A Film Canon

This extraordinary film collapses aesthetic, feminine and sexual pleasure into the provision of a surrogate body, ostensibly to provide a surface for the bourgeois need for 'rest' that opens the narrative, but actually to take on the burden of 'rest' itself; that is, to provide a rest from rest, replacing relaxation with self-annihilation, and opening up a world without surfaces, or in which everything has become a surface. To this end, Antonioni draws a common denominator between the various beds occupied by the protagonist, and the volcanic island where she disappears, condensing the latter to a mere, vaporous concatenation of sea, land and sky - a vertigo of frozen waves and molten water - and the former to the most exquisite instance of the film's attempt to reformulate the experience of submergence in the absence of a surface. Just as this combines an exquisite topographical sensibility with complete spatial indeterminacy, so Antonioni's extension of this burden of 'rest' to cinematic pleasure imbues time with the camera's own tendency to simultaneously objectify and subjectify, most iconically in his tendency to linger before and after scenes seem to have exhausted their narrative purpose, but most beautifully in his condensation of the general theory of relativity, and its most famous thought-experiment, into an attempt to shoot the same passage of time from a train and platform; a process that opens up the film's most striking curvature of space-time, in which the central bourgeois couple float between working-class action and pure cinematic spectacle, queasily enduring the slick of pure affect that culminates Rossellini's purgatorial, post-neorealist vision of the Italian sea and volcanic coastline, if only by reducing its Christian Humanist overtones to the slightest, barely hopeful fusion of church bells and radio waves, or whatever they might leave in their current, or wake: "I don't know why, but I hate all comparisons involving oil."