Article begins
Throughout its history, cinema has explored the potential of fictional images of emptiness and silence to generate sensibilities that escape representation. In this piece, I reflect on filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s trilogy L’avventura (The Adventure, 1960), La notte (The Night, 1961), and L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962). Antonioni’s trilogy provides a powerful filmic version of the nexus between individualism and loneliness, a critique of culture elaborated through what I call the poetics of silence. It corresponds to the moment when there is nothing more to be said between two people—in Antonioni, a version of human incommunicability.
In the films, Antonioni expands the horizon between time and image to a re-elaboration of the characters’ dramas, an experiment whose power allows us to think about how his work opens up to new sensory dimensions from silence and static. Using the idea of the nondogmatic image from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s thought and philosopher Jacques Rancière’s assumption of the emancipation of the spectator, I explore how Antonioni develops a poetics of silence while also carrying out a critique of individualism. In its relationship with life, cinema becomes a regime of perception capable of transforming sensorial experience, producing a politics of aesthetics, in Rancière’s terms.
Antonioni explores the relationships between images of emptiness and the spectator’s sensorial experience. The characters’ dramas are filmed in the context of the deterioration of relationships until emotional bonds have eroded. The scenes extend into situations of impasse, paradoxes in which the characters remain silent, submerged until meaning is emptied.
Cinema and Anthropology in Search of Expressions of Silence
Cinema establishes a particular experience of the passage of time. Unlike photography and its potential to freeze the snapshot, film retains a sense of perpetual duration, the psychological comfort of the image that does not escape but has the capacity to dilate the present and twist the experience, as Gaudreault and Gunning showed. As art, as expression, or as technology, cinematographic devices spread throughout the world throughout the twentieth century and assumed the functions of industry, entertainment, art, education, propaganda, and scientific research. Technological development and the entry of thinkers from other areas enriched cinema theories to the extent that the filmic image incorporated analysis from anthropology, phenomenology, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy and structuralist, culturalist, and Marxist assumptions, among others. Cinematic discourse has absorbed theories in such a way that it is not possible to separate the history of cinema from the history of thought.
Faced with all this noise, in the articulation between image and culture, a movement that emerged in Italy, inspired by French realism, turned to a critical reflection on the country itself. Initially used by filmmaker Antonio Pietrangeli to refer to Visconti’s film Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), the term “neorealism” gained notoriety throughout the 1950s through the films of Rossellini and De Sica, which sought to expose the contrast between socioeconomic conditions and the banality of lifestyle in Italian culture, according to Bazin, immersed in political circumstances that escape control, in the postwar context.
Given this context, what place does Antonioni’s work and his trilogy of incommunicability play in thinking about silence in the twenty-first century? From an anthropological point of view, Antonioni proposes a language that breaks with the usual regimes of visuality to the extent that it approaches the idea of a cinema-poetry in which silence is a privileged space for questioning the meaning of human existence within values of modern culture. Andrey Tarkowski defended Antonioni as one of the few poet-filmmakers, creator of works that “do not age” (opere che non invecchiano), according to Aldo Tassone. Claude Sautet stated that, unlike the works of Visconti and Fellini, there is a pictorial culture in Antonioni’s cinema. Alan Resnais commented on the particular way in which Antonioni explores silence as the subtlest analyst of feelings.
The Trilogy as a Filmic Experience of Human Voids
In the 1950s, Antonioni, then a young filmmaker, combined neorealist aesthetics with film noir, focusing on psychological aspects and accentuating individual tension in scenes. His works, such as L’avventura (The Adventure, 1960) and L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962), mark the effects of the postwar Italian context on the individual, in which long takes tend to lose the characters, an expression of disorientation. The use of landscape, a cinematic dimension explored in styles such as film noir andWesterns, expands the space for contemplation. L’avventura operates by exploring the image as a space of contemplation valuing empty and silent spaces, a resource capable of isolating the characters in the narrative axis. In Antonioni, these spaces are metaphors for silence as an expression of anguish and introspection.
L’avventura and La note explore themes of desire, moral crisis, and the disintegration of a couple. L’avventura explores the boundaries between death and love, while La notte tells the story of a superficial party in a bourgeois house. La note features floating characters, a style that combines Musil’s critique of the individual with Camus’s existentialism. The films’ “language” is characterized by close-ups, empty urban spaces, and silent actors, in expressionless positions. Antonioni’s cinema is considered the opposite of Hitchcock’s, as it operates with pure mystery and not with a type of suspense that gradually reveals itself toward an outcome. La note ends with an ambiguous process of separation, while L’eclisse begins with the dissolution of a couple’s relationship. Both films stand out for their open narrative structures and their ability to reproduce life in its state of indeterminacy, a metaphorical expression of silence.
In L’avventura and L’eclisse, all efforts of the couples to reunite disappear in time. The language of disagreement is the means by which Antonioni approaches relationships, capturing the places where characters have previously been as now lifeless. L’eclisse, said Antonioni, is a kind of conclusion of the dive into modern feelings, which began with the relationship between friends (Anna and Claudia) in L’avvent