STEPHEN KOCH
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differ from the waywardness of the prodigal by having one thing in common:
paralysis, immobility. Not action (albeit misguided) but the incapacity to act.
Or feel. Or respond . Or love .
Quite obviously, paralysis cannot be narrated in any ordinary sense. But
it has been the special function and achievement of the modernist
paysage
moralisi
to
na"ate immobility.
This is the achievement of Beckett, Kafka,
and, in his lesser way, West. The immobility in question is almost invariably
understood as a spiritual disease-offhand, I cannot think of exceptions
outside comedy, although sometimes, even in Kafka, it is also a mystical
metaphor. The artist conceives his fanciful landscape as the only arena where
the immobilized spirit can be liberated into (otherwise unthinkable) events
and therefore into some kind of (otherwise unthinkable) awareness. The
implicit paradoxes become formal principles, and they account for the strange
breeziness blowing through the half-light ofKafka 's prose, in such contrast to
the dreary, fetid, choking fixations of the
Diaries.
In
The Passenger,
a man named Robertson stands withJack Nicholson on
the terrace of a God-forsaken African hotel, exclaiming on the beauty of the
desert beyond. "Something about it seems to be waiting." Nothing could be
more characteristic of Antonioni. Watching
L 'Avventura,
one does indeed
have a wonderfully complicated and delicate sense ofwaiting through silence
in landscapes that are autonomously present, all-but-alive, saturating the
wide screen during those long, slow, meditative takes. Even more extraordin–
arily, those attendant landscapes successfully replace ordinary incident and
characterization as a way of making the film live and move. The moralization
of Antonioni's great landscapes is all the more powerful because it is a film–
maker who is narrating immobility through the full paradoxes of a moving
picture, and doing it, moreover, in a way wholly unaffected by those vestiges
ofan expressionism which, in the literary forms, must be reluctantly conceded
to
infect almost the whole genre , even Kafka. Since a moralized landscape is
likely to seem dreamlike or nightmarish, the artist is almost irresistibly
tempted to resort to expressionism's dreamlike, nightmarish vocabulary,
creaking as it is, spooked and gothic, symbol-laden, self-consciously horri–
fying. (It is no accident, for example, that Schlesinger makes Tod Hackett's
paintings an even more dippy and vulgar version of Emil Nolde, with ritual
nods, of course, to Goya.)
L 'Avventura
is completely free of these hokey
enctustations: its landscapes are clean, "real," we see them with our eyes
open. (It is only in later films that Antonioni lapses into the expressionist trap,
as in the silly dance of the clowns-straight from third-rate Wedekind-in
Blow-Up,
or the long passages using the Open Theater in
Zabriskie Point.)
.'I'm interested in men, not landscapes," comes Nicholson's curmud–
geonly reply out on that African terrace. It's a snappy riposte-one wishes
