2 - La notte (1961)

Summary

Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.

–Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Compared with the relative spaciousness of L'avventura, La notte, all of which takes place in less than twenty-four hours in and about Milan, promotes an Aristotelian intensity of place, time, and action that gives each tiny gesture of its characters, each minute alteration in its story, immense incremental value. Unlike the earlier film, it has a minimal plot that is easy to follow, as are the motivations of its characters, who are troubled, certainly, but who remain relatively clear-cut and stable. Identities seem less fluid here than in L'avventura, and, although curious camera angles continue to be used, the film is somewhat less formally experimental and contains a great deal less in the way of unconventional ellipses and cuts. Yet Antonioni's reliance on striking visual images, spatial juxtapositions, emotional suggestion and nuance, ambient noises, and formal qualities of line, shape, and texture – rather than on the traditional resources of narrative – continues.

Dialogue is also much more significant in this film. In L'avventura, dialogue was so sparse as to be merely one more signifying element, on a par with ambient noise, music, and visual imagery, rather than occupying its normally dominant position. In La notte, there is a barrage of it, as if, having been so painfully reticent in L'avventura, the medium itself has to burst forth, using all of its resources.