Secret Violences: The Political Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960-75

Although Michelangelo Antonioni became one of the icons of “modernist” cinema in the 1960s, his position in the pantheon of great directors has never been quite secure. Unlike his famous contemporaries, such asIngmar Bergman and Luchino Visconti, whose essential contribution to the art of cinema is hardly ever questioned, Antonioni’s work has been repeatedly denigrated from many angles for both aesthetic and political reasons. Though the historical importance of some of Antonioni’s films as an incarnation of certain attitudes and problems characteristic of the 1960s and 70s is not denied, they are often considered passé, artificial and boring. Contesting prevalent readings, which focus on existential and psychological motifs involving anxiety and the malady of sentiments, this book offers a re-evaluation of Antonioni’s most important films interpreted as political cinema engaged with issues which are still crucial in the 21st century. Far from being politically neutral, Antonioni’s oblique and “abstract” approach makes possible the prising open and devaluation of the morally and politically constrictive “organic” narrative structures. HIs approach overthrows the primacy of character and plot, on the one hand, by showing them to be emanations of the spectral materiality of capital, and, on the other hand, by allowing for an opening into the utopian dimension, implying engagement in the rethinking of our attachments to the world.

Table of Contents:
Introduction L’avventura (1960) La notte (1961) L’eclisse (1962) Red Desert (1964) Blow-Up (1966) Zabriskie Point (1970) The Passenger (1975) Bibliography Filmography Index

About the Author :
Slawomir Maslon is Associate Professor in the Institute of Literary Studies at University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.

Review :
Secret Violences offers a thought-provoking interpretation of the political charge of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films from the Sixties and Seventies, placing emphasis on their depsychologization and consequent “devaluation of the patriarchal plot” through brilliant close readings that query the role of supraindividual discourses that render characters “mouthpieces of the dominant ideologies”. Maslon’s makes a unique contribution to the field through a nuanced analysis of the explicitly political nature of Antonioni’s MGM films, shedding light on an aspect of his production that has long begged for engaging scholarly attention. Antonioni’s cinema from L’avventura (1960) onwards is either praised or critiqued for turning to formalism and tearing narrative apart, and it is rarely, if ever, seen as political. Challenging these three tropes at once, it is on narrative and form that Slawomir Maslon focusesto reveal the political aspects – as well as, at times, the politics – of Antonioni’s feature films of the 1960s and 1970s. The result is an insightful, and at times exhilarating, account of Antonioni’s engagement with contemporaneous problematics of gender, sexuality, race, colonialism and post-colonialism – problematics which are often overlooked or deemed absent from Antonioni’s cinema as a whole.