This book is a collection of short essays and sketches of ideas for films. The latter will undoubtedly never be made but in their own way they provide as valuable an insight into Antonioni’s mental world as the films he did complete.


That world is strangely postmodern, although he was working well before the term became popular. As a child in Ferrara, he writes, ‘in winter, when the fog moved in, I liked walking the streets. It was the only moment when I could think I was somewhere else.’ Antonioni’s adult world, too, is one, as he puts it, ‘where nothing is conclusive.’ As his translator points out, ‘Reality, like truth, is attainable, but only temporarily, provisionally so.’


The protagonists in Antonioni’s films, from Blow Up and The Passenger to The Identification Of A Woman, are all caught up in the process of self-realisation, forever incomplete because they are (in principle) endless — fog, in fact, is a recurrent image in his work. Their stories, too, are only loosely narrative: beginnings, middles and ends are transparent conventions, pervaded by a sense of their own contingency.


The same is true of Antonioni himself. One of his principle working methods, he explains, is to ‘start looking at things,’ then work ‘backwards from a series of images to a state of affairs.’ And there is, of course, always more than one possible state of affairs that would explain any series of images. So one could say that in a further erosion of rigid conventions worthy of Ionesco or Flann O’Brien, Antonioni lives in the same world as his protagonists. As do we, when we participate in his films — this book is another way in to, or perhaps out of them.

‘At the end of September night on the plain comes swiftly. Day ends when the headlights unexpectedly flick on. A little earlier the sunset had spread a magical light over the brick walls and it was the city’s metaphysical moment. That was the hour when the women came out. In the cities of the Po Valley women were a category of reality. The men waited for twilight in order to see them. The men were greatly attached to money, they were crafty and lazy, with the rhythm of tedium. If money made them restless, women soothed them. In the Po Valley men loved women with irony. At twilight they watched them walking by, and the women knew it. At night you saw groups of men standing on the sidewalks to talk. They were talking about women. Or money.

The film I had in mind dealt with a strange story between a man and a woman in Ferrara. Strange to those who aren’t natives of this city. Only a citizen of Ferrara can understand a relationship that lasted eleven years without even existing.’ p43