MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI'S CINEMA IS POETRY FOR THE MIND
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
I learn to see through films. It is both frightening and delightful at times. Scything through wheat fields, poring over cracks in buildings, gazing at faces of people and animals, yawning at the sky, looking at traffic through a thirty five mm wide-lens in the immediate aftermath of a dash of rain: all of these possibilities come to me through cinema. It’s like a training to both appreciate as well as have a critical eye towards objects in your vision. The kind of cinema you consume consumes you over time. Your thoughts meddle over trivial affairs or think of ruses like the characters of your films. Your eyes incessantly hover like the passionate lens of the camera. By expanding your tastes you come across realist film-makers and their films that destroy all interpretation. The consequent numbness now crawls on your skin like the itch of the serial killer.
The voice of sense-making is glib and porous. Seconds of belief get doused in years of nonchalance. The phrase making sense dates back to the 17th century, and was used in the context of something being reasonable or clear to comprehend. But what is clear may only be to the trained eye. Because what do you call problems that an untrained eye keeps trying to solve and constantly fails at? Let’s call them the great problems.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s films are about some of these great problems –
How does one keep sanity in the new world?
How does one reconcile to the fact that one’s utmost desires are impossible to attain?
How does one attempt to live when everything appears tragic?
Why do my thoughts seem unfaithful to how reality appears to me?
Why do I feel so separate from the other?
How does one experience aliveness ?
In Red Desert, his first colour feature, the camera lingers on images of silhouettes, streets, and people in motion. Everything is alive yet dead. There is no magic, nor laughter. Merry-making is available only in the form of carnal desire or in the productive use of nature. Monica Vitti’s character is in a steady decline towards madness, and wants to run away to a place where images have no interpretative value.
"I am sick. But I must not think about it. I have to think that whatever happens to me is my life"
What is valuable? The question is a recurring theme in his films. His characters are never constricted. They are at cliffs overlooking oceans, in high altitude cable cars, and in cars that they drive across for hundreds of miles. They want to see beyond. It’s unclear if Antonioni is urging us towards, or if he is cautioning us against these adventures. Everyone yearns to feel alive. New and shiny things are put in contrast with an overarching malaise or ennui his characters face. In The Passenger, one of his few English language films, Jack Nicholson can only see the dust and ruins during a work trip in Chad. Faced with an opportunity to forge his identity, he takes it up and runs away. He continues to flee but as the cops chase him, the, illusory nature of his escapade dawns on him. His character had his time in the sun. Monica Vitti’s character in Red Desert towards the end confesses that she feels ‘separate’ and perhaps that sums up Jack Nicholson’s character in The Passenger, a sublime film whose images show the path to salvation for a doomed character but he just cannot see.
Jack Nicholson in 'The Passenger'
In La Notte, perhaps his best film one attends to one of his other great ideas – the spectacle. Developed from Marxist theory, the film is an enchanting watch, scenes build off one another akin to a literary thesis. The examination of the spectacle includes self-critique, its merits and its contours across social-strata. The characters’ inner worlds represent themselves in the images of the spectacle we are privy to, giving a sense of of the onset of modernity and how it restructures society now, and even responsible for the gulf between people.
It is with people and characters though that Antonioni shines with perhaps no other film-maker showcasing human relationships with such elan and artistry. The characters suffer. Still, they confront life never shirking, always embracing contradiction as a key principle of living. The conversations between characters either feel like an intrusion on a private space, or are a commentary from Antonioni on the state of things. It is a simple and refined approach from the film-maker who exudes high taste. This comes across most strongly when one were to examine the conflicts in his films. The central conflicts arise typically through philosophical positions, or as an examination of one of the great problems.
In L’Avventura, the first in his modern alienation trilogy, moral decay is shown as the central cause of strife. A sensuous internal study of its characters, the images of the film are symbolic, while events seem co-incidental. Such is the remarkable complexity of the film that if one where to put it the other way around, there would be no complaints. It’s interesting that in the famous strip club scene in La Notte, when Jeanne Moreau’s character jokes to her increasingly estranged husband that she “doesn’t have a thought now, but she is expecting one soon. She can see it coming”, we get a sense of the consequent malaise in L’Avventura. The pattern of his ideas, the internal worlds, and the movements of his camera, all of this can be grasped if one were to see a repertoire of his films.
Cinema is the only medium that one can afford to get sloppy with. Antonioni never afforded himself that. I watched five to six of his best works with the intention to watch his earlier and later works over time. But to try and understand his evolution I watched a few early documentaries (both freely available to watch on YouTube) – one his first ever film, a documentary on the Po river and the community that lives around it, and the other a foreigner’s gaze on the Kumbha Mela which he happened to visit in the 70s. Commanding the camera like a master, he displays a remarkable empathy at a fledgling period of his craft. Opting for his signature long takes, he lingers on people or things that he finds to have forged a connection with the camera. Discovery perhaps is his biggest weapon. Fully evident across his thirty years of filmmaking one sees his ideas marinate and mature, and in that sense his vision will always be eternal for the searchers and the seekers. To capture on film the tension of the generation is no easy feat, but he draws us in to the great problems, never providing any answers but only aesthetic input, and the eyes chico they never lie…
Scene from Red Desert
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN VIA NIETZSCHE, RAY, MAKARAND DESHPANDE, AND TALEB
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
There is an acknowledgment now that as a society we face a much different set of problems than before. Why not postulate if the individual too has evolved from this lens?
Starting with Nietzsche, a colossal but exhausting figure. Widely accepted as an original thinker, one of his seminal works provides some clues –
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Old and New Laws – Tables, No.5:
“He who is of the mob wants to live gratis; we others, however, to whom life has given itself – we are always considering what we can best give in return!
