this polite disengagement, this attitude of lethargy that permeates the upper class—a class that has nothing to do but consider itself? Mavi “moves like in a ballet within this world made up of counts, dukes, princes, and the black aristocracy, where there isn’t a single object that isn’t authentic. She moves at ease within these walls made up of ancient leather wallpaper” (Antonioni; qtd. in Bachmann, “Love” 172). “The Aristocrat devours nature,” writes Sartre. “The exquisite imperfection of forms and a discreet blurring of colours are the best guarantees of authenticity” (Masturbation 115–6).

Niccolò is in a doorway next to a young man in a tux, who gazes forward, past the camera, at someone or something, yet with an empty regard that betokens neither comprehension nor involvement. “Is there always this sectarian atmosphere at your parties, cocktails, and dinners?” the director asks the boy, “Are you afraid of being spied upon?” The kid drops his eyes: “Many of us have escaped already.” As if a comment were in order, Niccolò rejoins, “Once it was the poor who emigrated from Italy. Now it’s this lot.” Need we be told that the poor who emigrated had nothing to hope for, and therefore nothing to lose? But these rich: clearly they have everything and are still destitute. They have escaped in order to have more than everything. We can suddenly read the slightly pouting, pampered expression on the boy’s face. The eyes glazed, observant but uncaring; the lips, fulsome but pursed with possessiveness; the dark curly hair cut as though to impress Donatello, the shoulders artfully slouched. Nothing in his world appeals to this boy, has merit for him, holds his commitment. As Niccolò was told by Mavi, this is a society in which there is no orientation, no sense of duty or obligation, no agreement on higher principles that can guide everyone in a unifying way. It’s a world of personality and disconnection, in which the social life has dried up and everyone who can afford to escape has jumped to richer pastures.

In a party like this, one should be able to find the greatest lights of a society, the repositories and voices of its most supreme values. The paintings should be inspiring and beautiful, both classical and futurist: Guercino, Miró, Boccioni, Ensor, Crivelli, Duchamp, Canaletto, De Heem, Malevich. The language should be poetry, not the garble of the marketplace or the voting booth. Instead of talking about the double-bass, one should be invoking music. Meanwhile, a paid lutist is playing something inoffensive, popularly Mediterranean, vacuous, when he could be playing Bach or Vivaldi. And, given all the meaningless chatter, it is difficult for the personality who searches for light to locate a source of inspiration. All the guests are interchangeable, all the rooms interchangeable, the conversations all forgettable if indeed they are not full of lies or dissemblings: for instance, Mavi invites a man and his wife to dinner at her house, but soon makes it clear to Niccolò she hopes to borrow his place for this cultural adventure.

What sort of an aristocracy or managerial class works without a principle upon which to base its designs? “In fairly populous societies,” wrote Gaetano Mosca in the 1930s,

ruling classes do not justify their power exclusively by de facto possession of it, but try to find a moral and legal basis for it, representing it as the logical and necessary consequence of doctrines and beliefs that are generally recognized and accepted. So if a society is deeply imbued with the Christian spirit the political class will govern by the will of the sovereign, who, in turn, will reign because he is God’s anointed …. And yet that does not mean that political formulas are mere quackeries aptly invented to trick the masses into obedience. Anyone who viewed them in that light would fall into grave error. The truth is that they answer a real need in man’s social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of a moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and a real importance. (207–208)

No chance here of satisfying that need. Mavi and Niccolò have invaded a den of lotos-eaters. In their presence it is difficult if not utterly impossible to discern value, truth, or loyalty to an idea. The “idea,” as it were, is the momentary self and nothing more.

