Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

From the Air 205
ernist perception on all things private and public, quite distinct from
Antonioni’s cinema as it will become more persistently recognizable in the years
to come. The film’s realist claims – the regional elements of everyday life that it
documents – are repeatedly suspended, like its narrative, in motions of externalization
and dissolution, amplifying the identification of the landscape with the
space of cinematic representation as such. The gray expanse of the river – ‘flat as
asphalt,’ the voice-over observes – that fills the frame repeatedly, opaquely; the
graphic division of light and shade on a wall under the opening credits; the
Metaphysical premonition of the empty provincial piazza bordered by arcades
whose perspectival suggestion is blotted by the bright light and sharp contrasts;
the high-angle shots of the barge filling the frame bottom to top, with depth and
the view itself effaced by smoke as the camera tilts up (fig. 9-10) – these turn attention
to the grasp of the landscape as cinematic image in process of being
drained. These are not Neorealism’s consoling, reconstructive gestures. The linear
movement of the river towards the Adriatic and the final view of the marine
horizon themselves seem fashioned as cinematographic entities to correspond
to the modernist sensibility confronting them, reciprocating this movement of
dissolution, emptying-out. Like the aerial photograph of Antonioni’s early essay
that emptied the landscape of traditional connotations and narrative anecdote,
so in the closing images of Gente del Po the landscape, like the film itself,
is vacated. Yet the profilmic is not subjugated here to an encompassing figure
except under the sign of mutability, change: the tentative voice of a modernist
cinematic consciousness exploring the spaces that open up in-between realist
codes and the contingency of the everyday. 33
In describing this particular position vis-à-vis Neorealist cinema, we might
now recall that of all the major filmmakers to emerge in this period leading to
the great flowering of Italy’s post-war film culture, Antonioni is the only one to
dwell so rigorously on the documentary. Rather than simply appealing to
quasi-documentary means of articulation (actual locations, non-professional
actors, etc.) in the service of Neorealist narrative or historical reconstruction, we
see him preoccupied with distilling cinematic form from the profilmic subject
at hand. It may be that a documentary consciousness sharpened his sense of
taking nothing for granted, taking nothing as settled and coded, realist or otherwise,
in the face of post-war contingency that was so amplified by the sharp
shifts in power and ideology, the disappearance of people, and the transformation
of the landscape itself over the course of the war. The post-war Neorealist
agenda – harnessed as it was to the urgent restoration and reconstruction of Italy’s
image to itself – would avoid, at least for a while, a rigorous exploration
of cinematic modes that would disrupt its consoling sense of humanist certainty
and continuity, avoiding a full-fledged confrontation with a modernist
consciousness as well as with the documentary form as such. Antonioni, in-