The Big Screen (57 page)

A young woman, Claudia (Vitti), is invited on a trip by her friend Anna (Lea Massari). Anna is in an affair with Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), but it is not going well. The party takes a boat and lands on a rocky island off Sicily. After a few hours they realize they cannot find Anna. There is a lengthy search as the day draws in: the ebbing light (shot by Aldo Scavarda) is exquisite, and the framing and the camera movements are consistent with Antonioni's taste for austere beauty.

They have to give up. Anna has disappeared. She is never found. But as time goes by, gradually another affair develops, this time between Claudia and Sandro, until she finds him early one morning making love to an American starlet/call girl named Gloria Perkins.

That's all, at the level of plot, in a 143-minute film. When
L' Avventura
opened at Cannes in 1960, there was booing at first and great controversy over the pointlessness of this enigma. The fans of mystery at the movies were accustomed to having their puzzles explained: Anna might have been murdered, run off with another man, been kidnapped by the CIA, been hijacked by space aliens, fallen down a hole in the ground, whatever—but vanished? The jury rallied—its president, Georges Simenon, was an expert on mystery—and
L' Avventura
shared the Jury Prize with Kon Ichikawa's
Kagi
. (The Palme d'Or went to Federico Fellini's
La Dolce Vita
.)

Against many expectations,
L' Avventura
became an art house box office hit. There was an audience far from disconcerted by Antonioni's failure to deliver a narrative payoff, but intrigued by the openness and uncertainty and well aware that time and memory had their ways of erasing people. The failed search was as hypnotic as one with a tidy conclusion—perhaps more so. We still don't know where Anna went in
L' Avventura
. But we may recall how in the 1920s, when the surrealists discovered cinema, they would walk into a theater in the middle of a picture, and watch until they made sense of it. Then they'd move on to another picture. The moment. The presence.

L' Avventura
had been a tough film to mount financially. But once it was a hit, Antonioni had international backing to do more. He followed with
La Notte
, a story of a failing marriage and a possible affair (between Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti). It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and it was another hit, no matter that some critics called it listless, uneventful, depressing. Antonioni managed to accept those words as praise or as a mark of what he had intended. (Manny Farber renamed the actresses Monica Unvital and Jeanne Morose.)

The third film,
L'Eclisse
, was produced by the Hakim Brothers, a sign of unbridled commercial support, though Antonioni declined to be interfered with. In this story, Vitti is Vittoria, a translator just coming out of one love affair and caught up with Piero (Alain Delon), a broker on the Rome stock exchange. They are as unsuited as their jobs, but they have an intense attachment—and Delon was an uncommonly energetic and charismatic actor for Antonioni. There is a dynamic sequence on the floor of the stock exchange, abuzz with action—you feel Martin Scorsese might have shot it.

The affair is uneasy, but the lovers agree to meet on a street corner one summer evening. The sequence that follows is the bookend to the trilogy, if you like, for the only “person” at the crossroads is the camera. The lovers do not arrive, but the camera watches the world go by, and simultaneously we feel life passing in all its heedlessness and time advancing.

L'Eclisse
won the Jury Prize at Cannes, too. There were steadfast opponents of the trilogy who claimed pretension, indulgent “beauty,” navel-gazing, star-making, literary affectation, inertness, slowness, and boredom. Others said the trilogy amounted to the arrival of cinema at the level of modern fiction—to see these three films, to absorb them, was like reading…Musil, Mann, or Joyce. To which some replied, try reading those writers instead of invoking them. Why should a movie be justified by comparisons with literature? In which case, you have no option but to watch the trilogy, ideally three films in three nights. Every hostile charge against it has some substance, but why should movies not arrive at a point where they can be pretentious? Hadn't the cinema always been about pretending?

Let me add the words of an eloquent defender of Antonioni, Seymour Chatman, talking about
L'Eclisse
but placing the trilogy in an age of larger anxieties. The trilogy, it seems to me, is a peak of cinema. Seen today, it can prompt lamentation—that once we had a medium prepared to address all our feelings and the range of our world:

L'Eclisse
is about an eclipse, a natural event and a helpless metaphor, and it's not possible to watch its coda without seeing the fading light as a cultural omen. But the Antonioni trilogy is persistently concerned with the light and its loss. It was made in the years 1959–62, and I have been harping on that time, when the world and the medium turned and ideas about light shifted from pioneer innocence to existential disquiet.