As the bourgeois revolution continues, writes Marx, the distinctions between people are diminished and also exaggerated, so that only two great classes—“two great hostile camps” (103)—remain. Among the slaving workers, “machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor” (110), a phenomenon illustrated again and again, to be sure, in the factory scenes of The Red Desert, but we can also understand this obliteration as an enhancement and reflection of a greater and more diffuse social change, in which distinction itself loses importance. As the bourgeoisie retreats further and further from the proletariat—“escaping already”—contrasting lifestyle and value are nowhere to be detected. The principle social value is selling and buying, a value broadly diffused through the population, coming to define freedom itself (as Marx writes), and supplanting a central feudal value, “the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism” (105). What eventuates is a condition in which people progressively lack the ability to gain true purchase on experience, because experience has been degraded into an exchangeable commodity that merely fluctuates around and shuttles between those who pay for and those who profit by it (see Pomerance, “Gesture”). Every experience is a quick fix, a snatch, a detachable, accountable, and expendable waste. Baudelaire describes modern bourgeois life as a “moving chaos where death strikes from every side at once” (Spleen 94), and Marshall Berman suggests that

the man in the modern street, thrown into this maelstrom, is driven back on his own resources—often on resources he never knew he had—and forced to stretch them desperately in order to survive. In order to cross the moving chaos, he must attune and adapt himself to its moves, must learn to not merely keep up with it but to stay at least a step ahead. He must become adept at soubresauts and mouvements brusques, at sudden, abrupt, jagged twists and shifts—and not only with his legs and his body, but with his mind and his sensibility as well. (159)

In experience—which is the zone of interest for an artist, or at least for an artist such as Niccolò—the somersaults and brusque movements required in the modern flux are vague and insensible to the degree that no solid world resists them, no fixed forms or established values, even revolutionary values, linger and persist as frictionable surfaces against which one can sense, thus find, oneself in motion. One is continually twisting and turning in modern life—just as Antonioni’s camera twists and turns in its Brownian motion through this soirée—without particularly feeling the stress of motion. “All that is solid,” says Marx, “melts into air” (106).

Corresponding to the loss of material stability implied by the relentless motion of bourgeois life under capitalism, is a sharp discontinuity with classical visual forms, in which the “proximate vision” that Ortega places at the center of optical experience in the Quattrocento finally submits to revolution, as it were. Whereas in Giotto, for example, we had seen “‘in bulk,’ convexly,” by the time of the Impressionists an object “placed farther away, for distant vision, loses this corporeality, this solidity and plenitude. Now it is no longer a compact mass, clearly rotund, with its protuberance and curving flanks; it has lost ‘bulk,’ and become, rather, an insubstantial surface, an unbodied spectre composed only of light …. In passing from proximate to distant vision an object becomes illusory” (Point of View 111). Thus, by the time he had come to a thorough repudiation of classical techniques through which space and material bodies were rendered with discreteness and depth, the painter of “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte” (1884) found himself giving “an illusion of deep space” by placing the spectator “in a foreground of deep shadow” and by drawing the eye into the picture “stage by stage, in a dark-light progression that gradually leads into a light, bright distance” (Thomson 108); all this using his pixillating brushstrokes that laid upon the canvas not the lines and planes that were elements of a classical form but a vast field of explosive luminous punctuations, an atomic theory of vision. Nor did Georges Seurat stand alone in his fascination with light, its play, its changes, and the way it affected color and surface when examined for itself. Louis Émile Edmond Duranty remarks with delight on a sort of social abrasiveness the impressionists manifested as, following the likes of Whistler, they began to use a “highly personal palette,” and to produce “the most daring innovations” as they worked “with color variations of infinite delicacy—dusky, diffused, and vaporous tints that belong to neither night nor day” (42). Indeed, Duranty reveals that for the impressionists, who were at the center of modern life, a particular use of paint could have one particularly astonishing effect on our observation of the world as objective and corporeal, namely to fragment and dissipate it: “They are not merely preoccupied by the refined and supple play of color that emerges when they observe the way the most delicate ranges of tone either contrast or intermingle with each other. Rather, the real discovery of these painters lies in their realization that strong light mitigates color, and that sunlight reflected by objects tends, by its very brightness, to restore that luminous unity that merges all seven prismatic rays into one single colorless beam—light itself” (42, italics mine). “La grande lumière décolore les tons.” Invoked in impressionism, then, is the potentiality for a disintegration of objective reality, for that limiting condition in which bourgeois existence, riddled with motion and substantiated by glancing visions—Ortega notes that in impressionism one sees out of the corner of the eye, as though seizing a vision while moving through space—comes to make the world of experience an ultimate challenge for the now outdated sensibility that wishes to seize and fix objects, find a center, penetrate an interest, develop for things and places a history and biography that is unique.

