The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Michelangelo Antonioni · a film · 1962 · about 126 minutes · written with Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini and Ottiero Ottieri · in Italian
Mode
A love story that withdraws its lovers; social portrait, economic film and study of a city in one
Mythos
The eclipse: light withdrawn and the world seen while its source is covered; the appointment missed, declined as fate
Phase
A short span in Rome: a dawn that ends four years, days at the Borsa and in EUR, a flight to Verona, a crash and a courtship, and one dusk at a crossing
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 126 minutes; Gianni Di Venanzo’s photography, Eraldo Da Roma’s cutting, Giovanni Fusco’s score and a twist sung by Mina over the titles; an Italian and French production
Register
From the roar of open outcry to minutes of silence among objects; comedy at an airfield, eros in an office, dread at dusk
Scale
Two lovers, a mother and a market, against the white streets of a new quarter
Governing Proposition
A young woman ends one love at dawn and begins another with a young man of the stock exchange, between a stock exchange that grieves for a dead man for one minute and the white streets of EUR, the modern quarter of Rome. The wager of the film is that its last minutes can show the place where the two lovers agreed to meet, without them, and so make the viewer know that the failure of their love belongs to a world in which persons are thinning before the things around them.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at dawn, at the end of a love. In Riccardo’s flat in EUR, the modern quarter of Rome, Vittoria, played by Monica Vitti, and Riccardo, played by Francisco Rabal, have come to the end. A fan turns. Objects stand in the frame, and the camera gives them as much time as it gives the two faces. Minutes pass in silence before the words that end four years, and then Vittoria leaves. The opening has said what the film will say: a feeling is ending among things that will outlast it.
Michelangelo Antonioni wrote it with Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini and Ottiero Ottieri. Gianni Di Venanzo photographed it in black and white, Eraldo Da Roma cut it, and Giovanni Fusco wrote the score; the titles run over a twist sung by Mina, “Eclisse twist”, and then the music stops. It was produced by Robert and Raymond Hakim, an Italian and French production, in Italian. It opened in Italy in April 1962 and was shown in competition at Cannes that May, where it shared the Special Jury Prize. Alain Delon plays Piero, Lilla Brignone Vittoria’s mother.
The unit judged is the film as released, the Italian version of about 126 minutes, as carried by the current restoration. It follows L’Avventura (1960) and La Notte (1961), and the three are often called a trilogy, but it is read alone. It is built in a prologue, five episodes and a coda: the Borsa; a night in EUR with two neighbours; a flight to Verona; the crash and the meeting; the courtship; and a last appointment that neither lover keeps.
Movement II
Vittoria goes to the Rome stock exchange to find her mother, and the film enters the Borsa as a crowd of hands and mouths: men shouting prices across the floor, runners, clerks, telephones. Piero works there, quick and hungry, at home in the crowd. The camera does not judge the place. It watches it with the same patience it gave the objects in Riccardo’s flat, and the frenzy has its own beauty in Di Venanzo’s light.
A broker has died, and the floor stops for a minute of silence. The men stand still with their heads bowed; the telephones go on ringing through it; and when the minute is over the roar comes back at once, as if a lid had been lifted. It is the only stillness in a room of shouting, and the film’s plainest figure: the market grieves for a minute and goes on. Feeling and money are set side by side, as two markets with the same weather.
Vittoria’s mother knows the price of everything and the feeling of nothing, and her daughter, who has just ended four years with a man, stands beside her in the noise. Nothing begins yet between Vittoria and Piero. The film has placed them both inside a system that will go on without either of them, and has shown what that system does with a death.
Movement III
At night in EUR, Vittoria spends an evening with her neighbours Anita and Marta. In Marta’s flat the talk turns to Kenya, Marta’s Kenya, spoken of with colonial contempt, and Vittoria dances in costume in a racial masquerade. The scene is the loosest in the film. It summons the primitive as costume, it comes closer to satire than the film’s even regard elsewhere, and it is staged without the tact the film keeps for everything else. Its racial masquerade now plays as a charge against the film.
Then the night outside. Vittoria walks alone among the flagpoles of the quarter, and their cables ring in the wind; a dog runs loose; the trees move. It is one of the film’s heights, cold as they all are: a woman small among poles and wires, with the sound of wind in metal for company. The scene does not explain her, and does not need to.
With Anita she flies to Verona and back. Above the clouds she is at ease, for the only time in the film, and at the airfield there is a moment of comedy. The episode is slack, loosely tied to the line, and could be shortened with little lost; but the flight’s lightness is a breath the rest of the film withholds, and it shows what Vittoria might be outside the two kinds of possession on offer.
Movement IV
The market crashes. At the Borsa the crash is cut with a command of chaos the film never needs again: shouting, hands, faces, men ruined. Vittoria’s mother loses heavily. Piero handles it as a working day. Afterward, at a café, a man who has lost a fortune orders mineral water and draws flowers. The ruin is shown as a small, almost tender, absurd act.
