The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Michelangelo Antonioni · a film · 1960 · about 143 minutes · written with Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra · in Italian
Mode
A mystery set up and abandoned; love story, social portrait and study of attention in one film
Mythos
The quest that forgets its object; the place of vanishing, an underworld without a door; the double who takes the lost woman’s place, as in the stories of the substituted bride
Phase
A short span in four places: a departure in Rome, a cruise and a night on an island, a search across Sicily that lapses, and one night and dawn in a hotel at Taormina
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, mono sound, about 143 minutes; Aldo Scavarda’s photography, Giovanni Fusco’s score, Eraldo Da Roma’s cutting; an Italian production with a French co-producer
Register
From a name called across rock in the wind to a crowd of men round a starlet; long silent passages of walking and looking, the take held after the event has ended
Scale
Two people and a moneyed set, seen against sea, rock, a baroque town and an empty one
Governing Proposition
A young woman vanishes in daylight from a bare island off Sicily, and her lover and her closest friend, searching for her across the island and the coast, become lovers and stop searching. The wager of the film is that a form which abandons its own mystery can make the viewer forget the lost woman as the two of them do, and so show, in a class freed from need, desire come loose from feeling, until pity is the only bond left when love has failed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a woman leaving. Anna, played by Lea Massari, goes out from her father’s villa in Rome to the flat of her lover Sandro, played by Gabriele Ferzetti, and her friend Claudia, played by Monica Vitti, waits below while the two are together upstairs. The first ten minutes or so set out three people and a cruise to come, and they set the vantage the film will keep: the friend who waits outside is the one through whose eyes it will come to see, and the woman it seems to be about has very little time left on the screen.
Michelangelo Antonioni wrote it with Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra. Aldo Scavarda photographed it in black and white, Giovanni Fusco wrote the score and Eraldo Da Roma cut it. It is an Italian production with a French co-producer, in Italian, with mono sound, and runs about 143 minutes. It was first shown in competition at Cannes in May 1960, where the first screening was jeered; critics and filmmakers signed a statement in its support, and the jury gave it its Jury Prize. It opened in Italy the same year. Two films followed that are often joined to it, La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), but this one stands alone, and is read alone.
It is built in four movements, each a place: Rome, briefly; the cruise to the Aeolian Islands and a bare island called Lisca Bianca, for a little under the first hour; a search across Sicily, the longest; and a hotel at Taormina, for the last twenty minutes or so. Its central event is never explained. Anna is on screen for roughly the first half hour and then is gone, and the film goes on for nearly two hours more. What it does with that time is the whole of what it has to say.
Movement II
A yacht carries a moneyed party out to the Aeolian Islands, Anna and Sandro and Claudia among them. They put in at Lisca Bianca, bare volcanic rock with the sea on every side. There, in daylight, Anna disappears. The party spreads out across the rock and calls her name into the wind, and the name goes nowhere. The film gives no sign of where she went, and never will: the disappearance is not a puzzle set for solving but a hole cut in the story.
Night comes on, and a storm. The search goes on through the dark from a fisherman’s hut on the rock, and the night is long and mostly silent. Claudia carries a guilt she cannot place, as if her friend’s absence were somehow her own doing; the hours on the rocks are what give it ground. At first light the sea is grey and the rock is grey, and the search starts again over the same stones. It is on this dawn that it begins, almost unnoticed, to fail.
The party leaves the island with nothing found. The film has kept its question open for most of an hour, long enough for the viewer to share the search: to scan the rocks, to listen in the wind, to wait. Then it carries the viewer away from the island with the others, and the question goes with them, unanswered, into Sicily. It will never be answered. The mystery has done its work, which was to clear the ground.
Movement III
Claudia wears a blouse of Anna’s. It is a small thing, and it is the film’s figure. In the days that follow she takes Anna’s lover as well, and comes to fear Anna’s return. The lost woman is replaced by her likeness, as in the oldest stories of the substituted bride, and the film shows the substitution happening without anyone choosing it.
The search moves across Sicily: Milazzo; Messina, where a crowd of men surges round a starlet; a train; a villa, where Giulia, played by Dominique Blanchar, is seen with a boy painter; the house of a woman called Patrizia. Somewhere along the way Sandro and Claudia become lovers, and in each place the search counts for a little less. Sicilian men stare at the Roman visitors, and at Claudia, and the eye of men on a woman runs through the movement like a second subject, beside the appetite of the idle.
Looking for Anna, they drive into a town that has been built and never lived in: white blocks, a church, no one. Claudia feels that it is a cemetery. When the car has gone, the camera stays and holds on the emptiness. It is the film’s plainest statement of its method: the place does not notice the people, and the camera keeps looking after they have left.
Movement IV
Noto is a town of baroque facades in hard sun. Claudia, in love now, rings the bells from a church tower. It is a rare moment of joy in the film, and the film lets it ring, as it lets so little else. For a little while the search is entirely forgotten, and the viewer forgets it with them. The bells are rung in play, in a church that has become a place to be happy in, and the sacred enters the film that way, as a sound and a game.
