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L’Avventura (1961)
Michelangelo Antonioni
I cannot forget the time I was on a train winding through the low, old
mountains between F and S—the dark, green carpet passing slowly by
when out of nowhere, down below, almost within reach, was some kind of
ruin—and now I can see what used to be a swimming pool. The pool had
long since dried up. An empty square. Dusty white stone. Victorious
jungle into all the four sides. It was only a matter of time. The last
remnant of what must have been. A once great mansion, now left behind.
Oh, but to imagine the days. And nights. The parties. What must have
been. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald. The dried-up swimming pool had and
always has a particularly strange quality, which along with its remote
isolation, evoked in me a kind of melancholy and sense of time lost,
which I do not claim to understand. Did you know in the palace in
Monaco, they used to have lions and tigers just wandering around the
royal garden? Can you imagine?
But this wasn’t the only time. A while ago a girlfriend of mine and I went
to this tiny old town in actual Mexico. We found this big hotel, which was
clearly much larger than it had needed to be for who knows how long.
And that’s just it. There were entire floors, whose only reason for being
there now was that they were there before. There was even a giant,
mirrored ballroom with a huge carpet rolled up against the wall covered in
dust. On the top level, there was this room with sliding glass doors to a
patio balcony all around. The room was the size for one bar, but there
were two, separate bars. Underneath cabinet doors flayed open, each with
a tangle of pipes and metal like the inside of an exploded tank. There was
so much dust.
What I had felt on both these occasions was the spirit of “what once was.”
It most often visits us through architecture, but it could also come as just a
word or thought, a certain lost gesture—a stamp even. Some call it “The
Gold Room” as in “Hi, Lloyd. Been away but now I’m back.” It is in
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