Introduction Michelangelo Antonioni is one of Italy’s most famous filmmakers of the post-war era. His films are pieces of artwork, the plot develops slowly and there is not much going on. And that makes Antonioni’s films difficult to understand for the mass audience. ‘Antonioni made his wonderful remark after a visit to Mark Rothko’s studio. What he said exactly was, “Your paintings are like my films – they’re about nothing … with precision”’ (Chatman, 1985, p. 54). Gilman explains:

L’avventura and La notte are movies without a traditional subject … They are about nothing we could have known without them, nothing to which we had already attached meanings or surveyed in other ways. They are without being abstract, about nothing in particular, being instead, like most recent paintings, self contained and absolute, an action and not the description of an action. (Gilman, 1962, p. 11)

Antonioni’s films are not about extraordinary events, indeed, most of them portrait the everyday life of people. The director is interested in showing the ‘“spiritual aridity … and moral coldness” (freddezza morale)’ (Chatman, 1985, p. 54) of people in Italy, alienated by the modern society of the economic miracle in post-war Italy. To do so, Antonioni’s films are of an extraordinary camerawork and editing. He uses many unconventional shots to create a certain atmosphere underlining the characters feelings. The landscape and the architecture that form the setting in which the film takes place are very important to understand the characters’ psychology and motivation. Antonioni confesses that even in his childhood he was interested in using architecture to create stories:

I have never drawn, even as a child, either puppets or silhouettes but rather facades of

houses and gates. One of my favourite games consisted of organising towns. Ignorant in architecture, I constructed buildings and streets crammed with little figures. I invented stories for them. These childhood happenings - I was eleven years old - were like little films. (Tassone, p. 14)

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In his seventh feature film La notte (1961) Antonioni shot in and around Milan in a way to create a disturbing and anonymous atmosphere. This essay will analyse how Antonioni uses the city’s architecture and landscape to illustrate the alienation of people in the modern world. This essay will have a look at the setting, how Antonioni frames the architecture and the characters in one shot. Two specific sequences of the whole movie will be analyzed properly: The opening sequence and the sequence in which Lidia wanders around the city and the periphery. These parts of La notte serve as good examples, because they are predominantly shot outside and contain images of the architecture.

Antonioni’s films in general

Many of Antonioni’s films act within the upper-middle class, although Antonioni was born into a working-class family of landowners in North Italy. As mentioned earlier, he is interested in showing people alienated from their modern environment and their selves, creating a moral coldness in society - the malattia dei sentimenti how Chatman calls it (1985, p. 103) - which is displayed best in love relationships. Therefore, many of his films are about love: the end of a marriage in La notte, sex and adventure in L’avventura (1960), and a love affair in L’eclisse (1962). Antonioni prefers female protagonists, ‘not because feminine psychology says that love is their proper domain but because Western civilization, Antonioni thinks, has left to them alone a modicum of the capacity to acknowledge feelings, a capacity virtually lost by men, especially intellectual men’ (Chatman, 1985, p. 56). In every film of the so-called trilogy (Bondanella, 1991, p. 210), there is a desperate female protagonist and her counterpart, an intellectual male, a writer in La notte, a banker in L’eclisse or an architect in L’avventura.

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The films probed changing relations between character and milieu in a context

appropriate to the far-reaching cultural and social transformations wrought by

industrialization and the “economic miracle.” (Landy, 2000, p. 269)

One of Antonioni’s originalities is ‘a concern for linking landscape in ambiguous ways to the internal state of his characters’ (Landy, 2000, p. 352). Therefore he uses the wild landscape of an island in L’avventura or the modern cityscape of Milan in La notte to explain either a savage love affair or a cold marriage. The use of architecture can evoke ‘emotion in the audience which the director can connect with characters or ideas’ (Wiblin, 1997, p. 107). In La notte, Antonioni uses modern buildings to show the alienation between a couple, and the coldness and loneliness of the characters.

La notte

La notte was shot in Milan in 1960 and released at the beginning of 1961. The film is the central part of the loosely connected trilogy, which begins with L’avventura and ends with L’eclisse (amongst others: Stevens, 2008, p. 6; Bondanella, 1991, p. 210). Other authors like Chatman (1985) see it as a ‘tetralogy’ including Il deserto rosso (1964) because it ‘differs from the earlier films only in its use of color but not significantly in theme, plot structure, or character type’ (ibid, p. 51). All these films are linked by similar style and themes.

In La notte, Antonioni tells the story of two people with emptiness inside who notice the nonsense of their marriage. Giovanni and Lidia Pontano visit a friend, Tommaso, who lies in hospital and is about to die. Later they visit Giovanni’s book party, but Lidia slips out for a walk through Milan’s suburbs. In the evening, they are going out to a nightclub and then, they attend a party in the house of a tycoon. At the end of the night, Lidia confesses that she no longer loves Giovanni. ‘The night of La notte is literally the long night of the party, which ends at dawn on a

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bleak prospect of marital misery’ (Chatman, 1985, p. 72). The plot does not seem to be very exciting, but Antonioni focuses on the images, the atmosphere, and the setting rather than on the narrative.

La notte is in parts constructed like a road movie. Lidia wanders around the city without any destination. The visit in the hospital has disturbed her and made her think about her unlucky marriage. ‘Antonioni’s films focus largely on characters in movement through the landscape, often a journey’ (Lardy, 2000, p. 296). Lidia’s journey makes her realize that she does not love her husband any more. It might be seen as a search for her identity and finally she realises that she should close her marriage. Also the sequence of the party is constructed like a road movie: ‘even though the participants do not really go anywhere, the road movie theme of being adrift from familiar ties and rituals, and thus open to new life-altering experiences, comes across strongly’ (Brunette, 1998, p. 63). The party guests in fact behave like adolescents: They jump into the pool wearing clothes, they play a strange game on the floor of the villa and they flirt with each other like teenager would do it at a house-party when their parents have left them alone. The party at the tycoon’s house is a central part of the movie. It is well choreographed by Antonioni. It took him at least thirty-two nights to shot that sequence (Brunette, 1998, p. 63).

Milan

Every city offers to the cinema a ready-made set, which, however, has to be explored, re-

edited, divided and reconstructed. The film camera and editing of the images ‘make’ the

city. (De Berti, cited in Foot, 2001, p. 71)

Milan in general is not - and never was - attractive for filmmakers. Only few famous Italian filmmakers shot films in Milan: Rossellini and Fellini for example made no film in Milan, De Sica only one (Miracolo a Milano), Antonioni two (La notte and Cronaca di un amore).

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