Sandro trained as an architect and gave it up for estimates. At Noto, among buildings he could once have drawn, he spills ink on a young man’s drawing. The film does not explain the act and does not need to. It is envy made an act: the man who traded his work for money spoiling the work of someone who has not yet traded his. Of all the film’s glimpses of labour, it is the one that touches the hero, and it touches him as a wound he passes on.
By the hour mark the viewer has stopped asking where Anna is. The film has not told its audience to forget her; it has made them do it, as Claudia and Sandro do, by giving them the present in place of the absent. When Claudia is afraid that Anna will come back, the viewer can share the fear rather than judge it, and that is the knowledge the form exists to give.
Movement V
At a hotel in Taormina there is a party at night, crowded and idle. Toward dawn Claudia searches the hotel’s corridors for Sandro, as the party once searched the island for Anna, and finds him on a sofa with a starlet. The night answers the island: Sandro betrays Claudia as Anna was betrayed, and with the same ease. The search the film began with has come round again, and this time its object is found, which is worse.
At dawn, on the terrace, Sandro sits on a bench and weeps, and Claudia puts her hand on his head. The last shot holds them there: a wall on one side of the frame, Etna on the other, two figures small between them. The touch is pity, without love and without forgiveness, and it is all that is left. The film ends on the bond, and on the gulf, in one image.
The film’s reputation came fast after the jeers at Cannes. In 1962 the critics’ poll of Sight and Sound placed it second, behind Citizen Kane. The dead time between events and the figure in an indifferent landscape became a grammar that later filmmakers took up, and the director’s name became a byword for the art film of alienation. The film has been read as that, as the exhaustion of a class after the boom, as a study of a woman’s consciousness and of landscape, and as a film about looking. Anna is never found.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The design is subtractive in spirit: the film takes away its own plot and asks what remains. Without the long island movement the disappearance is an incident, not a hole; without the hours on the rocks, the storm and the hut, Claudia’s guilt has no ground. Without the slow lapse of the Sicilian search the forgetting cannot happen, because forgetting takes duration, and the length is compelled by it. The Taormina night answers the island. What gives is in the middle: the Messina crowd round a starlet, Giulia and the boy painter at the villa, and the visit to Patrizia’s house make points the film makes elsewhere. Perhaps a tenth of the running time illustrates rather than enacts.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in a class freed from need, desire has come loose from feeling, so that a person can be lost and replaced within days, and those who do it know it and cannot stop. Her lover and her friend look for Anna and end in each other’s arms, and the viewer, who has also stopped waiting, finds the same ease in himself. Sandro’s ink on a young man’s drawing is envy made an act. The last shot discloses something harder: pity without love and without forgiveness, the only bond left. All of it is shown, not said. Held off the top because part of the force is a mood of emptiness, and the social order behind the class is sketched rather than opened.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevation is cold and recurrent. The island is the first summit: bare volcanic rock, the sea on every side, figures calling a name into the wind, the night storm and the grey dawn over the water. The deserted town is a second, white blocks and a church and no one, the camera holding on the emptiness. Noto is a third, its facades in sun and the bells Claudia rings from the tower, a rare joy the film lets ring. The last shot is the highest: a bench, a wall, Etna, two figures, dawn. Height comes from small people set before large indifferent spaces. Frequency holds it down: long passages in villas and hotels are level by design, and the film refuses the swelling cue.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The myth is built by inversion. The form is the quest, the search for one who is lost, and the structure bears load because the quest forgets its object. The island is the place of vanishing, an underworld without a door. Claudia becomes the double: she wears Anna’s blouse, takes Anna’s lover and fears Anna’s return, so that the lost woman is replaced by her likeness, as in the old stories of the substituted bride. The last dawn, between wall and volcano, gives the two a ground older than their class. Held below the gate because the archetype is kept submerged, by design: it is felt through absence and seldom becomes load-bearing image, and the film builds one myth rather than several.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is neorealism, which had given Italian film the street and the unresolved ending, and the narrative feature at large, whose contract is that a question posed will be answered. The swerve breaks the contract: a mystery is set up in the first half hour and abandoned, and the film turns to what it was watching all along, the dead time between events, the figure in the landscape, the drift of attention. The stake was paid in full: the first audience at Cannes jeered, and critics and filmmakers signed a statement in its support before the jury gave it a prize. Held below the top because the turn was prepared, by Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954) and by Antonioni’s own Il Grido (1957).
