Thomas J. Harrison

Most film directors do not come up with their own subjects or write their own screenplays.   They are contracted by a producer to give dramatic shape to an existing story.   In that sense they are somewhat like the conductor of an orchestra.   Other, far fewer, directors are more like the composer--conceptualizing the piece, scoring it, distributing its musical lines among a range of registers, chords, and instruments.   Michelangelo Antonioni is one of those.   In his fifty-five years of filmmaking, he has thought up almost all the subjects for his films, scripted and cast them, meticulously overseen each shot and edit.   Before becoming a director Antonioni was in fact a writer--more particularly a film critic, but also a screenwriter (on Roberto Rossellini's A Pilot Returns of 1942 as well as on other works up to and beyond Federico Fellini's The White Sheik of 1951).   After making his first documentary in the forties and his first feature film in 1950, this composer or writerly director went on to invent some of the most original idioms in the grammar of cinema.   When attempting to understand these idioms, it helps to consider them a part (the most important part, without question, but a part nonetheless) of Antonioni's larger engagement with writing.

To begin with, there are the many reviews and more than thirty articles on film which he, a voice in the neorealist chorus affiliated with the journal Cinema , wrote as early as the second half of the 1930s.   Then there are the rich fictional writings--the dozens upon dozens of stories, sketches, and reminiscences partially collected in That Bowling Alley on the Tiber .   Then there are Antonioni's reflections of cinema and art in general, the accounts of his poetics and filmmaking practices recorded in The Architecture of Vision (Marsilio, 1997).   Finally there are the scenarios and screenplays--both to films viewed by thousands as well as to others that never were shot.   To this scriptorial practice one would want to join the musical Antonioni, the young violinist who performed his first public concert at nine years of age, and the painter, whose select works are reproduced in Montagne incantate .   Fictional, poetic, pictorial, essayistic, and cinematic, the parameters of Antonioni's art are not easy to fix.   The eighty-six year old artist suffered a stroke in the 1980s, received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1995, and has another film currently in the making.   He is the very embodiment of unfinished artistic business.

The temporal expanse of his work is equally broad, bearing witness to cultural developments spanning two-thirds of a century--from the era of Mussolinian fascism to the explosion of neorealism, from the throes of postwar Italy to the terroristic scene of the 1970s, from the urgencies of philosophical existentialism to the quizzical postmodern dérive of the century's end.   Antonioni is virtually the sole survivor of that grand generation of Italian filmmakers once boasting Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, Fellini, and Pasolini.   In terms of sheer longevity, he is an extraordinary touchstone of 20 th century Italian culture.   Even if he had never made a single film, the testimony of his writings alone would warrant the attention of historians.

Unfinished Business is just one element in the record.   A translation of I film nel cassetto , it collects ten scenarios, sketches, or screenplays that Antonioni never found the chance to film, even though some of them (particularly "The Crew") were dearer to his heart than projects he did complete.   For the story of how and why some scripts got made and others did not, one should turn to the essay by Carlo Di Carlo concluding this volume.   It is essentially the old tale of the director proposes, the producer disposes, the market, of course, underlying the disposition, and inevitably wary of Antonioni's highly cerebral art.   In forty-eight years Antonioni made close to the same number of films (less than two dozen) as Pasolini did in fourteen years, Fellini in twenty-three, and Visconti in thirty-four.   For a true sense of the density of his work, however, as Di Carlo reminds us, one must note that Antonioni authored another twelve fully-written films that were not produced, six co-written screenplays, fifteen original treatments, and approximately forty documentary treatments.   Unfinished Business gives an important piece of this collateral production, including two screenplays.  