Piero’s car, a Giulietta, is stolen and driven into the lake at EUR, and the man who took it drowns. The car is pulled from the water with the man inside it. Piero is concerned with the dents. It is the film’s sharpest image of its law: a person absorbed into a world of objects, the thing outlasting the man and mattering more.
The courtship follows, in the flat of Piero’s absent parents and in his office. It has play in it, and eros, and at times the play looks directed rather than found. In the middle of an embrace Piero lunges for a telephone. The lovers are framed at the edge of the shot, behind grilles and blinds and pillars, and the camera often stays after one of them has gone. They agree to meet again, at a crossing in EUR.
Movement V
Neither of them comes. The film does not say so. It goes to the crossing at the hour of the appointment and shows it without them: the street, the barrel of water seen before, now with water running out and a sliver of wood afloat, a bus from which passengers step down, people who are not the lovers. Dusk falls. The streetlamps come on. The last image is the glare of a lamp, close, as Fusco’s music rises: a dread without event.
After two hours on two people, the film removes them from their own ending, and the viewer, who has waited for them, is left looking at the place. The coda is the form completed: the grammar of the film, its held shots and its objects given the duration of faces, is applied without the lovers and becomes what it was always about. The prologue opened on a love ending among things; the coda closes on a love failing to arrive, with only the things left. The eclipse of the title is here, and only here, built as image.
The film has been argued over since: why neither lover comes; whether the coda is despair, indifference, or a world that goes on without need of them; whether the eclipse is of feeling or of the persons or of an age. It has been read as a study of modern architecture, as an economic film, as the portrait of a woman who refuses possession, and as a precursor of slow cinema, and filmmakers have named the trilogy it closes as a formation. The crossing is still there at dusk, and nobody is waiting.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The prologue and the coda are each required, and together they are the argument: the film opens on a love ending in silence among objects and closes on a love failing to arrive, with the objects left. Between them the Borsa sequences are required, setting feeling beside money as two markets with the same weather: the minute of silence for a dead broker, then the roar; the crash that ruins Vittoria’s mother and that Piero handles as a working day. The drowned car is required: a man has died and Piero looks at the dents. What gives is in the middle: the masquerade at Marta’s flat and the flight to Verona are strong images loosely tied to the line, and Verona could go with little lost.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in the prosperity of postwar Italy feeling has taken on the habits of property, so that love is conducted like a transaction and ends like one, and the persons who might love are worn thinner than the things around them. It is shown in image rather than said: Piero lunging for a telephone in the middle of an embrace; a market’s grief that lasts a minute; Vittoria’s mother, who knows the price of everything and the feeling of nothing; a man who has lost a fortune ordering mineral water and drawing flowers. At the end the city at dusk becomes a world after people. Held off the top because much of the power is mood, and the meaning is diagnosis more than discovery.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is cold and frequent. The prologue is the first height: dawn in Riccardo’s flat, the fan turning, a frame of objects, minutes of silence before the words that end four years. The night in EUR is a second, Vittoria alone among flagpoles whose cables ring in the wind, a dog running. The flight above the clouds to Verona is the one moment of ease she is given; the minute of silence is the only stillness in a room of shouting; the water tower stands white and alien. The summit is the coda: the crossing, the barrel with water running out, the bus, the streetlamps coming on, the last glare of a lamp, a dread without event. The courtship, which carries much of the length, rises less.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The archetype is the eclipse itself: light withdrawn, the world seen in the moment its source is covered. It names the film and gives it its last image, a lamp’s glare, and it is load-bearing in the coda, where the lovers vanish and the place goes on, so that one crossing in EUR stands for a world emptied of the human. What holds the axis down is that elsewhere myth is evoked rather than built. The lovers who fail to meet carry the old matter of the missed appointment, but the film declines to make it fate; the Kenya masquerade summons the primitive as costume and is weakly joined. The film is secular and modern by conviction, and its deepest figure, the market, is rendered as a condition, not an archetype.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is neorealism, whose Rome Antonioni had shared in the 1940s and 1950s, and the romantic melodrama of the couple, which the film takes up and refuses. L’Avventura had removed the solution of its mystery; L’Eclisse goes further and removes the lovers from their own ending. After two hours on two people, the last minutes show the place they agreed to meet without them, held long enough that the viewer’s expectation becomes the subject. It is one of the boldest decisions in the narrative cinema of its decade, and the stake was real: a commercial production with a French star, risking the audience the earlier film had only lately won. Held below the top only because the trilogy had prepared the turn.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that persons are thinning before the world of things, and the form enacts it. Figures stand at the edge of the frame or behind pillars, grilles and blinds; the shot is held after a character has left, so that it outlives its occupant; architecture and objects are given the duration a melodrama gives faces. The coda completes the form: the film’s grammar, applied without the lovers, becomes what it was always about. Told as a romance, with the meeting kept or missed in a scene of feeling, the story would know only that a love failed. Told this way it knows that the failure belongs to a world. The middle episodes use the form as manner more than instrument.