THE MODERN SELF

Mirrors are subject to the defects of the individual substances of which they are made and react the way they really and truly want to.

—Julio Cortázar, “The Behavior of Mirrors on Easter Island”

Much of the relatively meager critical appreciation of Identification of a Woman concentrates seriously on Mavi and Ida, even debunking Niccolò as merely an “absent-minded fellow” (Chatman, Surface 216), as a “zombie-like” male who must constitute “a critique of the modern world” (Sarris), or as “the most ethically disoriented of the film’s major characters” (Kelly 38). Andrew Sarris finds the film revolting if not nonsensical: “Antonioni has always been up there on the screen, but we tended to mistake his reflection for a portrait of Modern Man with all his wires disconnected. Yet now that the director stands at last nakedly before us, the absence of a plausibly compelling narrative drains his confessional film of the necessary tension to sustain our interest. And the cryptic intimations of rampant feminism, lesbianism, and even masturbatory solipsism seem overly tentative and dilettantish.” Narrational penis too small, in other words: doesn’t “sustain our interest.” A serious viewer of the film might well disagree, since serious viewing recapitulates that “naked” director as a field in which multiple engagements and intentionalities intersect and work to blossom. As to the solipsism of masturbation: the young woman at the swimming pool who discusses her fondness for self-manipulation doesn’t strike the eye or the intelligence as solipsistic at all, especially given her extremely civil, even modest, reactions to Niccolò; nor, in her desperate self-reflections alternated with pregnant philosophical comments, does Mavi. In Sarris’s rejection, we can see a persistence of Enlightenment assumptions about the masturbatory act, as summarized by Thomas Laqueur:

Three things made solitary sex unnatural. First, it was motivated not by a real object of desire but by a phantasm; masturbation threatened to overwhelm the most protean and potentially creative of the mind’s faculties—the imagination—and drive it over a cliff. Second, while all other sex was social, masturbation was private, or, when it was not done alone, it was social in all the wrong ways: wicked servants taught it to children; wicked older boys taught it to innocent younger ones; girls and boys in school taught it to each other away from adult supervision. Sex was naturally done with someone; solitary sex was not. And third, unlike other appetites, the urge to masturbate could be neither sated nor moderated. Done alone, driven only by the mind’s own creations, it was a primal, irremediable, and seductively, even addictively, easy transgression. Every man, woman, and child suddenly seemed to have access to the boundless excess of gratification that had once been the privilege of Roman emperors.

Masturbation thus became the vice of individuation for a world in which the old ramparts against desire had crumbled; it pointed to an abyss of solipsism, anomie, and socially meaningless freedom that seemed to belie the ideal of moral autonomy. It was the vice born of an age that valued desire, pleasure, and privacy but was fundamentally worried about how, or if, society could mobilize them. It is the sexuality of the modern self. (210)