Reading these writings back to back with Antonioni's films is somewhat like studying a poet's drafts of his poems, a novelist's outlines for a novel.   The films we are familiar with slowly reveal elements of their inspiration and genesis, the theoretical horizon against which they stand, the imaginative options among which they emerge.   We find the same predominance of female protagonists, the triangular structures of love, the disappearances, homicides, or suicides, the intangibilities and evanescence of all signs and identities.   Gradually what changes as we see Antonioni supplementing his images with words and his dramas with expositions is his artistic profile.   We develop a deeper sense of the intellectual ambitions that accompanied his stylistic innovations.   We witness the social-philosophical ramifications of his taciturn art.   Above all, we better understand that crucial claim that he made when he said, in The Architecture of Vision , that his films were "documents, not of a completed thought, but of a thought in the making" (p. 58).

The reason behind Antonioni's idea of film as a "thought in the making" seems mainly to be emphasis on the fact that a huge dimension of filmic significance takes place in the actual process of production:   in scouting for locations, in decisions about frame and shot, in the spatial disposition of characters, in expressive implications of color, in the extemporaneities of performance and, finally, in the copious adjustments to the plans that all this thought-in-the-making entails.   Antonioni is more determined than most other directors to stress that the "meaning" of a film can only be located in the actual constructions of visual drama.   It does not exist independently of, or prior to, the labor occasioned by each detail of composition.   At the same time one must reckon with the other side of this vision of film as an enactment of thought, or the dimension captured by the Italian title of The Architecture of Vision :   "filmmaking is living to me" ( Fare un film per me è vivere ).   Only in the aesthetic process, as Schiller famously announced, does a person become truly human, truly alive.   If filmmaking is a species of thinking, then that thinking in turn is a deep unfolding of life, an essentialization of existence.   Nothing is what it is except through the form that it assumes.   Hence certain lines in the script take on a different meaning depending on whether they're spoken against the background of a wall or a street; and "a line spoken by an actor in profile doesn't have the same meaning as one given full-face" ( Architecture , p. 28).  

The same can be said about a film as a whole.   A verbal, dramatic, and visual document of a "thought in the making," it does not necessarily unravel a single, coherent story.   In Antonioni's case it is more often built out of "flashes, ideas that come forth every other moment."   That is why Antonioni speaks of his "ancient conviction"--we are only in 1940--that "to make good cinema you need virtually nothing, an image such as this one [i.e., the meteorological change upon which the first scenario, "Green Land," is based] from which more precise images germinate" (p. 2 of this volume).   A mere sensation can generate a film even though the story remains far from clear.   One day "I invented a film while looking at the sun," asserts Antonioni, "the meanness of the sun," just as he thought up Il grido by staring at a wall ( Architecture , pp. 91, 61).  

The resulting work could be considered an elaboration of a mood, feeling, or tension--the "thought" by which these are expressed.   After all, as Antonioni puts it in That Bowling , "My thoughts are almost always films" (p. 199).   When critics then ask him what he "intended to say" with a particular film, the question seems to beg the issue, making Antonioni feel that he best he can do is "respond along these lines:   'In that period, certain events happened in the world, I saw certain people, I was reading certain books, I was looking at certain paintings, I loved X, I hated Y, I didn't have any money, I wasn't sleeping much.'"   The thinking-that-is-a-film remains fused to the experience from which it arose. That is why Antonioni did not take exception to that early assessment of his cinema as "internal neorealism," for it recognized that his films were interested in the "innermost thoughts" of a character, in the subjective after-effects of a dramatic scene, in the forces that move us to act one way instead of another.   This type of cinema does not necessarily record either a meaningful story or a completed understanding, but rather a process of interpretation.   If the work is successful it will occasion a similar experience in the spectator.   "A film does not need to be understood," Antonioni believes.   "It is enough if the viewer feels it" ( Architecture , pp. 8, 25-26, 57, 168).

