‘L’Eclisse’ or — BOOM!?

Vittoria (Monica Vitti) breaks-up with her fiancé. She walks through Rome’s EUR district to the stock exchange to meet her mother where she encounters Piero (Alain Delon), her mother’s stock broker. Italy’s economic miracle is imploding and everyone is losing money. The systems still continue.

Vittoria and Piero slowly connect leaving us to wonder if they might get together, although ‘L’Eclisse’ (1962) is an Michelangelo Antonioni movie so no, of course they’re not going to get together.

From the start Antonioni invites us to pay close attention to what we’re seeing, especially in terms of gestures and the spaces within which they dwell. At first they’re small and almost static — the reflection of one leg against another, the tilt of a head — yet by the time we reach the stock exchange they’re a furious flurry so quick we can barely follow them as information is exchanged in the jostling motion of independent units.

Piero moves fast (“You never stay still” Vittoria tells him). Vittoria is stalked by the spectre of mushroom clouds (the water tower; her lamp) and colonialism. Electric fans continually attempt to cool everything down (is the Cold War is heating up?). There’s the sense of an obliterating force in the city — was that a streetlight flickering to life or the flash of detonation?

Like a neutron bomb Antonioni depopulates his cityscapes, removing the people yet leaving the buildings intact. This highlights and emphasises what solitary human movement remains along with material, shape, light and space.

In contrast the stock exchange scenes are a mass of bodies. It’s a bio-mechanical system Antonioni concentrates on with a captivating focus and what results are some of his most dynamic sequences, especially in terms of sound. At one point the stock exchange suddenly holds a minute’s silence for a deceased broker and this abrupt evacuation of noise heightens our awareness of the architectural dimensions. Yet even a void contains ripples and fluctuations, and systems (including those in the sky above our heads) must inevitably exert themselves which is why the phones keep ringing.

When Vittoria and Piero finally connect it’s surprisingly playful but we’re acutely aware any lasting bonding is impossible, not from anything they say to each other but by the geometrical arrangement of the objects and invisible barriers within their fields of existence.

A meeting is arranged. In its place is a devastating annihilation. There is a thundering silence. The city remains.

Antonioni’s films can appear overly cerebral and intellectual, but that’s not how they function — you don’t think these films but experience them, like flying into a cloud. And what’s the film’s point? Watch the last six minutes of ‘L’Eclisse’ and ask yourself how it makes you feel? Then ask how would you describe that feeling? Ineffable? That, right there, is the point.