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Sixty-four years of return are evidence. The film’s questions have stayed open and argued: why neither lover comes; whether the coda is despair, indifference, or a world going on without need of them; whether the eclipse is of feeling, of the persons, or of an age. Readings have accumulated: the film as a study of modern architecture and of EUR; as an economic film with the Borsa at its centre; as the portrait of a woman who refuses the two kinds of possession offered her; as a precursor of slow cinema. The form yields on return, in the rhymes between prologue and coda, in objects that recur, in the water barrel seen twice. Part of the return is to texture, and the courtship yields less on a third viewing than the two ends.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 1962, so force and reach are scored together. The field is the cinema of the 1960s, and the intrinsic force is high: the film shows that duration, architecture and absence can carry a narrative’s conclusion, that a feature can end by withdrawing its story, and that a city can be photographed as a protagonist’s condition. With L’Avventura it changed what European art cinema believed a film could leave out. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide within art cinema and narrower beyond it; filmmakers have named Antonioni’s trilogy as a formation, and the emptied place and the held shot have been read as a source of the slow cinema of later decades. Much of the reach is shared with L’Avventura, which made the decisive break, and that is discounted.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-four years. The form survives whole as released, and the restoration is repair. Presence is continuous in repertory, film schools, criticism and home release, a fixture of the art cinema of the 1960s, but narrower than the widest presence: the film is less seen than L’Avventura (8.8) and far less than the popular canon, and that holds the figure where it stands. The fabric carries no charge. The surface is fixed in parts to its year, the open outcry of the Borsa, EUR under construction, the twist, and the racial masquerade of the Kenya scene, which now plays against the film and is weighed as surface, not loss. The moment it is fixed to is its subject, and it has outlived it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Gianni Di Venanzo’s photography is of the first order: the whites and greys of EUR in hard sun, the night scenes lit by streetlamps and wind, the Borsa as a crowd of hands and mouths, the faces of Vitti and Delon set in architecture without losing their particularity. The cutting of the coda, shot to shot across a crossing at dusk, is load-bearing, and the crash at the Borsa is cut with a command of chaos the film never needs again. Vitti plays in hesitation, Delon in speed and appetite; Fusco’s score is sparing and exactly placed. The costs: the Kenya masquerade is staged without the film’s usual tact, Verona is slack, and the courtship’s play at times looks directed rather than found. Below Tokyo Story (9.3) and Citizen Kane (9.4).
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the roaring Borsa and the silent crossing of the coda. One law governs both: persons are absorbed into systems and places that go on without them. The Borsa absorbs a dead man in a minute; the crossing absorbs two living ones without a trace. The prologue’s objects, the flagpoles in the wind, the drowned car whose dents matter more than the drowned man, and Vittoria’s mother counting her losses all obey it, and the camera’s coolness toward everyone is the law applied. The range is wide for so cool a film, from comedy at the airfield to dread at the end. The strain is at Marta’s flat, where masquerade and colonial talk come closer to satire than to the film’s even regard, and in the Verona flight’s lightness.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness, in Vittoria above all, between two lovers and two kinds of possession; the family, in her mother and in the flat of Piero’s absent parents; labour and money, in the Borsa as a whole social organ with its clerks, runners and ruined; the city, in EUR and the centre of Rome; the colonial order, in Marta’s Kenya; the age, in the eclipse of the title; the natural order, in wind, trees, water and light. One law joins them, and the joining is real. What holds the axis lowest is how some are reached: the state appears only through money, the colonial order through a scene the film does not master, and history only at the edges, as setting rather than as a field the film enters.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.1, then The Swerve at 9.0 and The Made at 8.9. A form in which persons thin before things and the shot outlives its occupant, completed in a coda that shows the lovers’ meeting place without them; a turn that removes the lovers from their own ending; and a making in which Di Venanzo’s light and the cutting of the coda carry the meaning.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, the family, labour and money, the city and the natural order are held under one law, but the state appears only through money, the colonial order through a scene the film does not master, and history only as setting. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9: the eclipse is built in the coda and evoked elsewhere, and the film renders its deepest figure, the market, as a condition rather than an archetype.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 falls short of it: the eclipse is built only in the coda, and elsewhere myth is evoked rather than built. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, which stands at 8.5, below the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of L’Eclisse as released in 1962, the Italian version of about 126 minutes, in black and white, as carried by the current restoration, from the dawn in Riccardo’s flat to the lamp at the crossing: directed by Michelangelo Antonioni from a screenplay by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra with Elio Bartolini and Ottiero Ottieri, photographed by Gianni Di Venanzo, edited by Eraldo Da Roma, with music by Giovanni Fusco; produced by Robert and Raymond Hakim; with Monica Vitti, Alain Delon, Francisco Rabal and Lilla Brignone. Listed running times differ by a few minutes with projection speed and source, and nothing judged here depends on them. The film is scored alone, not with L’Avventura and La Notte. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Italian film; English renderings are an aid to sense, and nothing is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so none is quoted. The middle episodes are described in outline. Figures that could not be verified, among them the length of the coda, shot counts, scene timings and the share of dialogue, are not given.