The Italian poster for
Chinatown

In the early 1960s, there was confusion over what to call this transaction—was it film, the movies, or cinema? You could tell a person's taste and agenda by the word he used most often. “Cinema” meant the history, and the suggestion that it had been superior then; “film” was the essential function and might be covering an urge to make the stuff; while “movie” usually meant America and fun. In preparing
Jaws
, Steven Spielberg told Richard Dreyfuss, “I don't want to make a film, I want to make a
movie
.” The choice of words was especially delicate in a surprising new area. For the transaction had caught the attention of academia. But if it was going to get traction there, how could it be managed without the correct language and a reading list on the cinema of existential disquiet? You couldn't use “movie” in that context.

If a disillusioned English teacher had walked into the office of his academic dean at an American university in the early 1960s and said, “Look, I'm not getting anywhere with
Paradise Lost
or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Suppose I switch to a seminar on Fred Astaire or Cary Grant?,” he would have been endangering his tenure prospects. I'm not sure there were people with that much nerve, let alone the instinct to watch Astaire or Grant until the ideal of an American gentleman sank in. But if the reckless suggestion had been made, the dean would have turned to frost and asked, “Are you proposing we give young people credit for watching motion pictures?”

The University of Southern California offered a few courses in film from 1927. It was a kind of local specialty, well intentioned and useful, bringing practitioners to the university to tell stories, and perhaps opening up lines of future funding. The practitioners liked it because it gave them a feeling of respectability. But this was an isolated instance. In 1945 the University of California at Berkeley started to publish a magazine, the
Hollywood Quarterly
, but by 1958 it had become
Film Quarterl
y. Apart from that, there were several illustrated fan magazines, not reliable in what they printed, but part of the promotional thrust that sold movies. The modest film bookshelf consisted largely of the self-serving ghosted memoirs of industrial leaders and a few novels that were more valuable and educational. So anyone interested might be better off reading Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished
The Last Tycoon
, Nathanael West's
The Day of the Locust
, Gavin Lambert's
The Slide Area
, or Norman Mailer's
The Deer Park
.

In Britain, there was the British Film Institute, established in 1933 and resolved after the war to encourage the appreciation of “filmic art” rather than get involved in production. It had a quarterly magazine,
Sight & Sound
, begun tentatively in the 1930s but developed by the editorship of Gavin Lambert and Penelope Houston. Another BFI facility was the National Film Theatre, started in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain but moved to its Waterloo Bridge site in 1957 and devoted to the regular screening of great films from all over the world. In 1960, America had no national film institute or theater, no national archive, and no magazine like
Sight & Sound
, except for
Film Quarterly
and
Film Culture
, started in 1954 by Jonas and Adolfas Mekas but aimed principally at independent, avant-garde filmmaking.

In 1960 there was not a single place of higher education in Britain that offered a film class, let alone a major area of study in film. There was just the London School of Film Technique, located in Brixton, in South London, with a title that signaled professional training. Alas, the school lacked the funds, the equipment, and the regular teachers to carry that out. But it was better than nothing, and it tempted me to give up a place at Oxford, where I would have read history. When I say there was nowhere in higher education that taught film, I should add that there was also no school that sought to take five-year-olds and upward and ask, “Do you realize how much film you are seeing in 1960? And have you thought how far this affects your sense of reality?”

Filmmakers were invited into the teaching system. Surely they knew what they had been doing well enough to advise the young? In the early 1970s, Nicholas Ray was hired at Harpur College, in Binghamton, New York, to do whatever he could. He and his students started to shoot film for a project that was never quite identified. He died (in 1979) with the project unfinished. It would be called
We Can't Go Home Again
, and in 2011 it was finally assembled and shown by Susan Ray, his last companion. I fear it is unwatchable, yet it was an experience—like knowing Ray in those years—that changed many lives. In 1980, Michael Powell taught a term at Dartmouth. He went down to New York one weekend to see Martin Scorsese editing
Raging Bull
. That's when he met the editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who would become his wife.

June 1962 had seen the first publication in London of
Movie
, a magazine edited by Ian Cameron, with Mark Shivas, V. F. Perkins, and Paul Mayersberg as associates. This was influenced by the writings in
Cahiers du Cinéma
and by the way so many of those writers had become filmmakers. Its first issue included what the editors called a “talent histogram,” a table of evaluation of British and American directors, with the categories “Great,” “Brilliant,” “Very Talented,” “Talented,” “Competent or ambitious,” and “The Rest.” Only two people made it as “Great”: Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. “Brilliant” was Joseph Losey, George Cukor, Stanley Donen, Anthony Mann, Leo McCarey, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Jacques Tourneur, Raoul Walsh, and Orson Welles.

So the French heroes were saved again. But further down the line—and this was aggressive or “rude” in a British publication—“Competent or ambitious” included David Lean, Michael Powell, Carol Reed, Tony Richardson, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann. This was meant to upset the old guard, and the
Movie
group was happy to deride the way
Sight & Sound
had barely reviewed (or had omitted) works such as
Psycho
,
Rio Bravo
, and
Written on the Wind
.

