F. P. TOMASULO/1982 “Life Is Inconclusive”: A Conversation with Michelangelo Antonioni 163 dissertation ("The Rhetoric of Ambiguity: Michelangelo Antonioni and the Modernist Discourse"), the following questions stemmed from my own research. Nonetheless, given the circumstances under which this interview was conducted, I will let readers decide for themselves whether the information extracted was worth the effort expended by both parties. Your oeuvre, especially after Il Grido, fits into that discourse we refer to as Modernism--a term, however, which is all too ubiquitous. In the cinema, Modernism can encompass such diverse filmmakers as Wiene, Eisenstein, Vertov, Cocteau, Deren, Fellini, Resnais, Godard, Duras, Brakhage, and Snow. Some are narrative filmmakers, some are not. Some are representational artists, others are not. How would you position yourself in this form-content dialectic? MA: That's really your job. You're the critic. FT: FRANK P. TOMASULO/1982 As I spoke to Antonioni on a dismal, rainy, late September day in 1982 at Cornell University, three analogies came to mind. All involved the cinema. The first analogy was with the Hitchcock-Truffaut interviews, in which Hitchcock displaced Truffaut's questions about psychology, philosophy, and religion to what was for him the more familiar terrain of camera angles, production details, and star profiles. Antonioni, justifiably displeased with the circumstances under which he happened to be at Cornell, likewise diverted my questions onto other paths. More than once, he replied, "When I was a critic, it was my job to interpret someone else's films. Now it's your job." The second cinematic analogy related to the horrific tooth-pulling scene in John Schlesinger's Marathon Man. To get the information (or the diamonds--I don't remember which), Laurence Olivier is compelled to yank healthy teeth out of a helpless Dustin Hoffman. Just as violence in Antonioni's films generally takes place off-screen, I've left out the gruesome details of the pain involved in this extraction of information. My final analogy was the most disturbing. In The Passenger, an African shaman turns the tables (and the camera) on his interviewer by saying, "Your questions are much more revealing about yourself than my answers would be about me." Since Antonioni's work is the subject of my UCLA doctoral To be more concrete, then: as a director concerned with the aesthetics of the image, what is the role of narrative in your work? MA: My impulse, even early on in my career, was in terms of story. Even my documentary Gente Del Po is a story. The film I consider to be my best short documentary, N.U., is a story. It's the story of a day. FT: Do you see any similarities between your work and the films of more avant-garde practitioners like Michael Snow? MA: I do like to experiment. Perhaps it's in a different way. As you've described La Region Centrale to me, I've probably used the same sort of camera gyroscope to maintain balance and fluidity. FT: What is it about narrative that attracts you? Film has always been, for me, conflict. A man, a woman: drama. My next film will be different, however. It will be a man versus three other men. It's tentatively titled The Crew, and it will be shot here in the United States. I have the locations, the environments, almost all picked out. The story and the characters will follow. I will be meeting my American producer in New York next week to work out the details. FT: MA: Why work in the United States again, considering the artistic success of Identification of a Woman, your first Italian film in eighteen years? FT: From On Film (Los Angeles), no. 13 (Fall 1984), pp. 61-64. Reprinted by permission of Frank P. Tomasulo. 164 FRANK P. TOMASULO/1982 MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI: INTERVIEWS 165 The bourgeoisie is sliding into nothingness. They're disappearing slowly. I don't know what the alternative might be. MA: MA: FT: Your only previous American film, Zabriskie Point, was severely criticized on its initial release, particularly by the Establishment critics, who asked, "What does this Italian know about America?" MA: I made ten pictures in Italy and they said that my focus was too narrow. Critics, of course, say the same thing about your Robert Altman--that he doesn't understand America. Does the reaction of Daria, after "blowing up" the corporate house in Zabriskie Point, suggest one answer? MA: That was the personal reaction of that girl, of that character. It was not my statement. Let's just say that I'm against certain rules of this society. Zabriskie Point really happened, in Phoenix. There was an airplane theft and a police killing. I was visually interested in this fact. The idea of a helicopter going around excited my fantasy. First of all, because of the poor state of the Italian film industry. The films they make now are either low-budget or those lightweight comedies with certain actors like Mario Verdoni. I hate them. They're all in dialect. FT: All your films--not just the more overtly political Zabriskie Point--strike me as profoundly ideological. What is the role of political ideas in your work? MA: I don't start from a thesis, if that's what you're getting at. It's the plot which is most important. As I'm a man who lives in Italy--a very political country--it inevitably enters the picture. We feel everything in regard to politics in Italy! And not just in the cinema, but through the newspapers, art, elections ... Italy is so corrupted by political scandals now. We're against it, of course, and in favor of social justice. FT: Since you mention" social justice," why do your films emphasize the role of the bourgeoisie more than other factions in Italian life? MA: Quite simply because I know the bourgeois class better. I grew up with that background, as a tennis champion. That was my milieu. But it was not in Rome or Florence, but in Ferrara, which is not so aristocratic. FT: You seem to criticize or satirize the bourgeoisie. MA: Yes. I was so against the bourgeoisie and wanted to say something against it. Only in Il Grido and Gente Del Po do I deal with the working classes. That was in reaction to a government which didn't want films to be about workers. FT: Like Jean