A Film Canon

The culmination of Antonioni's classical neorealist period, The Outcry represents the movement's most concise depiction of the Po Delta as an 'any-space-whatever', supplementing the misty bleakness of Paisan and Obsession with an abrasive, uncanny technological presence that contributes to the post-human co-ordinates of the final scene, and finds its logical spectacle in the government expropriation of peasant land for a new airport. Despite concluding with an invocation of Rossellini's vertiginous descents, this effectively translates vertigo into a horizontal register, as the insatiable wandering of the characters around whom the romantic drama revolves opens up an unprecedented combination of on-location shooting and depth-of-field, as if the only thing preventing previous neorealist protagonists from stretching the capacities of the cinematic eye were the descrated, labyrinthine cityscapes within which they found themselves bounded. This is enhanced by the use of high horizons, and necessitates a recurrent, queasy, 180-degree horizontal pan, both of which tend to centre on the erratic, unexpected movements of the protagonist's daughter. That said, the child feels like an increasingly inadequate cipher for this emergent, agoraphobic disorientation, gesturing towards the disappearance at the heart of The Adventure, and precluding the exquisite sentimentality of previous neorealists.