(7 of 10)
Taste Minus Variation. Michelangelo Antonioni, 49, is the temperamental antithesis of Fellini—a sensitive esthete who could hardly make an error of taste if he tried. He has done only three pictures (L'Avventura, La Notte, Eclipse) that really matter, but they matter a lot; any one of them would suffice to establish him as one of the finest stylists in the history of cinema. His style is slow and spacious. His scenes begin a little while before they begin and end a little while after they end.
His camera usually sits still, and his actors move like figures in a funeral procession—as indeed they are. Each of Antonioni's films is a somber and ceremonious wake for the living dead. His characters have lost all sense of the meaning of life, of the reason for being. They wander through a weary series of loveless loves, hoping vaguely that mere amorous friction will rekindle the fire of life in hearts gone cold.
The theme is a great and timely one, and Antonioni states it in grave and noble measures. The trouble is that he states it again and again and again. He seems to have nothing else to say. If that's a fact, the eclipse he envisions may very well be his own.
In the work of all the important new Italians, and no less in the films of the rising young Frenchmen, the attitudes toward sex have much agitated the critics. There are several attitudes, none of them new and most of them sick but all of them more serious and significant than Hollywood's. In Hollywood movies, sex is a daydream for people who are scared of the real thing. In the new French movies, sex is a sort of physiological religion, a mystical experience almost as profound as, well, eating. In the new Italian movies, sex is what one feels bad after, as good a way as any to get lost. In any case, people in the new European movies do not moon around like people in Hollywood movies and wonder what sex is like. If they want to do it they do it, and in some films they do it pretty often. But when they have done it they forget about it till the next time. Sex is explicit in the new European pictures and often it is exploited. But at least it is real.
Angry Young Tony. Men like the French and Italian directors simply assume that cinema is an important art in its own right. Most British moviemen are not so sure; British movies are traditionally regarded as subsidiary to drama and to literature. Most of the new British movies have in fact been adapted from plays and novels, and the new cinema in England has rather tamely taken its direction from the in-group in the allied arts. But since the in-group happened to be the Angry Young Men, the direction has been vehemently taken. Politically the direction has been left; geographically it has been north. Almost all the good British movies of the last five years have been films of social protest, and in general the protest has been leveled at living conditions in the industrial slums of Yorkshire.
Director Jack Clayton instituted the trend with a cruel little monograph on class warfare called Room at the Top (1958), but before long an angrier and younger man moved in on the movement and pretty well took it over. In rapid succession Tony Richardson directed Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, A Taste of Honey, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.