“If the symbol actually exists as an object in the real world, can the director be accused of over-obviousness? Is there not always a built-in nonspecificity to all symbols that will lead the interpreter to ‘find’ more than what the artist has ‘put’ there? (…) For example, Biarese and Tassone choose to interpret the immense, visually striking pillar that comes between Pieto and Vittorio at the stock exchange in symbolic terms that are also dismayingly literal: ‘(…) Between Piero and Vittoria there will always be an obstacle, the stock market’. It is true that the director chose to include this particular object within his film frame, and thus in some sense is responsible for it. But he cannot be held responsible – and then, in some cases, castigated – for the specific, often simplistic meanings that others claim to find there.
Another more general and farther-reaching question, one that goes beyond symbol-making, is also raised by these examples. It concerns the very nature and expression of visual meaning in film and, by extension, in any visual medium. Verbal meaning has always been privileged over visual meaning because the former has traditionally been considered more specific, and more specifiable, than the latter. It is always difficult to say ‘exactly’ what any visual image means, and this accounts, in part at least, for much of the ‘free play’ in the criticism if Antonioni’s films, which rely so much upon visual suggestion. As much recent theory has demonstrated however, the specificity of verbal language may be more apparent than real. After all, a dictionary never provides unambigious, base meanings for words, but only more words to look up. The question that is especially relevant to Antonioni’s films is this: ‘Is’ there meaning if it cannot be verbalized? How does visual meaning happen, and how can it be described? Consider the heavily marked traffic ‘zebra’ lines that Vittoria crosses late in the film. (…) If we exclude the overtly symbolic reading, then what do they ‘mean’? Antonioni gives explicit evidence in his screenplays that he thinks in this nonspecific, nonsymbolicmanner.
(…) How for example, would we go abut establishing a meaning for the hands that so often appear as graphic, expressive elements in Antonioni’s films? (In ‘L’eclisse’, the motif is more ambivalent: at one point, the lovers expressively match hands on opposite sides of a glass, but the quasi-erotic charge of the image is dissipated when the same motif is refigured in the hand of the drowned drunk that is sticking out of Piero’s sports car as it is hoisted to the surface of the lake). (…) is this merely an aesthetic, visual, or emotional link without any specific thematic or narrative meaning beyond that? (…) is thematic meaning intended, or is the meaning, vague and unspecific as it is, resident in the graphic nature of the composition itself, and thus inexpressible in words?
(…) What then begins is the magnificent series of shots (…) motivated presumably by the lover’s unkept promise to meet each other in the ‘usual place’ that evening. These shots bring the film to a brilliant emotional and aesthetic close that is accomplished almost solely by formal and abstract means. (…) What might be called the ‘human track’ is completely evacuated in the final minutes (…). (…) once again, the precise meaning, of necessity, remains vague. Some critics find the end of the film ‘arid’, but Tinazzi is closer to the truth when he suggest that the finale can be read as a display of the intense mistery of reality.
(…) Things refuse to represent or to point to an elsewhere, to a something, or a meaning, beyond themselves. This now apparently humanless terrain also attests the power of the sheer facticity of objects in the world – (…) a truth that reminds one of the phenomenological insistense that Being is always being ‘in the world’.
Antonioni has himself said: ‘I love objects, I love them like I love women; I believe that we have feelings towards objects; it’s yet one more way of grabbing onto life’.
(…) Pascal Bonitzer’s suggestive description (…) seems particulary appropriate in the context of L’eclisse: ‘Since cinema, like the uncounscious, does not know negation, emptiness in Antonioni exists positively; it is haunted by presence. There is no more beautiful moment in an Antonioni film (and each seems structured to reach this end) than that in which this characters, his human beings, are cancelled, only so as to leave behind, it seems, a space without attributes, a pure space… Empty space is not a void: full of mists, of fleeting faces, of evanescent presences or of random movements, this space represents that final point of being finally freed from the negativity of intentions, of passions, of human existence”.
Peter Brunette, “L’eclisse (1962)”, in The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (1998, Cambridge University Press)
