Impure Pictoriality: The Matter of Painting

This chapter considers how the trope of cinematic purity attached to Antonioni’s 1960s films is intertwined with another persistent critical trope: that he approaches cinema like a painter. Yet, this chapter argue that despite still dominant paradigms of pictorial purity, Antonioni approached painting not only as a concrete, material activity in which he himself was engaged, but also as a category that, around the mid-twentieth century, was itself in profound transformation and often ostentatiously ‘impure’. Impure pictoriality provided Antonioni with the conceptual means to renew, rather than purify, cinema, through an exchange with a form already contaminated by cinema and other forms of mass media culture.

The ‘Image-World’ and the Reality of Photography

This chapter considers Antonioni’s thematisation of photography in and beyond Blow-Up (1966), in the context of the postwar proliferation of media images and image culture. It argues that if photography and what Vilém Flusser more broadly terms ‘technical images’ affect Antonioni’s cinema, his cinema in turn also demonstrates a commitment to reflect on such proliferation, and engage film, as itself a medium of technical images, in a self-critique of the role of the image in mass media culture.

Introduction: Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity

The introduction addresses the ‘modernity’ of Antonioni’s 1960s films in the context of the proliferation of the mass image in postwar culture on the one hand, and aesthetic and art-historical debates about medium specificity, and ‘purity’, on the other.

Uncinematic Provocations and the Pursuit of Boredom

This chapter explores how Antonioni’s persistent engagement with still photography throughout his films, and his 1960s films in particular, produces a distinctive aesthetics. This is an aesthetics which is provocatively uncinematic. The chapter considers how photography and its characteristic stillness are implicated in an intermedial re-articulation of the cinematic image through which means – or, in fact, media – usually called upon to alleviate boredom are harnessed to make boredom manifest aesthetically, and even to encourage its production during consumption of the work as a form of resistance and critique.

(Quietly) Noisy Images: Sonic Landscapes, Audiotape and ‘the New Musicality’

This chapter explores the relation between sound and image in Antonioni’s films of the 1960s. It considers how the ostensibly quieter films of the 1960s – in which dialogue becomes sparser and from which extra-diegetic musical soundtrack is all but eliminated – have crucial affinity with contemporaneous transformations in music itself, where the diffusion of new mass media technologies such as audiotape and television, acted as powerful catalysts for experimentation with noise and attention to soundscape. In particular, I trace here a connection with the experimental practices of John Cage, musique concrète, and composers including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono associated with RAI Studio di fonologia musicale.

Performing the Mind: Interiority, Television and Artificial Brains

This chapter addresses the perceived turn to ‘interiority’ in Antonioni’s cinema during the course of the 1960s, often described as an ‘interior neorealism’ or a quintessentially psychological cinema. Such turn, often associated with a breakdown of narrativity and a changed temporal economy, is generally enlisted as another factor fostering increased cinematic purity. Yet I consider how it can be better understood by examining its entanglement with the diffusion of television. In the wake of its mass diffusion in the 1950s, this new medium, transmitting an externally generated ‘flow’ of images inside the home, gave rise to new temporal and viewing economies, as well as preoccupations about its effects on viewers’ interiority: their minds. Starting with a discussion of L’avventura and La notte, this chapter considers how the new temporal aesthetics of Antonioni’s cinema may be both a consequence of and a reaction to the televisual. The discussion then concludes with Il deserto rosso to address how television’s dynamics of interiority and exteriority are in turn connected with the then-emerging fields of cybernetics and early computers, with which Antonioni, like other ‘moderns’, was fascinated.