After "Red Desert" (1964), Antonioni left Italy and made two English-language films: "Zoom" in the UK in 1966 and "Zabriskie Point" in the United States in 1970. What is intriguing is that Antonioni "moves" without changing his original intention. The focus of artistic analysis is still on the living conditions of modern people and their spiritual variations. As far as the style of visual expression is concerned, these two English-language films have made a fantastic connection between the material reality and the spiritual surreal, combining him in the "Modern Women's Trilogy" ("Adventures", "Night") , "Eclipse"), the visual storytelling style with rich inner psychological tension developed into a new realm.
Originally, Antonioni used the United Kingdom and the United States as new "posts" for his artistic pursuits, embodying his yearning and enthusiasm for the "new world" outside of Italy. However, as a result of searching up and down, he fell into a deeper despair for modern material civilization. People can see what a cold and fiery criticism and contemplation Antonioni gave to the spiritual loneliness, imbalance and sadness of the ubiquitous modern people in the Western world!
If we say that "Zoom" is a pessimistic questioning of the truth and falsehood of modern life (with the "enlargement" of a photo of a lover's tryst secretly photographed in the park by the young photographer Thomas, and the "enlargement" of this "enlarged" photo The fruitless search for its true meaning), is also the disillusionment of Antonioni's "British Dream"; then, "Zabriskie Point" is a kind of stigma on the ultra-leftist ideology of the late 1960s. The tragic reflection of the new culture is also the disillusionment of the Antonioni-style "American Dream". This "new culture", according to Western scholars, was clearly influenced by the ideological trend of the Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution, such as the "May Storm" that took place in universities in France in 1968, as described by Antonioni at the beginning of this film Student protests, political demonstrations, and bloody police crackdowns on students on American college campuses.
As a modern narrative, Antonioni eschews the objective record of the American student movement, but only uses the political debate and revolutionary commotion on the Columbia campus as a cultural background, from the figurative level of this reality to the surreal quickly Spiritual aspect: Mark and Dalia, leave the violent city (one drives a stolen plane, the other drives an old Ford) and go to the wasteland (i.e. the "Garden of Eden" uncontaminated by modern civilization). This pair of modern Adam and Eve, in this inaccessible wasteland, performed a short-lived love ritual. In a substantial sense, it is more like a game of death fighting against life. The ending of the film is an inescapable tragedy. Mark was shot and killed by the police at the Los Angeles airport when he was returning the stolen plane to the city; after Dalia heard the news, he could only complete the protest against the capital world in an illusion. Break - the Phoenix villa, a symbol of capital ambition and modern industrial civilization, was finally blown up under her hateful gaze (in fact, the villa still stands majestically among the rocky cliffs). As American film scholar Ned Rifkin has analyzed: "In Zabriskie Point, Antonioni conceives the entire film as a metaphor, or, perhaps more precisely, a death and life The allegory of the struggle." Here, it may be added that Antonioni is sincere after all, and his conclusions must also be pessimistic. The profoundness of the connotation of this fable is precisely reflected in the fact that it is not life that overcomes death, but death that overcomes life; or it can also be read that life will eventually surpass death and regenerate.
It is worth noting that in Antonioni's films, fact, reality and illusion are often intertwined, which has become his unique visual narrative method for examining and grasping the real world. He has never been a film director in the strict sense, but rather a modern film poet who observes quietly and is good at capturing and enhancing poetic imagery from reality. He once explained it this way: "The birth of film is like the birth of poetry in the mind of the poet. Words, images, concepts, self-emerge in the poet's mind, they all merge together, and the result is the birth of a poem I am convinced that the same is true for movies." In the film "Zabriskie Point", the existential plight of modern people and its tragic poetry are mainly reflected by two sets of visual modeling: the One, the fanatical and pale love in the "Garden of Eden". The place where Mark and Daria met in the desert, the street sign marked the place name: Zabriskie Point. A few lines of small characters are also written below: "There were many lakes in this area in ancient times, and they had already dried up 5 million to 10 million years ago." The vision: the whole valley is full of pairs of lovers, their naked colors almost blend with the pale yellow of the desert, showing a kind of primitive lust and vitality. But in an instant, everything disappeared without a trace. What was Antonioni trying to tell people? The return to the Garden of Eden simultaneously becomes the denial of the Garden of Eden.
Second, the destruction of the Phoenix (original meaning Phoenix) villa in the hallucination. A loud explosion sounded, accompanied by a sky-high fire. The explosion was repeated 13 times, and the "slow motion" shot with the upgrade emphatically revealed that this capital world, which erodes humanity, will eventually go to destruction (or will be reborn in the fire of destruction like "phoenix nirvana"). Dalia's hatred for this building, which symbolizes the capital world, echoes the passionate political debates and revolutionary emotions of the college students at the beginning of the film, forming an artistic echo of end to end. What Antonioni wants to tell people is obviously A modern ambiguity is realized in this visual form of intertwined reality and surreal. American film scholar Stanley Solomon commented on this: "The accumulation of excellent shots of the explosion debris creates a very rich image: from the personal distressing scene of a girl to a panorama of the disintegration of a world of material pleasures." Germany In his book History of World Cinema (since 1960), the famous film historian Ulrich Gregor remarked: "What is more fascinating is the ending of the film, where the explosion of the villa is repeated in slow motion; the American All the components of the dream seem to revolve in the hallucination of a falling world."
It is true that some critics with unique academic insights have also pointed out the "narrowness" of Antonioni's subject matter and the limitations of his "high and low" in the use of film visual language. These problems cannot be ignored, but also need to be analyzed in detail. If the subject matter is narrow, it refers to his films. Except for "The Shouting" (1957), which deals with the lives of workers, almost all of them describe the emotional or spiritual anxiety of people in the middle and upper classes, which constitutes Antonioni's narrative foundation. exclusive imprint. Antonioni was born in Fejar, northern Italy, in 1912, to a family belonging to the upper middle class. He once confessed to himself: "The social background of the middle class I was born in and grew up in is the most important thing that made me a director. Important experience. It was that world that largely determined my preference for certain themes, certain issues, certain emotional and psychological conflicts." Antonioni's art world features prominently with such middle-class figures The unique indifference, fragility and neuroticism (such as the female characters with different names played by Monica Vitti, probably are), which not only presents his unrepeatable style characteristics, but also exposes his relative artistic vision. relatively cramped weakness. As for his paranoia in the expression of the visual language of the film, he has undoubtedly lost many audiences, and it is obviously not worth blindly imitating.
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