Re-watching Antonioni's "Eclipse", after reading it, I suddenly thought of a song by The Doors, called I can't see your face in my mind, and I just listened to it. Jim Morrison's ethereal and slow singing feels like the feeling of "Eclipse" - everything is still, and there is a trace of restlessness lurking under the stillness, but everything is still silent, alienated and indifferent.
The story of "Eclipse" is very simple. A young woman named Victoria just broke up with her fiancé and has not yet stepped out of the shadow of a failed relationship, and she met Pierrot, a staff member at the stock exchange where her mother frequented. The spark of love, in the end, failed. Antonioni shot this simple story for two hours, but there is no sense of boredom in it, but the spiritual world of the people in the story is just right-why the romance failed, needless to say, the camera shows the daily life of the protagonists. Every move in the process of communication, even if it is just a tiny detail, the ending is self-evident.
The calm beginning of the film has set the tone for the entire film's image style - the camera slowly pans to the serious and silent man, the sculpture of the cone in front of the man in the foreground seems to imply inner defense, and then fights back, the heroine. Victoria appears indifferent, leaning over to play with the picture frame on the ground, close-up, one hand straightens the ornament in the middle of the empty picture frame, and then the camera returns to the face of the heroine. In the low angle shot, she looks absent and trance. After that, the two had a conversation without a word. The man wanted to keep Victoria, and Victoria responded with silence, deviance, or a few words. The two walked around in the living room, and Victoria, who refused, always kept a distance from him. In the silent living room, only the small fan on the desk was making endless noise of the fan blades turning. This interior scene paragraph is calm, even, the whole atmosphere tends to be stagnant. The characters have only a few words, and there is only the sound of the fan in the background; the two people go around, but do not make any substantive actions; the shots are very concise, often following the characters to capture their unnecessary actions completely; Things that don't make any sense to the plot development, like picture frames and strange buildings outside the windows. Everything seemed calm, and there was very little information, except for Victoria's neuroticism and her state of existence in the environment around her—isolated, aloof, and restless.
The tone of the whole film is indifferent and calm, but after explaining the heroine and ex-fiancé, the scene changes to the noisy stock exchange. There are two sets of longer sequences in the film that both take place at the stock exchange, and this is probably the most prominent and very different tone of the scene in the film, and it is also the key to the progress of the plot. The hustle and bustle of the stock exchange contrasts with the quiet monotony of the title. In the long-range shots, there are countless moving heads. The hormones inspired by capital in the stock exchange are also expressed through more split shots and people who move quickly in the shots. come out. And in that minute of silence, the long-range shots were filled with countless motionless heads, silenced again with the background sound, and then broken by the next second of noise. Victoria met clerk Pierrot through her mother at the stock exchange, but we saw that in the noisy exchange, Victoria was still isolated from others, isolated and tended to be static; while Pierrot ran forward Later, as an exchange clerk, he showed speculation, which tends to be dynamic.
Victoria seems to be out of tune with the society around her. She seems to be enclosed in her own world. Most of the time, she shows an attitude of indifference or rejection. Occasionally, she will be attracted by a strange detail of the surrounding environment, and suddenly show a burst of restlessness. . She and her friends are visiting another friend's house, far away from the other two as they sit and chat together, in the deep focus shot her friends are in the background, she is in the foreground through the screen, staring at the wall The African image on the trance. Then a shot focuses on her brooding face, then cuts to a close-up of an African tribal image on the wall, pans slowly, and cuts to a close-up of Victoria in African makeup. Just using a close-up of the African tribal photos on the wall, Victoria transitions from the static staring action to imitating the spectacle of the Africans. Such a shot shows Victoria's self-indulgence in her small world - her complex inner world. And her neuroticism needs no superfluous explanation. Later, in the outdoor scene, Victoria's living state and spiritual world in the surrounding environment are shown ingeniously and intelligently: after she teased the puppy, there was a crisp sound of metal hitting each other in her ears. In the scene shot, she was disturbed by the sound and stood up, and then she walked towards the source of the sound. In the long shot shot, there was a row of tall metal pillars extending into the distance, swaying in the wind and making a crisp sound. Victoria stood on the side of the road and looked up. With this row of huge wind chimes. The background here is empty, the sound of the loneliness of the night is more ethereal, and Victoria is small under the towering pillars, she is thoughtful, we can't understand what she is thinking, but this long-range shot conveys a kind of The artistic conception of the interaction between people and the vast world may be the loneliness and loss she lives in it.
It's not until the second half of the film that the film's apparent narrative thread emerges: Pierrot flirts with Victoria, who appears to be about to have a new relationship. However, during the whole process, Victoria was always indifferent to Pierrot's initiative, and Pierrot was not very serious at first. A person who is immersed in his own secret inner world, one who is active in the noisy stock exchange, is still and moving, will this relationship really have a happy ending? We see an exterior scene in which Pierrot and Victoria are walking down an open road. Pierrot said to her, "When we get there, I will kiss you." As the two walked across the road, Pierrot was about to kiss her, but she struggled to refuse. The wooden fence walked away, broke off a piece of wood on the fence, turned to look at Pierrot, and then a close-up of her hand: she threw the wood in her hand into a bucket, making a sound, and the water rippled. Here the camera stops at the seemingly pointless movement, and it is this small movement, this piece of driftwood that creates tiny ripples, that allows us to see Victoria's inner wave: her hesitation and her indifference. The relationship between Victoria and Pierrot is not only shown indirectly, but also directly in the film, such as a close-up showing the hands connecting the two bodies. ; Pierrot wanted to kiss Victoria again, but could only cooperate with her through the window glass to pretend to kiss. Antonioni uses a lot of silent shots to show them. The inner state of the two does not need words to show when they interact, let alone actions that have a substantive effect on the plot. Just focus the camera on the surrounding details and stay in the complete. We can get a glimpse of their emotional state from the small gestures.
At the end, of course the two didn't meet, and the promise of "see you at 8:30 tonight at the same place" was abandoned like the promise of the kiss. In a set of montages showing the passage of time, we still see the same empty street, the same horse-drawn carriage and passers-by, the same old place and buckets with floating wooden blocks, playing children, and rustling works blown by the wind. Loud trees, indifferent passers-by... Then the camera cuts back to the old place agreed by the two. When we thought that the back of the blonde woman in the camera might be Victoria, we found that she was just a passer-by. Gradually the city fell into the night, and there was no one in the place that was endowed with the promise in the aerial footage, only the pale street lamps were illuminating for whom I did not know. The static tonality of the film is expressed to the extreme in such an ending. The scenes that are assembled and have no substantive connection to show the surrounding world seem to be extremely boring, but it is the daily space that these shots show, such as the empty streets before. The row of pillars on the top, the driftwood in the bucket, and the boring trivial actions of the protagonist reveal the illusoryness of the character's inner state and emotion. Seemingly meaningless spaces, objects and actions are endowed with phenomenological meanings. The title of the film is "eclipse", which may indicate "emptiness" and "nothingness". In the film, a large number of seemingly meaningless things are presented along with the overall silence, which not only outlines the characters' living space, but also It reflects the inner world of the characters - an alienated void.
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