[in]Transition

This audiovisual essay offers an original angle into the analysis of Michelangelo Antonioni’s great work of the early 1960s, and specifically L’avventura (1960). Although the connection between this filmmaker and modes of architecture has often been indicated by commentators, this video analysis seizes on the particular documentation by the architect Dante Bini (including a clip of him giving a lecture) of his design of the filmmaker’s holiday home “La Cupola” in Sardinia at the end of the 1960s. The video maker has photographed views of this home in its environment, and also assembles other photographic documentation of its interior.

Relating this fascinating case to various Heideggerian theories of architecture, the video then moves to an analysis of several scenes from L’avventura, making excellent points about the relations of its characters to philosophies of place, site, dwelling and home. The notoriously vague “alienation” or “existential malaise” too often said to characterise the director’s work is here given a more concrete grounding in the urban modernity that swept Italy in the 1950s, and its stark difference from the home that Antonioni had designed and built for himself and partner Monica Vitti.

Speaking on an overarching methodological-critical plane, I would say that his video requires us to suspend two doubts: 1. Can a director’s personal “taste” (in this case, in architecture, but why not also in dress or food or sex?) be entirely equated with the aesthetic and meaning of their work? 2. Should we mainly look at and appreciate Antonioni’s films through the lens of their fictional characters, and what they are supposedly thinking and feeling at any given screen moment?

Elaborate arguments could be mounted about (and against) both these underlying premises of the audiovisual essay, but La Cupola was persuasive enough for me to suspend my misgivings and “go with the flow.” It is an enjoyable, engaging, eye-opening piece (it prompted me to read many online articles on the house in question!). I particularly appreciated the scene-analysis section, once the introduction had been set-up.

In its format, the video veers a little uneasily and uncertainly between straight documentary, a “short illustrated lecture” (of the type common in academic conferences today), and a tighter, more compact audiovisual essay. The contributor’s revisions to the initial draft of the video have largely addressed these issues, thereby moving the final result closer to a truly audiovisual form. Bravo!

“La Cupola” (“The Dome”) constitutes an original contribution to the vast literature on the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, on account of how it draws on a little-known episode from the director’s biography — namely, his commission for a villa in Sardinia to architect Dante Bini at the beginning of the 1970s, around the time of Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1972) — and how it discusses alienation, the most archetypal critical topos on Antonioni, in light of it. The video includes an excerpt of a lecture by Bini, in which he explains Antonioni’s vision for the building and, in particular, his desire for a house that would not act as a barrier occluding the environment but, rather, as a conduit for its sounds, scents, and materiality. Drawing on Christian Norberg-Schulz, then, Spence suggests that Antonioni’s architectural vision helps explain the relationship between the characters in his films and the environments in which they exist. Spence elects to comment in particular on L’avventura (1960), on account of the similarities between the ragged nature of Lisca Bianca, the Aeolian island setting of Anna’s (Lea Massari) disappearance, and the panorama of Costa Paradiso in Sardinia.

While the established understanding of Antonioni’s characters is not overturned by Spence’s reading, the essay is helpful for how it further contextualises it, drawing on new evidence of the director’s sensitivity towards the environment and interest in architecture in relation to the concept of dwelling. The video is particularly helpful in its exploration of the forms of the villa and the qualities of the landscape in which it is immersed, through a haptic camera and its work on the soundtrack. The textual analysis of sequences of L’avventura, then, digs deeper into Antonioni’s filmic discourse on the relationship between the natural and the built environments, and the positioning of characters in-between them.

Spence places less emphasis on how the formal qualities of Bini’s villa may be said to rhyme with Antonioni’s cinema. Bini’s special construction technique (known as “Binishell”) used to produce thin domes of reinforced concrete was part of the broader effort to devise new standardized and prefab building methods that characterized the 1950s–60s — as such, it is not a far cry from the development of Borgo Schisina, the ghost Sicilian village visited by Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and Claudia (Monica Vitti) in one of the most striking sequences of L’avventura, and on which Spence lingers as an example of modernist alienation. In truth, the design of Borgo Schisina had merit, as Antonioni’s shots clearly demonstrate; if it did not work out, it was for a range of reasons and not just for the presumed failure of what Spence calls a “technocratic architecture” to understand place. The vacated, decayed cement of villa Antonioni in Sardinia raises today as many questions on architectural forms, materials, methods and functions as the abandoned Sicilian village in his film.

What remains to think about, perhaps, is how the dome of La Cupola itself finds an echo in L’avventura, and not just in the shot of the cupolone, the iconic dome of St. Peter’s Basilica clearly visible at the start of the film. It is striking how many of L’avventura shots explored in the video include arches that frame the characters both in interiors and exteriors – including in sequences that Spence reads in terms of a “beneficial presence” of nature, such as the arch of the bridge on the River Tiber that is visible from Anna’s balcony. What these images might confirm, then, is that architectural form consists in the imagination of the bond between humans and the world, rather than equating with the overbearing, alienating built environment that separates them from the world. Perhaps, then, the oculus that is visible in Spence’s shots of La Cupola did not just ensure that rain would continue to fall on Antonioni’s head once he entered his house – as, according to the architect, the director wanted – but also connected the dwellers to the cosmos, just like the oculus of another famous cupola of Rome, the coffered concrete dome of the Pantheon, was designed to do.

By providing us with a fresh view of Antonioni’s understanding of architecture, then, this video essay offers us new opportunities to rethink a cinema that today continues to interrogate the problem of dwelling, perhaps more so than that of alienation.