Renoir, you portray the dialectics of decay of the bourgeoisie. This FT: is an act of negation, in Marcuse's terminology. But is there a solution, something positive? Your work is filled with scenes of exquisite visual beauty, moments of pure form. As a modernist, are there other artists who have influenced you: writers, architects, painters, other filmmakers? MA: I'm not really conscious of any artistic influences at work on me. I'm now much more intuitive. I ask to be alone on the set or the location for fifteen minutes. Then I shoot the first idea that comes into my head. Pasolini, I know, wants to redo paintings in the cinema. You speak of the beauty of my images, but the best shots are cut from the films. FT: If there are no direct influences, are there at least filmmakers who appeal to you? MA: Only Steven Spielberg can appeal to all audiences. He's a genius for that, but not on this earth. FT: How do you feel about retrospective screenings of your films, when scholars and critics praise your work so extravagantly in public and attribute intentions which you hardly recognize? MA: It's very alienating. It's as if they were speaking about someone else. Ned Rivkin gave me his book to read (Antonioni's Visual Language). It's very accurate. FT: About your artistic intentions? MA: You can't ask Jackson Pollock why he made one circle black and another one pink. FT: 166 MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI: INTERVIEWS FT: We were privileged to see the American premiere of Profession: Reporter, the British version of The Passenger. What are the differences between the two versions, and which do you prefer? MA: Profession: Reporter is my preference. Some scenes were shuffled by the president of MGM, who is a lawyer. The difference is about six minutes. Were any changes made to the crucial penultimate tracking shot? No. Don’t you want to know how that shot was accomplished? (Antonioni proceeded to sketch out a diagram of the camera moves on some scrap paper.) Inside the hotel room, the camera hung from a ceiling until it reached the bars on the window. Then the bars were opened. There was a high crane outside the hotel and someone hooked the camera to the crane to continue the movement. This was all on a series of gyroscopes, so that it could even be hand-held later. It was a very windy during that scene and it took eleven days to shoot! FT: MA: F. P. TOMASULO/1982 167 Chekhov said, “Give me new endings and can reinvent literature!” I just got fed up with this traditional way of telling a story, the same pacing. Police stories had to have a certain pace, etc. The pace of life is different. There are dead moments. MA: It’s interesting to hear a realist justification for your pacing. What about the ambiguities of your narrative closures? MA: Life is inconclusive. … Hitchcock’s films are completely false, especially the endings. Altman tries to be real, as in Quintet. FT: Again, I’m surprised to hear you speak of Altman as a realist. How do you account for the cartoon characters, the play with genre conventions, the style of acting? MA: I’m very good friends with Altman and know why he works the way he does. He controls the crew in a sort of collaboration. But his personality has to come out, even if some of his actors are completely crazy, like Elliott Gould. FT: How do you work with actors, particularly in English? MA: You need good actors, but you can’t leave them free. This was entirely different on Zabriskie Point. There, I became an acting instructor. The female lead was spontaneous, but Mark Frechette was tough to work with. He had a “guru” named Mel Lyman who influenced him. It was Lyman who sent Frechette out to rob a bank and who made Frechette work in the movie, ultimately to help Lyman himself. FT: Why was it so important to shoot it in one take? Now I know why, although I didn’t fully understand it at the time. It’s a résumé of the entire film, not just a conclusion. Little by little, I came to understand that. FT: MA: FT: This is related to the role of the spectator of any Antonioni film. We must come to some sort of retrospective meaning—“little by little as you say—especially by the end of your films, which are particularly Modernist in their indeterminacy, their ambiguity. FT: In THE PASSENGER, the Jack Nicholson character is revealed through little 168 MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI: INTERVIEWS gestural codes that seem spontaneous, rather than through dialogue. Were they improvised or your instructions? MA: They weren’t so spontaneous. I told Nicholson to do that. As for dialogue, it can be completely changed by the lighting scheme of the shot, the colors, by camera movement… FT: The Mystery of Oberwald has always remained a mystery to me. I don’t see how it fits into the overall thematic and aesthetic unity of your oeuvre. Why did you choose to make this video, based on a melodramatic play by Cocteau, and set in the historical past? MA: It’s not by me. I made it to use video technology, but the tape wasn’t very good. It had only 625 lines, not the 1025 lines possible today. It will be shown on television. As for the color scheme, it would have been a crime to keep Oberwald cool. Another disappointing project for you was the Amazon venture. Why wasn’t that film ever made, even though the screenplay has been published in French with the title Techniquement Douce? MA: Why? Because Carlo Ponti changed his mind one day and decided not to do it. I still insist that it had a beautiful script. FT: F. P. TOMASULO/1982 169 FT: You indicated that there were no conscious artistic influences on your work. Were there any philosophical sources of inspiration, any modern philosophers who had an impact on you? MA: I would have to say that Sartre and Camus played a role. Their philosophy, as a post-war philosophy, was important to me at that time. FT: As a postscript, what do you think about your latest honor: being named Professor-at-Large by Cornell? MA: Now I'm a professor! It makes me laugh because I'm really more like a pupil. I want to experiment with every film. In Rome, a man once came up to me and said, "Your movies made me grow!" When I told an associate about this incident, he asked me, "was the man very tall?"