3 - L'eclisse (1962)

Summary

From the very first scene of L'eclisse, we know that we are in the presence of something even subtler and more narratively experimental than the films discussed thus far. Antonioni throws the viewer into the story, such as it is, in medias res, amid expressive but opaque silences and sighs. It is dawn, that Yeatsian border territory that traditionally gives access to truth, or what's left of it, precisely where Antonioni's previous picture, La notte, has ended.

It is clearly the aftermath of something; there is a heavy residue of tense feeling that thickens and darkens the atmosphere, but no explanation. This masterful ability to create intimate emotional texture, elicited and described purely through suggestion, and through absence more than presence, is one of Antonioni's great gifts. Here, it signals that this film will be more elliptical, less driven by plot and clear causality than his earlier films, though even there these were already in short supply. In this initial scene, says Sam Rohdie,

the camera … wanders through the room finding images which are variously imponderable, decentred, displaced, upsetting notions of centre, of subject, or object; what fascinates is the movement, the oscillations, the changes, all of which presuppose a refusal to fix anything in the narrative, or in the image, quite against the usual practices and satisfactions of a cinema aimed at fullness and centre.