And the feminism—by which Sarris must mean the presence of women—is hardly rampant, the lesbianism indeed virtually enshrouded. At any rate, Sarris’s comment is a beautiful example of the denigration of Niccolò. And the descriptions of Seymour Chatman give an equally pointed elevation to the principal females. “Mavi, a trendsetter, tends to represent the attitudes of an entire generation,” writes he, “She has a restless need to experiment” (219, 220). As her masseur—in one scene, after she accuses him of needing her rather than loving her, he offers an extended pudendal friction through her underwear—“Niccolò … is very much the servant of Mavi’s imperious sexual needs. And her ‘right’ to so elaborate a sexual life seems guaranteed in some sense by her membership in the leisured class” (226). Some, following D. H. Lawrence, would postulate that the poor experience an authentic, vigorous, bawdy sexuality while the etiolated rich are too self-conscious even for the depths of pleasure. Ida, for her part, “is fresh, frank, and, though young, level-headed and warm” (215); “healthy, down-to-earth, direct, sincere, in every way estimable, indeed to a fault: one cannot imagine why Niccolò would want to give her up” (227). Perhaps Niccolò does not want to give her up; mercifully, this issue doesn’t get explored. Vincent Canby waved the film off as “excruciatingly empty,” but could not forbear from finding Mavi an “enigmatic young woman … who makes love with a furious abandon that is about the only thing in the film that works.”

Niccolò does give Ida up, however, it being a repeated truth that he looks for a creature he has not found. That fact is central to the film’s structure. He gives up Mavi, too, once it becomes clear to him she does not wish to be found, will not permit it. In the end, he has given everyone up.

The way Sam Rohdie sees the film, the camera “is always with Niccolò … beside him as it were, looking as he looks, encountering as he encounters, like him facing the exact same problems of identification, of sorting out reality from its simulacrum, desire from the other” (188). Here is presented once again, this time in the context of an Antonioni work, one of those delicious Baudrillardian gauntlets, the crippling challenge of the simulacral world; and one of those piquant Lacanian projections, too, the problem of knowing the beloved apart from love itself, seeing the line between one’s conceits and the objective strangeness that confounds them. These are interesting riddles, but they do not describe Niccolò in this film as much, perhaps, as the viewer who is obsessed with them. The camera surely is beside Niccolò throughout, and we see the world as he sees it, a place without sharp discriminations. There is a tasteful, but also dulling harmony to colors and forms, as though everything has been managed into shape and all objects contrived to join one another in neat arrangements (the bed is always where Niccolò would like it to be, or better, where he expects it to be, because he is past finding sexuality an act worth appreciating). His friends, his family, his lovers, his business contacts, strangers he has never met before: with all of these he maintains a calm and even disinterested tone, quite as though they have been subjected to a ray that equalizes their statuses in his regard.

As to that regard: it moves lethargically, like the monster from the black lagoon, yet also methodically, so that he can maintain clarity without interruption as he searches in all directions for a central feature, a sacred object upon which to fasten the fascination. Daily life is a chain of obstacles, weeds entangled around him as he strokes his way forward: the ineffable, unretrievable beeper that will disarm his apartment’s warning system; his sister’s complaints about her troubles at work; his little nephew’s innocent but also incessant demands for additions to his stamp collection; the inexorably stringent demand of Mavi’s secret lover—demand or provocation; Ida’s very fluidity, her ability to do everything, to sense everywhere, to love without hesitation. At a certain point “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” the world can become a locus of events, sensations, and encounters that are all—that are each—precisely and only matters of fact. Its romantic patina worn away, its charming gleam dissipated by a movement of the light, the wine glass is merely a vesicle, its contents merely a calculated distillation from grapes that endured a particular winter upon a particular slope. What had seemed sacred and mysterious, overwhelming, even irritable—the genitalia of the lover—become anatomical parts in an array; just as, with a subtle change of light, the mundane becomes evanescent. As Camus wrote, “What wells up in me is not the hope of better days but a serene and primitive indifference to everything and to myself” (39). Sitting in his window in the finale, Niccolò is bathed in an ethereal, holy light—light from the sun; yet at the same time he is merely illuminated, with more illumination than some objects (like the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, upon whom, says cinematographer William Daniels in Visions of Light [1992], a few extra foot candles were expended to make them “pop”) and less than others. He exists on a kind of scalpel blade between perfunctoriness and salvation, corruption and purity, the everyday and the unworldly. Because each term implies the other, every special instant invoking and requiring the mundane, it is also true that neither term is true. Neither mundanity nor sanctity survive outside the arbitrary judgments through which we mandate and create them. In the end, what confronts us is light.

