Even Ghosts Desire Touch
The Lonely Image of "L’eclisse" (1962)
Keywords:
Michelangelo Antonioni, loneliness, abstraction, emptiness, L’eclisse, Italian CinemaAbstract
Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema pushes the transformative potential of the filmic apparatus to its limits. This sentiment is no better illustrated than within the concluding montage of L’eclisse (1962), wherein Antonioni offers a profound meditation on loneliness vis-à-vis the figure of the (in)visible spectre. Throughout the final seven-and-a-half minutes, Antonioni imbues seemingly vacant spaces with vitality, as the very ontology of absence appears negated. This essay illuminates how it is not simply the visual framing of a largely abandoned social milieu that permeates loneliness, but rather, the destabilised distinction between the visible and the invisible, and the abundant and the empty.
References
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Antonioni, Michelangelo. 2007. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 2023. A Very Easy Death, trans. Patrick O’Brian. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions Classics.
Orban, Clara. 2001. “Antonioni’s Women, Lost in the City.” In Modern Language Studies, 31.2. 11–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/3195334
Perez, Gilberto. 1991. “The Point of View of a Stranger: An Essay on Antonioni’s ‘Eclipse’.” In The Hudson Review, 44.2. 234–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/3851918
FILMOGRAPHY
L’eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
