space takes the place of characters as protagonists.
Here's a comparison of the similarities and differences between empty shot assembly and juggling montage.
There are also shot expressions similar to the end of "Eclipse", which are not necessarily completely empty shots. For example, it is Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Miracle" and the beginning of "Amelie", which is
somewhat similar to a sideshow montage, but has a decisive difference. Empty shots are combined to express ambiguous meanings, allowing a variety of interpretations. And vaudeville montages have a clear purpose, such as the fourth paragraph of Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin", the Odessa stairs. Through the fall of the stroller, the close-up of the woman's terrified face, the expulsion and suppression of the tsarist army and a series of highly contagious scenes, the sympathy for the lower class and the unstoppable indignation and resistance to the tsarist rule are very clearly expressed.
And at the end of the film "Strike" (1925), the scenes of shooting striking workers and the slaughtering of cattle in the slaughterhouse alternate, forming a classic metaphor for "people's slaughterhouse".
The juggling montage expresses the meaning extremely clearly. The assembly of empty shots does not set a clear meaning in advance.
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Talk a little more:
Cai Mingliang's "Long Live Love" ends with Yang Guimei's six-minute cry, a long still shot.
Antonioni's "Eclipse" ends with a seven-minute empty sequence.
The two endings express similarities.
All of them are the delicate exploration and expression of certain emotions of human beings, specifically, urban people.
But if you look closely, you will find that the two are actually not the same.
Yang Guimei's six-minute cry expresses more of the lack of a sense of belonging of a small individual in a modern city, which is rootless. And the unattainable love.
Antonioni is more inclined to express the emptiness and boredom of the middle class and the unavailability of communication between people, which is closer to the existentialist view that others are hell. In "Adventures", the male protagonist is so bored that he knocks over someone's ink bottle.
In "Night", Vitti said, "Whenever I try to communicate, love disappears."
The characters in Cai Mingliang's films lack a sense of belonging, and love is unobtainable. One word to express is "loneliness". And Antonioni's film characters are the empty and boring mental state of the middle class. In "Adventures", they are boring and boring. In "Eclipse", the expressions of the characters are numb and dazed. Close to "empty".
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