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that loss is absorbed, and only a form that loses its own subject can make the viewer do that rather than be told it. By the hour mark the viewer has stopped asking where Anna is: the disclosure is performed in the audience. The take holds after the event has ended, so that the viewer watches what people do when nothing is happening to them, which is the film’s whole question. The framing is an instrument, figures at the edge of the frame outweighed by walls, facades and sea. Make it a mystery and it becomes a thriller; give it a plot and the forgetting becomes a failing rather than the condition.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Sixty-six years of return are evidence. The film has been read as the cinema of alienation, as the moral exhaustion of the Italian bourgeoisie after the economic miracle, as a study of a woman’s consciousness, since Claudia is its real centre and its gaze, as a study of landscape and architecture, and as a film about looking itself; Seymour Chatman’s book on Antonioni belongs to a literature still in disagreement. It yields on return: a first viewing waits for Anna, a second watches Claudia, a third sees the spaces. Held below the top because the span is decades, not centuries, and because part of the literature has settled into one reading, the malady of feeling, which has at times seemed exhausting rather than inexhaustible.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together. The field is the cinema of its decade, crowded that year with Breathless, La Dolce Vita and Psycho. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: a feature could drop its plot, make duration and empty space its matter, and hold an audience on a woman’s attention instead of on events. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: second in the Sight and Sound critics’ poll of 1962, behind Citizen Kane; the dead time and the figure in an indifferent landscape became a grammar for Wenders, Akerman, Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ceylan and Martel. Part of the force is shared with Rossellini, and part of the reach belongs to the trilogy and Blow-Up; both are discounted.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole as released, with no lost version or missing reel known, and restoration has been repair. Presence is sixty-six years of continuous exhibition, teaching and circulation on every format. One charge is laid on presence: the film’s manner is at times taken as the type of art cinema’s solemnity, and that charge, not the form, keeps the figure where it stands. The surface is fixed in part to 1960, the yacht, the clothes, the hotel, but that surface is half the subject, so it ages as history and not as fashion, and the condition it treats has not dated. Below The Parthenon at 9.2 by the whole difference between decades and millennia.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium is load-bearing throughout. Aldo Scavarda’s black and white gives the island’s rock, the night storm, Noto’s stone in hard sun and the hotel’s grey dawn. The staging is in depth: figures split by walls and doorframes, a face at the extreme edge of the frame, people walking away from the camera into space. The takes are timed to the ends of gestures, not of lines. Monica Vitti’s Claudia, a face that registers guilt, joy and shame without a line to carry them, is the film’s instrument. The costs: dialogue post-synchronised in the Italian manner sits loosely on the image at times; Ferzetti is adequate rather than revealing; Fusco’s score is sometimes a conventional cue. Below Anna Karenina (9.5) and Tokyo Story (9.3).
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the island, bare rock and sea where a woman vanishes in daylight, and the Taormina hotel, a crowded party and a sofa at dawn. One law governs both: people are small in spaces that do not notice them, attention drifts from the absent to the present, and the camera stays where the drama would cut. Search and betrayal are shot with the same distance and patience, and the comedy of the Messina crowd obeys the law of the grief on the rocks: appetite, idle and public, in an indifferent place. The range runs from sea to baroque town to hotel, from mystery to near farce. The one strain is satire: at Messina and with the boy painter the film points at its class rather than watching it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, above all Claudia’s, which is the film’s vantage; love and desire, at the centre; class, a moneyed Roman set and a Sicilian aristocracy; labour, in Sandro’s surrender of architecture for estimates and the young man’s drawing at Noto; the nation, north against south, Roman visitors among Sicilian men who stare; history, in Noto’s baroque and the deserted planned town; the sacred, in churches and bells, empty or rung in play; the natural order, in sea, rock, storm and volcano. Each is reached through the couple’s drift. What holds the axis lowest is what is only glimpsed: the family is Anna’s father, briefly; the state is a police station and an empty town; work belongs to others, seen from a car. It is one class seen from inside.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.1, then The Inner Law at 9.0 and The Made at 8.9. A form that loses its own subject and so makes the viewer perform the forgetting it discloses; one law of small people in indifferent spaces governing island, baroque town and hotel alike; and a making in which frame, staging in depth and one face carry the meaning.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: consciousness, love, class, the nation, history, the sacred and the natural order are held through one couple’s drift, but the family, the state and work are only glimpsed, and it is one class seen from inside. Below the rest, The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: a Sicilian middle in which about a tenth of the running time illustrates rather than enacts, and a quest built by inversion that is felt through absence and seldom becomes load-bearing image.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short of it: the quest is built by inversion and carried by absence, and the film builds one myth rather than several. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, which stands at 8.7, below the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of L’Avventura as released in 1960, in Italian, black and white with mono sound, about 143 minutes, as carried by the current restoration, from Anna leaving her father’s villa to the bench at Taormina: directed by Michelangelo Antonioni from a screenplay by Antonioni, Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra, photographed by Aldo Scavarda, edited by Eraldo Da Roma, with music by Giovanni Fusco; with Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti, Lea Massari and Dominique Blanchar. No competing cut is known that changes the work, so no version is in question, and the film is scored alone, not with La Notte and L’Eclisse. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Italian film; English renderings are an aid to sense, and nothing is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word with certainty, in Italian or in translation, so none is quoted. Sources give the running time as 143 to 145 minutes. Figures that could not be verified, among them shot counts, shot lengths and the share of dialogue, are not given, and the smaller parts of the cast are not named.