Il deserto rosso and The Adjuster

209 Pages·2015·2.39 MB·English

by  Giulia Baso

Practices of Mediation and Phenomena of
Contamination in the Films of M. Antonioni and
A. Egoyan

Submitted by Giulia Baso to the University of Exeter
as a thesis for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Italian,
September 2014.

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This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright
material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper
acknowledgement.

I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my work has been identified
and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award
of a degree by this or any other University.

Signature: Giulia Baso

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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for financing
this doctoral project and for generously awarding me a Research Training
Support Grant to visit the TIFF Film Reference Library in Toronto. I am also
grateful to the University of Exeter, which provided further financial support and
gave me the opportunity to work as a Graduate Teaching Assistant of Italian
language.

This thesis would not have been possible without the help and support of many
people. I wish to express my deep gratitude to my supervisors, Dr. Danielle
Hipkins and Dr. Fiona Handyside, who believed in this project from the start.
Their guidance, insights, and patience enabled me to shape and clarify my
ideas. Thanks for letting me concentrate on the topics that stimulated my
interest and curiosity, whilst offering continuous encouragement and
constructive criticism. I am also very grateful to Dr. Sally Faulkner, who gave
me precious feedback and advice throughout all the stages of this project.

Thanks to the staff of the TIFF Film Reference Library in Toronto for providing
access to the Special Collections and the Atom Egoyan Archive. They were
extremely helpful during my visits. My archival research benefited particularly
from the assistance of Julie Lofthouse. I am thankful to Marcy Gerstein of Ego
Film Arts for allowing me access to the files regarding Just to Be Together. I
also received great help from the staff of the Videoteca Pasinetti in Venice.

At the University of Exeter, I wish to thank the Department of Italian Studies,
where I found a very friendly and supportive atmosphere: Sonia Cunico, Alice
Farris, Francesco Goglia, Danielle Hipkins, Angelo Mangini, and Luciano Parisi.
A special thank also to Micheal Jecks and James Wilson.

I am grateful to Dr. Armando Pajalich for his guidance during my years at Ca’
Foscari University of Venice, and for encouraging me to apply to a doctoral
programme abroad.

Last, but not least, I want to thank my family, particularly my grandmother Jole,
for their support and understanding. Thanks to my friends: to my colleagues,
Caterina, Claudia, Elena, Ilaria, and Iole; to Barbara, Donald, and my
housemates in Exeter, Akiko and Isaure; and to Anna, Chiara, Daniela,
Francesco, Irene, and Marta. Thanks to Lucia, for everything.

Translations
Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Italian are mine.

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Abstract
By bringing M. Antonioni and A. Egoyan into dialogue with one another, this
thesis sheds light on a significant yet neglected aspect of their cinematic
visions: the interactions of practices of technological mediation with phenomena
of contamination and dissolution of boundaries. My work is inspired by the
recovery of archival material that demonstrates the two auteurs’ intention to
collaborate on a filmmaking project, entitled Just to Be Together, between 1997
and 1998. This unfinished film invites us to look retrospectively at Antonioni’s
and Egoyan’s oeuvres in a way that transcends established frameworks of
analysis based on national, art-house, and diasporic/exilic paradigms.
Focusing on what came before this suspended artistic collaboration, the
present study proceeds through a series of paired readings of films, framed
within a theoretical context of transnational cinema. The final section includes
an expanded, intertextual discussion of the major findings of my research in
relation to the screenplay of Just to Be Together. Whilst recognising the
directors’ different cultural and historical backgrounds, I argue that there exist
strong thematic and stylistic affinities between Antonioni’s ‘art-house’ cinema
and Egoyan’s ‘accented’ aesthetics. The corpus I have chosen to concentrate
on reflects my view that such similarities are most noticeable in Antonioni’s first
colour films and Egoyan’s early features. In particular, the following films are
examined in pairs: Il deserto rosso (1964) / The Adjuster (1991) (Chapter One,
‘Reconfiguring Modernity’); Blow-up (1966) / Speaking Parts (1989) (Chapter
Two, ‘Capturing What Vanishes’); The Passenger (1974) / Next of Kin (1984)
(Chapter Three, ‘Discarding the Unwanted Skin’).
By using different conceptual frameworks developed by scholars such as
Zygmunt Bauman, Julia Kristeva, Rosi Braidotti, Roland Barthes, and Richard
Dyer, this study explores themes of fluidity, ambivalence, renegotiation of bodily
boundaries, media technologies, pollution, and identity. It aims to engage with
recent critical efforts to rethink Antonioni’s aesthetics from the perspective of
contemporary theoretical frames, whilst opening up a discursive space from
which to challenge the validity of diasporic and accented models for Egoyan’s
early features.