At much the same time, in
Film Culture
, in an issue dated 1962–63, Andrew Sarris published an essay, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” This was in the spirit of André Bazin's 1957 article in
Cahiers
, “La Politique des Auteurs,” in which he generally accepted the idea that directors made films and good directors tended to make them well. Bazin knew that some hero worship and professional ignorance fostered this attitude, but he understood it was one of the best ways for a newcomer to approach the vast body of unseen films. He concluded:

The intellectual openness of that—to collaboration, commercial pressure, the personality of stars, of genres—is worth recalling in the furor that would spring up in America over auteurism. Andrew Sarris—talented as both writer and critic, and not shy of argument—did believe in auteurism, and he would offer his own grading system in the 1968 book
The American Cinema
, where his ranking of directors was argued with wit and insight. Still, he became caught up in fierce controversy—with Pauline Kael, above all—in which the principle of auteurism came under attack as a nearly un-American elitism. After all, wasn't film a business where many hands contributed? And if auteurs had really been responsible for it all, where did that leave Hollywood standing? (Of course, Hollywood was collapsing, and that was a large reason for the auteur theory.)

In time, Kael found her own auteurs—Altman, Bertolucci, De Palma, for instance—and the thrust of personal adoration or discovery should never be forgotten. But something more fundamental was at work, for now the disaffected teachers of Milton and Hopkins could go to their academic dean and say, Orson Welles is an American artist, Alfred Hitchcock is a unique figure, Ingmar Bergman is very serious and important. You had to be careful, still, in the 1960s: you couldn't really float a whole course on Nicholas Ray or Vincente Minnelli or Jacques Tourneur. But academia rejoiced in the idea of artist figures—especially those who might have been wronged and misunderstood by commerce—and so such figures worked their way into the curriculum.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, universities and colleges began to present film courses in their catalogues. And if you were going to offer a seminar on Hitchcock, didn't you also need Film 101: a historical survey; an introduction to criticism; film and the novel; and even an introduction to filmmaking? Was there a reading list to make these courses seem substantial? It was growing year by year. In 1967 the National Endowment for the Arts set up the American Film Institute. In 1968, Pauline Kael—who had once programmed a repertory movie theater in Berkeley, California, and been a freelance film writer—took up a position as film critic at
The New Yorker
. Sarris taught, at Columbia, but Kael never accepted a teaching position—indeed, it was her opinion that if anything could ever kill the movies it was academia.

The audience for such writers was the young generation excited by Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni and beginning to reappraise American film history. The sources for that still were films on television, or films at repertory theaters and university museums. Television had fallen on old movies with a vengeance: How else could it fill all that air time cheaply? The pictures might be cut, interrupted with ads, and introduced by charming idiots—but there they were. And dedicated repertory theaters—such as the Brattle in Cambridge, the Surf in San Francisco, the Electric on Portobello Road in London, the Thalia in New York—were springing up. There were film festivals to showcase the new work: the New York Film Festival began in 1963, at Lincoln Center, led by Amos Vogel and Richard Roud, who had also been an inspiring figure at the London Film Festival, begun in 1956.

One of the regular courses in the new discipline of “film studies” was “Film and the Novel.” It was the obvious escape route for jaded literature teachers, just as Hollywood had appealed to novelists who felt celebrity and money were passing them by. From Joe Gillis to Gore Vidal, the writers tell the best Hollywood stories and have the most mixed motives. As early as 1926, Aldous Huxley wrote to a friend who had gone to Hollywood:

Later on Huxley yielded: he took $1500 a week and easy sexual liaisons in Hollywood, and he worked on
Madame Curie
(1943; uncredited) and
Pride and Prejudice
(1940): “One tries to do one's best for Jane Austen; but actually the very fact of transforming the book into a picture must necessarily alter its whole quality in a profound way.”

Many writers have been diverted by the movies and television. That opportunity, “going Hollywood,” led to famous crack-ups, like that of Scott Fitzgerald, who died in Los Angeles in December 1940 before he had made up his mind over the balance of condemnation and envy in his unfinished novel,
The Last Tycoon
. Monroe Stahr, the central character in that book, is a Thalberg figure, and Fitzgerald had known Thalberg, and complained at how the young boss had treated him.

I don't think William Faulkner was ever heard complaining—though, in private letters, after a stint in Hollywood, he would admit to having to get the air of the place out of his lungs. But he went back time and again, and he never seems to have eased his vulnerability by telling himself he was doing great things.