All things are connectable. Niccolò searches for his woman not as the center of his narrative but as the starting point from which he can join together the various threads that bind all things to all things. In that apartment building where Mavi has been hiding away with her girlfriend—her cool, even supercilious girlfriend; her brutish girlfriend (because it is this girlfriend who has hired the thug)—there appear to be a number of discreet apartments, but actually all of these spaces exist together, simultaneously, and each footstep taken by any person in any one of them echoes or contradicts a footstep taken above or below. Moral stricture, ethical suasion, aesthetic form, political mandate, economic imperative: all of these, at once, are ways of formulating and predicting the sorts of events that Niccolò is moving toward and away from, observing carefully, thinking through as possible additions to the story he wishes to make. When one has adopted a certain state of readiness, every discernable nuance is potentially raw material. It is not so much that Niccolò is apathetic, that he does not feel his relations with Mavi and Ida, as that he is obsessively devoted to the work at hand. He is continually, and inextinguishably, burning with the motive to narrate.

And what is this story, this supreme construction? That a few dozen red chrysanthemums are delivered by hand. That one drives off into the night to escape from Rome. That a collaborator wonders about what kind of love story can be written in a corrupt world. That the swimmers move through a pool, while a strange girl watches them in self-absorption. That outside one’s window, in a pine tree, there is a birds’ nest, but no birds. The human presence, a ghost of sorts, inhabits this world and circulates among objects, caressing them with its intent. As Ida and Niccolò leave his apartment, they pass the concierge’s cubby and see half the chrysanthemums scattered on the floor: some ghost dropped them, the red flowers, perhaps it is me.

BORED

We no longer know how to see the real faces of those around us.

—Camus, “The Desert”

One difficulty that has beset viewers of this film, and confounded critics—“When it hit New York in 1982,” moans John Powers, “this elusive, challenging work received the kind of dismissive reviews more appropriate to Claude Lelouch than to one of the century’s great artists”—stems from the expectation that one should be watching vital, healthy people—especially if they are neurotic—who struggle ardently, even nobly, to make achievements we can detect and applaud: a transformation of the social arrangements that imprison the powerless, a transformation of space according to a new aesthetic, a transformation of the self. A film, then, about a personality who meanders and turns in circles, who stares out the window, whose encounters are systematically, repeatedly, emphatically fruitless? No. A man should be looking for a love partner, and find one. He should be solving a mystery. He should be erecting a pyramid. But Camus put it best: “Everyone wants the man who is still searching to have already reached his conclusions. A thousand voices are already telling him what he has found, and yet he knows that he hasn’t found any thing” (155). Niccolò has not reached his conclusions, and his search, which we must accompany, is exhausting, overwhelming. “You have found me,” says Mavi, in effect, and Ida echoes; as we presume the wife echoed, too, earlier, in another life. But he never finds Mavi, we only want him to. Never finds Ida. This film is not about the result or motive of a search, but about the search itself, its vertigo, sloppiness, unpredictability, passionate yet hopeless intensity. Given the incessant movement and complexity of the world in and through which Niccolò searches, it is perhaps obvious to say that he is bored. He experiences, that is to say, boredom in the most exquisite and high-minded sense of the term, a “nagging desire for something, the nature of which is forever hidden” (Healy 48; qtd. in Winter 28).