And truly, it is a noble speech that says: ‘What life has promised us, we shall keep that promise – to life!’
One should not wish to enjoy where one has not given enjoyment. And – one should not wish to enjoy!”
This has lived and breathed among men for centuries, but Nietzsche here reframes it. There is no onus on you – but merely an opportunity to give back to life what it has given you, that is itself. Life is a living breathing sacrificial lamb; and Nietzsche affirms us to give something back, not devour life for free. Yet even amidst this inspiration, Nietzsche adds –
“For enjoyment and innocence are the most modest things: neither want to be looked for. One should have them – but one should look rather for guilt or pain!”
Why guilt or pain? Because these are qualities that elevate us. Guilt or pain is a consequence of longing, desire, becoming, possessing – qualities that Nietzsche admires, and key attributes that encapsulate his most well-known idea of the rapturous man or Superman. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written in the 19th century posits a reframing of the human condition. But Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘Superman’ was a call for man to rise above the masses.
Now, the masses have since undergone much socio-political revolution throughout the 20th century. Here we move to auteur extraordinaire Satyajit Ray and his ideas on universal humanity as picturized in his films set in post-independence Bengal.
A set of his films, called later the Calcutta trilogy is a commentary on the condition of the Bengali youth in 70’s Calcutta, a period when the spirit of new India grappled to find meaning under a newly elected Leftist regime. Indoctrinated in the ideas of revolution, the youth were promised stable futures, at a time when the structures of commerce and capitalism were taking shape.
In the first of these films, Pratidwandi, Ray introduces the aspiration of capitalist stability via an idealistic and existential protagonist. An intellectual, he is forced to drop out of medical school due to his father’s death. His lack of agency in earning a living wage is juxtaposed against the searing anguish of the times. His intellect equips him to see the oppression around him, yet he remains in the process of seeing, and consequently acting out of it.
In Seemabaddha, the second film in the trilogy, Ray reflects on a different kind of protagonist. It is the story of a mature, successful man who is driven by ambition and wealth, yet whose ethics are questioned by his sister-in-law, a person he has grown to admire. This lack of validation from one of the few people he innately respects leads him to lament his choice to transcend the traditional Bhadralok ideas of virtue and modesty. How could he ever have imagined that his actualization lay in a life of status and monetary success?
In the final film, Jana Aranya, Ray creates a malleable protagonist. He has no job or woman, and after bustling about trying to find a job, he is by chance led into a life as a small-time businessman selling office supplies. He is in the jungle (Aranya means jungle in Bengali). Feet on the ground, working with numbers, and commissions, all proceed as planned until one day he is required to bend his personal book of morals. The film ends on a piercing note, the moral boundaries of a seedy businessman’s life confronting the virtuous tradition that enabled his upbringing. This man sees but is also seen, and via the gullible eyes of the deceived father, his shame is our shame.
This trilogy shot over a decade is symbolic of a psychological evolution. From seeing injustice and oppression to transcending first-order thoughts to arriving as a man of action in the capitalist jungle, to eventually being able to perceive oneself, as seen in Jana Aranya, Ray arrives at an epistemological conclusion.
This final phase of grasping himself as an object to be seen is captured in a recent play by theatre legend Makarand Deshpande. Titled Manushya, this post-modern play tells the tale of a man who in his penultimate quarter of life decides to now be seen as an object of enjoyment. He becomes a clown, an act to be enjoyed by others. Breaking the Fourth Wall at will, this is an experimental piece symbolic of what Nietzsche had principled – to arrive finally as the ultimate object of enjoyment. Deshpande in an eccentric performance roars and postulates, informing the audience to make the movement from Drishti (seeing) to Drishta (perceiving), deploying the clown act as the ultimate analogy to how he wants the world (or at least his loved ones) to perceive deeply.
Nietzsche had speculated the arrival of his man, a man who could give enjoyment and not just wish to enjoy. Deshpande in Manushya operates from a similar vantage while introducing Drishta and thus becomes the ultimate man who provides ‘enjoyment’ to all.
Advancing further, there is a need to demonstrate the man of our age, someone who has arrived as sneakily as the advanced capitalist era that we inhabit.
Within the context of collective systems and technologies that function systematically, the onus is on YOU to thrive. And while the collective mass, an essential majority stake in the societal machinery is busy seeing, the only way to thrive as the ultimate man is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes is to have Skin in the Game.
Taleb talks about men who encounter risk, who enjoy risk, who enjoy uncertainty, who can accurately perceive systems designed to exploit, and thus are not rent seekers or slaves, but are people who talk and do. He talks of a society designed for effect, where political hoo-ha and privilege afford status, where half-baked intellectuals use language to wrangle themselves out of positions, where incentives are misplaced, and where legal systems are not necessarily ethical.
All of this requires a new age Drishta, a new outlook to thrive and overcome the masses. He calls on the need for less abstraction, more courage, the ability to identify asymmetries and inequalities, and above all the need to develop the sense of a collective good. And that collective good is how we see through the systems that engulf us.
The linear and transcendental understanding of Ray,
The Superman – or how to overcome Man by helping them perceive and enjoy, as championed by Nietzsche,
The ability to be seen as an object of excitement and enjoyment, as a work of Art, as imagined by Deshpande,
The capacity to distinguish and discern amidst complex modern systems by Taleb,
All constitute the all-new courageous man.
As Nietzsche writes – “He who sees the abyss, but with an eagle’s eyes – he who grasps the abyss with an eagle’s claws: he possesses courage.”
Bibliography
1. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra A Book for Everyone and No One (1883-1884)
2. Satyajit Ray, Director, Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970); Seemabaddha (Company Limited) (1971); Jana Aranya (The Middleman) (1976)
3. Ansh Theatre, Makarand Deshpande, Manushya (2023)
4. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game – Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018)