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Contents

Introduction 8
Chapter One
Reconfiguring Modernity: Il deserto rosso and The Adjuster
1.1 The Impact of Development 24
1.2 Objects and Waste 36
1.3 Perceptual Indeterminacy: Sound and Colour 51
1.3.1 From Solid to Liquid 52
1.3.2 Fluid Sounds: The Acousmatic Voice 57
1.3.3 Superimpositions and the Chromophobic Impulse 63
Chapter Two
Capturing What Vanishes: Blow-Up and Speaking Parts
2.1 The Viral Force of Images 70
2.2 Dismantling the Integrity of the Body 81
2.2.1 ‘So… Intimate’: Posthuman Renegotiations of Boundaries 82
2.2.2 Clothing As a Second Skin 94
2.2.3 Un-fashioning/Re-fashioning the Body 100
2.3 Dismantling the Integrity of the Image 115
2.3.1 Ghostliness 116
2.3.2 Decomposition 125
Chapter Three
Discarding the Unwanted Skin: The Passenger and Next of Kin
3.1 Two Stories of Invented Identities 131
3.2 Nomadism and Homecoming 141
3.2.1 Exiles, Migrants, Nomads, and Polyglots 142
3.2.2 The Desire for Contamination 161
3.3 The Distracted Camera 175

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Conclusion
The Film They Never Made 185
Illustrations 194
Bibliography 197
Archival Sources 207
Filmography 208

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List of Illustrations
Figure 1.a; 1.c from The Adjuster (Atom Egoyan, 1991)
Figure 1.b from Il deserto rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)
Figure 2.a; 2.b from Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
Figure 2.c from Speaking Parts (Atom Egoyan, 1989)
Figure 3.a; 3.c from Next of Kin (Atom Egoyan, 1984)
Figure 3.b from The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1974)

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Introduction
Antonioni today powerfully escapes the reach of old
categorisations that have attempted to congeal his
figure once and for all into an inert monument of
modern cinema. His continued influence on world
film-makers and the new pressing questions that his
films raise today for contemporary audiences call for
a renewed critical effort.
Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes1

Looking back at the work of Michelangelo Antonioni today, from the perspective
of the twenty-first century, one might feel that everything has already been said
or written about the director of ‘alienation’. Yet recent instances of film criticism
have powerfully demonstrated that his cinema is more alive than ever, and
continues to pose pressing questions to contemporary audiences. This thesis
aims to bring to the surface one neglected trajectory of Antonioni’s transnational
artistic legacy: the connection with Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Through a
series of paired readings of films, it draws together two major filmmakers in a
way that sheds new light upon their oeuvres.
Antonioni lends himself to national (Italian), art-house, and modernist
paradigms of analysis. His cinema is commonly seen as bearing the mark of a
European auteur tradition. Egoyan can be variously claimed as a national
(Canadian), diasporic/exilic, accented, and mainstream director. My dissertation
is informed to some degree by all of these critical perspectives; one of its
purposes, however, will be to unsettle dominant assumptions about how
Antonioni’s and Egoyan’s films should be read. In order to do so, it attempts to
trace the contours of Egoyan’s artistic indebtedness to European art cinema,
whilst bringing Antonioni’s oeuvre into dialogue with key conceptual models for
understanding late-modernity. Without negating the directors’ different temporal,
geographical, and cultural contexts, the present study argues that there exists a
strong affinity between their cinematic visions. The corpus I decided to focus on
reflects my view that such similarities are most noticeable in Antonioni’s first
colour films and Egoyan’s early features. More specifically, the following filmic

1 Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, eds., ‘Interstitial, Pretentious, Alienated, Dead’, in
Antonioni: Centenary Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 1-17 (p. 1).

