L'Eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni's last entry in his "ennui trilogy" is perhaps his best directed effort in the group. It contains the fullest exemplification of his "follow-cam."

I will draw a comparison between video-game camera angles, and Antonioni's cinematic technique, likely causing the entirety of the cinematic intelligentsia to furiously roll in their graves. Nevertheless, I think the point relevant.

In a third-person video game, the camera hovers behind the protagonist. There is a very obvious, fundamentally practical reason for this - as players controlling the on-screen character, we need to see the environment ahead. If the camera showed us the protagonist's face, we would not get a proper view of the video game world, incapacitating our ability to travel within it.

The concept of 'traveling' is key here, because characters in an Antonioni film do just that: they travel. Therefore, the movie camera acts like the video game camera described above - it hovers behind the characters, and so shows us where they are going. This makes viewers powerfully aware of the characters' surroundings.

When Monica Vitti, who plays Vittoria, walks past streets and parks, our focus is almost exclusively on the scenery about her - we often cannot see her expression, so she does not hold as much presence. This is quite effective in consideration of the film's thematic and narrative goals - as Vittoria tries to search for meaning in the environment that she inhabits, we are witness to the process of her search. Indeed, we search alongside her. She looks and gazes at her milieu, and we do so as well, thanks to the camera work, which points out attention outward, rather than inwards, towards Vittoria herself. If we identify with the protagonist of L'Eclisse, it is because Antonioni includes us in the actions of his main character.

But the film's cinematic wonder also lies at the level of staging - there is a unique, exciting, and constant interplay between background and foreground. This is particularly noticeable in the long stock market sequences, but can also be found during the street scenes. Vittoria, and her lover, Piero (an energetic Alain Delon), at times seem to disappear behind the onrush of people. Yet they resurface, time and again, from the mass of pedestrians and brokers, to regain their center stage amidst the camera-frame.

This could be read several ways - the characters are either being consumed by society, detaching themselves from society, or both.

It is as if the two protagonists are in danger of being suffocated by people, and to survive, they have to leave elsewhere, where they can emerge as individuals. This might explain why their growing affection for each other blooms while they are alone - most all the scenes of them together, supposedly in love, occur while they are in solitude.

Following this theory, we arrive at the ending. If Piero and Vittoria have been trying to leave the grasp of the masses, the conclusion marks their defeat, for we no longer see them, the individuals, but the coming and going of the random people that have been threatening to destroy them all along.

That said, though the above may be a true reading for Vittoria, it may not be so much for Piero, for he does not seem that eager to depart from society's sway - in fact, he's very much a willful participant of the culture he inhabits. He even says that he enjoys his job and place in the world. It is Vittoria who is dissatisfied, and who most clearly wants to leave everything, and discover some sort of new meaning through which to re-define herself.

This changes our previous thematic construct. In this second reading, Vittoria is trying to leave the grasp of the masses, and Piero is the man who drags her down.

It is clear that she does not agree with his incredibly materialistic perspective - when a drunk man steals, and then crashes, his car, he worries more for the car, than for the dead man, and she is evidently disgusted by this. They have two completely differing ideologies. But Vittoria tags along with Piero anyhow - maybe she is giving up her search for greater self-definition.

In that case, the ending marks only her defeat.

She has been trying to make herself into a discernible individual. But in the end, we see, not her, but a plurality of unknown people. Society has taken over the movie. The individual has been lost in the tumult.