If much of the thought-in-the-making takes place during the process of production, other portions of it occur before, around, and outside the shooting--to begin with in the life and mind of the person making the decisions.   In the largest sense, the thought-in-the-making is embodied in collective, national, historical experience, not to mention in the ontological relationships between humans and their natural or artificial habitat (which Antonioni analyzes in the screenplay Tecnicamente dolce , not included in this volume, but published in 1976).   However much a film may aspire to convey a sense of the entirety of this thought-in-the-making, it can only articulate a part.   The rest, no doubt, will be better expressed by writing, painting, or singing; by playing, working, or loving; by musing, sitting, or simply gazing.   In fact, for Antonioni this gazing is probably the most fundamental of all cognitive activities, leading Biarese and Tassone to quote him as saying that essentially "painting and writing are developments of a gaze" ( I film di Antonioni , p. 169).   The intellection that develops from a gaze--with the instruments of art--is potentially vaster than any single film.

Many, in fact, question how successfully Antonioni's films actually communicate this developing intellect that arises from mere dwelling in the world.   So many parts of these films draw attention to quite the opposite phenomenon--the failure of human understanding, the obstacles to intuition and emotional clarity, the impenetrability of signs and things--that by the end of the films the thought in the making is all but undone. Antonioni himself confesses:   his films present "abortions of observation" more frequently than full-fledged visions.   And that lands us back in his writings, seeking explanation.   So much is unsaid in Antonioni's films that the impulse to scour his intentions is greater than it is in the case of, say, Fellini, Pasolini, or Bertolucci.   His films pose more difficulties of comprehension than theirs, often revolving around unsolvable conundrums (what happened to Anna in L'avventura ?    Why does the boy lose the use of his legs in Red Desert ?   Why does Jack Nicholson's character in The Passenger risk his life to assume the identity of a stranger?)   Not that the screenplays or writings answer these questions; but they do help us move beyond the expectation of an answer, making us recognize how many other, simpler occurrences are just as questionable.   The most abstract of Italian filmmakers, Antonioni has little regard for conventional manners of displaying character and unfolding action in cinema.   He uses methods of illumination that have more in common with poetry, painting, and music. The irony that emerges from his prose--even after erudite references to philosophers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Max Scheler--is that only the image is eloquent.   What is seen makes sense.   As it is "aborted," the flash of significance leads to a thought.   The thought develops into and by means of a film.   And the film reaffirms and recuperates the power of the image.  

Tinazzi and Di Carlo thus properly stress:   important as writing is to Antonioni, it would be a mistake to lend it more authority than the film toward which it looks. The screenplay is only a preliminary articulation of a thought that properly takes shape in film. "These are the limits of script," says the director:   "to give words to events that refuse words."   Writing a screenplay is just "describing images with provisional words, words which will no longer do" (70).   For Antonioni images are empirically and epistemologically prior.   The images are what, in the absence of a film,   the words of a script try to clarify.   And even when the film materializes, at least a film by Antonioni, the spoken words are frequently the least convincing part.   The images seem to have more autonomy and power.   Could it be that Antonioni himself is prone to the criticism he directs to Visconti's Ossessione of 1943?    The dialogues of that film appear dated after many decades, he observes, "not because they are wrong, but because they no longer fit the images" ( Architecture , p. 208).   Time wears out words quicker than anything.   Moods, situations, and moments resist their explanatory power.

The ten treatments/projects/screenplays that make up Unfinished Business span forty years between 1940 and 1980.   The essays by Giorgio Tinazzi and Carlo Di Carlo thoroughly contextualize these scripted projects, relating them not only to the other work Antonioni was engaged in at the same time, but also to their historical moments, to the films and their recurring themes.   Tinazzi analyzes the intrinsic merit of these writings one by one, while Di Carlo recounts the trajectory of Antonioni's cinematic career throughout the decades in question, detailing the fortunes of these scripts never converted to images.   After reading them and measuring them against the films with which we are familiar, it becomes clear how that conversion from word to image occurs.   What is more fascinating and challenging to the reader, however, is the opposite and apparently prior conversion--from image/experience to word, or to thinking in the absence of image.