It is not that Niccolò feels a yearning but does not know what it is that he yearns for. It is that he experiences desire, but cannot know its object. “In an instant,” he knows, with Vladimir and Estragon, “all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.” This is what it is to be searching for form, reaching into the ether in every posture one assumes, combating that gravity, straining against convention and history, trying through the unilluminated void to see shape, not any shape but the singular shape that will give to one’s sensibility and memory, placement and purpose and potentiality. As Tennessee Williams’s poet Nonno writes in The Night of the Iguana:

Sometime while night obscures the tree

The zenith of its life will be

Gone past forever, and from thence

A second history will commence. (123)

Niccolò is like this poet, but his mutterings are gazes; and the tone of his voice is in the way he stretches out his arm, the way he enters a room. The opposite of this boredom, this relentless but evenhanded search, is commonplace action: the partygoers, for example, carrying on trivial little conversations at the soirée as though it mattered what one said, as though one were actually being informative in adjoining oneself genealogically to the inventor of the double-bass; or a shopgirl fiddling with a male mannequin in her vitrine, as though to give a signal, as though to embody a daydream; or an actress giving a performance, or circling an enclosure on her steed; or a woman giggling with excitement because she has to find a place to pee; or the noxious mundanity of trying to get into one’s apartment through the burglar alarm one has forgotten to disable; all these and a myriad more commonplaces, the stuff of daily life but poison to the soul (poison like the ice cream the thug is slurping in the café while he tells Niccolò that he should give Mavi up), poison because the soul is looking for the phrase to complete the line, the line through which to move the object through space.

… The parabolic line that Niccolò’s filmic space-asteroid takes as it moves off toward the sun (the same as the parabolic line of David Locke’s Land Rover hurtling off into the desert in The Passenger and the parabolic line of the Jeep curving away into the park with the shouting revelers in Blow-Up). In the universe, there are no straight lines.

The soul is breathing and cannot tolerate that obstructive garbage, matter, clogging every passageway to every horizon. To be bored with the commonplace is to strive to outlast and outdistance it, to work at escape. Boredom is the true vitality. Continually and everlastingly, in its commonplace fashion, the earth orbits around the sun. To break with this, Niccolò strikes up the idea of voyaging to the sun, coming to know it. We have used the sun only as a vehicle for knowing ourselves, and we have come to the end of the line. A “Charlie Bubbles-ish ending” is what John Powers deprecatingly calls this snippet of science fiction footage, which is so challenging and exciting to watch. The color of deep space is not only green but a vivid and forestial green, chlorophyll green, and there is nothing but a superfluity of optimism in the passage of the platinum colored asteroid, which wobbles a little insecurely with the perils of its voyage and thus attracts our sympathy.

IMPOSSIBLE EXPERIENCE

The art of storytelling is coming to an end.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

“The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling,” writes Benjamin, “is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times” (“Storyteller” 87): the novel, we might add, that has so often become the film. The novel, dependent upon the form of the book, abjures the storyteller’s idiosyncratic speech, tactile experience, direct unmediated relation to his nature and his world. For a man to be able to find and tell a story, he must relax, withdraw himself from the mechanical pressure and rhythm of the modern world; and, Benjamin sadly observes, such a state of relaxation “is becoming rarer and rarer” (91). Niccolò is in search of a story, very like his creator, who felt himself to be searching for “a new kind of story” (Samuels 92). He believes in storytelling. Perhaps, as Benjamin says of the storyteller, “he has borrowed his authority from death … it is natural history to which his stories refer back” (94), but at any rate there is something morbid about his gaze, his flaccidity, his patience.

