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Watch L’Eclisse – Criterion Collection Online.
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**May Believe Spoilers**
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After years of seeking out acceptable VHS copies of L’ECLISSE, at last this elusive, enigmatic, haunting film has advance to DVD. To be glorious, some VHS copies were not so bad-looking, but few were letterboxed, so many viewers have never seen the film in its modern widescreen format. Criterion presents L’ECLISSE in widescreen format and in a neat, beautifully restored print. There is a marvelous amount of snappily flashing in the opening scene, but as we are engulfed in Antonioni’s vision of the world this becomes less noticeable. The soundtrack also has the recessed quality familiar from many Criterion releases, but that can be remedied by a volume boost. Apart from these minor criticisms, this is an exemplary release. It may indeed surpass Criterion’s edition of L’AVVENTURA in terms of the supplementary material.
On disc two, there is a pair of reliable features: “The Sickness of Eros” features interviews by Antonioni scholars and associates. These people actually have big things to say about the film and the director. The other feature, a documentary, “Michelangelo Antonioni: the Peep that Changed Cinema” is a perfect example of its kind. There is a lot of footage of the director discussing his films (and saying absorbing things about them) as well as other relevant comments by scholars and collaborators. Of even greater interest are the numerous clips and stills of the director on the dwelling of many of his works. Both these documentary features are eminently re-playable. There is also an informative, film-length commentary by Richard Pena.
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L’ECLISSE seems to sum up the ideas that evolve in Antonioni’s earlier films from LE AMICHE through LA NOTTE. But it also pares down these ideas and renders them in an abstract, or nearly abstract scheme. This is why the film is so inspiring for some viewers. From the opening shot, we are in Antonioni’s world: a collected still-life of a room and its ordinary contents; the camera pans lawful (here we look the wait on of the widescreen format) and a shirtsleeve is glimpsed; immediately, it moves and we behold Francisco. This opening seems to say: humans are fragment of the world. They live in it, but they are piece of it too. Vittoria is then introduced, first from below, the we are allowed to seek her whole. The film continues to part the characters in this contrivance, cutting off our conception of their complete bodies, as if to say the people themselves are not complete. Vittoria’s first genuine action in the film is to adjust a cramped, empty record frame and to come through it to disappear some objects on the desk within the scope of the frame. This is another typical Antonioni theme. He expresses it many times with frames, both picture- and window, and with doorways and arches. Humans need to seek a shape to reality, a formality of some kind, to fabricate it comprehensible.
Monica Vitti is Vittoria in this 1962 film. She is the ultimate Antonioni existential protagonist. Presumably sometime shortly before the film begins, Vittoria has become aware of a basic human dilemma: life is constantly in a status of change; we try to maintain onto emotions and ideas, but the forward-moving nature of existence can render them meaningless’ also, there is some mystery under the surface of life. Vittoria ends a relationship that clearly was ‘going nowhere’, considerable to the panic of her nearly immobile lover (Franscisco Rabal) . She leaves him and begins a wandering high-tail, an exploration that makes up the body of the film. Along the plot, she will acknowledge in different ways to her gradually evolving residence of mind. One response Antonioni’s characters often have is to try to hasten, symbolically perhaps to transcend their existence. Vittoria accepts an invitation from a friend to cruise to Verona and aid to Rome in a private plane. The experience is exhilarating, but ultimately empty. She also dresses in native African costume and dances quite well in an attempt to transcend her normal world and normal self. This too is ultimately devoid of dependable meaning. Very typically of an Antonioni protagonist, Vittoria allows herself to study the possibility of romance as a kind of dash or distraction. She meets, and apparently becomes emotionally alive to with the impossibly fair, but empty Piero (Alain Delon) . Through his association with Vittoria, Piero too becomes aware of the incompleteness of life. At one telling point, Vittoria and Piero are crossing a street; she stops and says “siamo in media” (“we are halfway”) with a obvious portent in her dispute and expression. The film is made up of many microscopic moments like this that seem to deliver the whole of it. Human experience is only “halfway”—there is more to life than what we study or deem we know. Something else lies under the surface. Antonioni explores this theme in all his films, most famously four years later in BLOW-UP. Here, the style of the film is so rarefied and so nearly abstract that it may seize more than one viewing to luxuriate in it. Vittoria and Piero, together, realize that truly connecting, finding a meaning beyond the fleeting sexual one (which is yet another empty attempt to transcend) may be impossible. So Antonioni, in perhaps the most celebrated sequence, permanently removes the characters from the film. As if to emphasize the universality of his theme and the interchangeablility of human experience, we are shown a woman who closely resembles Vitti, but who passes anonymously from the frame as she did. The eminent wordless sequence creates an uncanny, almost gruesome sense of anticipation: we feel we are waiting for something to happen, for someone to reach in this neighborhood of unfinished buildings, circulating city buses, and symmetrical crosswalks, but only a spot of pure being seems to exist now. It’s almost an Eastern map of looking at the world. The film leaves the viewer with a lot to notice and calls many abet to ogle more in it than can be addressed in a brief review like this.
This original Criterion DVD of L’ECLISSE should not be overlooked by anyone fervent in fresh film.
Michelangelo directed a trilogy of sorts in the 1960s, beginning with his breakthrough film L’Avventura, continuing with La Notte, and ending with my personal common, L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) . All were preoccupied with the theme of alienation, and all featured more or less neurotic and disaffected performances from the striking actress Monica Vitti (as a blond in L’Avventura and L’Eclisse, and as a brunette in La Notte) . L’Eclisse begins with the Vitti character’s romantic breakup, and continues with her affair with a young stockbroker. The affair is destined for failure, however, as she ultimately finds it impossible to experience meaningful contact with other people. There are several vital sequences in the film – the dead fatigue of the opening breakup scene, raucous and frenetic scenes in the stock market, even Vitti and her friends dressing up and dancing as African natives! The most striking for me, however, is the final several minutes, in which the lovers have agreed to meet but neither shows up, and we notice a series of deserted spots (mostly locales from earlier scenes) in a mounting crescendo of emptiness and apathetic terror. The stark and impersonal “unique” sixties architecture, headlines about nuclear panic, and a quietly eerie and horrific musical gain combines to do this one of the most grand sequences ever filmed. It shocks me to learn that when originally released in America the sequence was chop as extraneous!
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It’s a shame that this masterpiece is currently out of print. There are copies floating around that are dubbed from British sources, and there are also some from an American release several years ago, which had generally very respectable represent and subtitle quality. I can only hope that someone, maybe Criterion, chooses to release L’Eclisse on DVD – I would give my apt arm to salvage it!
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