Random musings on frames, images, reflections, and impediments

It often saddens me that we interpret every little movement and action as symbolic. Therefore, we assume that the director did this to "tell something", saying that Vittoria did not play with the frame for her own inner motives (the motives of Vittoria, the character) but she was just a tool in the hand of Antonioni who wanted to tell something, symbolize something, instead of letting his character live.

I'd rather have a director, like Godard, being honest when he wants to tell/show an idea: text, actor speaking to audience, imagery - or Tarkovsky in a poetic manner .... than a director hiding "symbolism" inside seemingly normal actions.


For me, Vittoria played with the frame and the little sculpture because she was thinking a lot, and people tend to play with their hands and all when they think.

But Antonioni is supposed to use symbols all the time ... i guess, i just dont want to see it. It's too obvious.


I dont like the idea of think about a director planning : " ok Monica, you'll walk to there and look that way and all, not because that's what a normal person would do in the scene, but because it will show my audience my clever ideas and concepts and symbols ... "

That's what I would do, and i'd like to think that antonioni is better than me :)

Godard : Antonioni = Apples : Oranges

Both Godard and Antonioni are amazing, but for different reasons. Yes, Godard's work is more extroverted, but Antonioni's resume is more mysterious.

Antonioni DOES convey more through his cinematography. Now, I don't necessarily agree that he has symbolism behind every little thing displayed, but one cannot deny some of the more obvious things - like the glass in between the kiss. This film is about alienation and disconnection; Vittoria (Vitti) is not representing a 'normal person', she is a person that is inundated by the stark modernity of her environment: this alienation. So she feels around the room, touching various things trying to feel a connection to something, because she's not getting it from the people in her life. Those people are ruled by something else: mostly money.

Well Antonioni isn't for everyone, but that is also true of Godard. I love both. I love Antinioni for his extraordinary aesthetics, and Godard for his amusing characters and experimental quirks.

p h u c k a b e e s !

You're right to notice these things.

Vittoria touches almost every inanimate object she encounters. She seems almost obsessed with doing so.
It's as if she prefers them to real people...

“What can I say? There are days when a piece of cloth, a needle, a book, a man are the same thing.”

Throughout the film the inanimate and the animate often trade places: people are framed in doorways like pictures and the photo in Mata's flat at first seems real; electric fans in apartments blow like the wind through wastelands; poles become trees and animals become furniture; a fossil is hung on a wall as art...people are 'fossilised' in photographs...

Materialism, modernism, money-markets, mothers, men, malaise...Monica!...mmm...a mesmerising meander through Michelangelo's mordant magazine spread mausoleum. More please.