Although Benjamin does not put it this way, for him boredom is a thoroughly appropriate response to modernism, one that symptomatizes the healthy spirit at war with a condition in which we prefer to validate information over intelligence. Information “lays claim to prompt verifiability,” and the “dissemination of information has had a decisive share” in a state of affairs that has seen storytelling decline (89). We may consider the distinction that Patricia Meyer Spacks makes between two usages of the word “interesting” in the history of the novel. The word can apply to the spirits and tastes of the individual: bored, one declines to find things “interesting,” appealing to the self; or it can apply to a social and cultural importance “inherent in the old meaning of interesting” and involving “reliance on communal values” (115). One usage of “interesting” applies to the public realm, then, and the other to “private tastes” (117). For Spacks, a reader can be bored by privileging the private, indeed by denying that public interest might adhere to certain texts or situations. Niccolò is appropriately bored with the quotidian trivia of the world in which he moves with Mavi, and the slow turning of the film and of its protagonist’s movements in searching for her depths is itself a calculated statement about the boredom he experiences in his life. As the modern world of mercantile, journalistic, superficially social, and professional experience seems to tumble by, his boredom is a way of withdrawing in order to be attuned to the voice of an “artisan form of communication” of an earlier, and richer, day (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 91). And the fact that he experiences boredom—a sense of the undifferentiated equality of events and contingencies, a flatness of affect, a constant hunger and readiness for something richer—may lead us to expect that Niccolò will find his story in the end. “Boredom,” says Benjamin, “is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (91).

But Adam Phillips more neatly strikes the chord when he reflects, “Boredom, I think, protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be. So the paradox of the waiting that goes on in boredom is that the individual does not know what he was waiting for until he finds it, and that often he does not know that he is waiting” (77–78; my emphasis). We must understand that Niccolò himself is the central character of the science fiction film he eventually makes: he is floating through space on an exploration, slowly approximating himself to the brilliant center of things. What he can know about himself is his own hunger to travel and search, but not precisely what he is searching for, and often—because the search is relentless and occupies every aspect of his existence—not even that he searches. He experiences a “determination of the present by the future, of what already exists by what does not yet exist … which philosophers today call transcendence” (Sartre, “Baudelaire” 38).

When we are bored the world taxes us by lacking nodes worth special focus. Objects do not stand out as either central or peripheral, light does not assist us by flattering surfaces or points. All of the optical field makes itself accessible uniformly, so that Ortega’s “luminous hero” (of the Quattrocento) is merely a trace memory or a vague hope (“Point of View”). Direction impossible, pathways are indistinct and unnavigable, the lights of the heavens are inaccessible through their very profusion and constant motion, philosophy is a riddle. We move in a fog.

The eloquent and magnificent fog sequence in this film:

Niccolò, certain that his house is being watched, escaping through the back door and racing in his silver car to Mavi’s house; fetching her and driving into the country, because he knows that villa he rented once. But on the way they encounter a field of mists, or rather what seems a cloud that has given up its immortality and dropped to earth. The suddenness of this manifestation, its impenetrability, the feeling we must have that Niccolò and Mavi have been waylaid in their life journey by an obstacle that is at once material and insubstantial, practical and ephemeral. As Niccolò advances, the cloud swallows them. “Drive slowly,” says Mavi. A close shot of the white lines slowly slipping under the wheels. “I can’t see,” she says, and he promises to just follow the white line. Directional placards loom up out of the whiteness. Swerving left and right, they hope they are on the right road. A gray sheen of darkness doesn’t quite illuminate them in the car as, through the rear window, we see the papery surface of the fog. A cigarette for Mavi. She offers it to him, and another car’s lights swing up from behind. They kiss. The vehicle behind has gone, but Niccolò sees a traffic light blinking lazily. He stops and gets out, a dark shadow against the swirling mists. The road is glistening. His footsteps as he walks away are crisp and clear, a metrical voice.

After a few steps he stops and looks around. A dog is barking somewhere. A car, its headlamps blazing into the fog and turning it to pearls. Niccolò watches a man approach a bush, turn, walk away. The sound of another car revving up. The low ticking sound of steps—no, the mechanism of the traffic light, and a whistle as of a train. He backs away as a car approaches going the other way, passes him, turns off-screen. Mavi strains to see through the windshield and confronts nothing in the mist but the headlamps of a parked car blinking on and off into her face. She becomes anxious, opens her door, stands up. Hazy amber light floods her face from the traffic light. “Nic—where are you?”

Out of the depths of the cloud: “I’m here.”

His body approaches.