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texts will be closely examined in pairs: Il deserto rosso (1964) / The Adjuster
(1991) (Chapter One); Blow-up (1966) / Speaking Parts (1989) (Chapter Two);
The Passenger (1974) / Next of Kin (1984) (Chapter Three).
The first chapter, ‘Reconfiguring Modernity’, explores the historical
resonances of Il deserto rosso and The Adjuster, with particular attention given
to Italy’s economic miracle of the late 1950s and early 1960s. After having
outlined the role of actresses Monica Vitti and Arsinée Khanjian, my discussion
engages with discourses on objects, waste, and perceptual indeterminacy
through reflections on the directors’ expressive use of cinematography. It is
concerned with demonstrating how the two films reconfigure aspects of the
modern condition against a backdrop of globalisation and fluidity. Chapter Two,
‘Capturing What Vanishes’, argues that processes of renegotiation of
boundaries are central to both Antonioni’s and Egoyan’s configurations of
media technologies. Drawing a parallel between modes of proliferation of
photography in the 1960s and video technology in the 1980s, it examines how
the dismantlement of integrity in Blow-Up and Speaking Parts unfolds on two
intertwined levels – body and image. Such an approach will allow me to discuss
motifs of clothing, organ transplantation, ghostliness, and decomposition. The
third and final chapter is titled ‘Discarding the Unwanted Skin’. The focus here
shifts from the skin-like surfaces of clothing and images to the skin of the body,
its colour, and cultural resonances. My filmic analysis of The Passenger and
Next of Kin tackles issues of nomadic subjectivity, untranslated foreign
languages, historical and spatial displacement, and desires for contamination,
whilst also calling attention to the imagery of food ingestion in Egoyan’s first
feature. Chapter Three aims to show that these paired films engage with
spatiality and camera movement in very similar ways, and that they establish a
clear link between media technologies of reproduction and the contamination of
identity categories.
What prompted me to look at Antonioni and Egoyan in a comparative
fashion is also the existence of a filmmaking project, provisionally entitled Just
to Be Together, on which they should have collaborated between 1997 and
1998. Preliminary activities had already begun when it was dropped due to lack
of financing.2 This potential collaboration serves as a point of departure for my

2 Private correspondence with Marcy Gerstein, Ego Film Arts. See also Aldo Tassone, I film di
Michelangelo Antonioni: Un poeta della visione (Rome: Gremese, 2002), p. 52.

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analysis, which aims to shed light on the significant yet overlooked connections
between Antonioni’s ‘art-house’ films and Egoyan’s ‘diasporic’ cinema, and in
particular to uncover the way the technological imagery in their films is used to
reconfigure and renegotiate our experiences of modernity and its associated
viewing practices. Even though the body of work that precedes the suspended
project constitutes the main focus of my research, in the Conclusion I will
illustrate and revise my findings also in the light of the screenplay of Just to Be
Together. In doing so, I wish to emphasise the way in which the unfinished film
has elicited an interest in the common perspective that these directors share,
and which has received only limited critical attention. By mapping out the
reciprocal intersections and divergences between Antonioni’s and Egoyan’s
oeuvres, I will gain a better understanding of what led the two auteurs to
embark upon a collaborative project that, albeit incomplete, involved a
deliberately chosen fusion of their artistic and authorial identities.
The mid-1990s can be said to represent a challenge without precedent in
Antonioni’s and Egoyan’s careers, although under different circumstances. At
the time when Just to Be Together was taking shape, both directors were
undergoing a process of artistic rediscovery that involved negotiating between
opposing forces of continuity and change. Having suffered a serious stroke in
1985, Antonioni’s health issues and inability to speak made it difficult for him to
shoot the many films he was still thinking about making. Insurers insisted on the
presence of a back-up director; for the shooting of Beyond the Clouds (1995),
he relied on Wim Wenders in a similar role (see the Conclusion). Following
Exotica (1994), his critically acknowledged breakthrough film, Egoyan began to
alternate original stories with literary adaptations. The reason for turning to
materials written by others, as the director explains, is that he felt he had
reached an impasse with his own fictional world: ‘I felt that I’d exhausted
everything I had to say and all the characters I could invent at that point.’3 The
critical and commercial success of The Sweet Hereafter (1997) is indicative of a
shift in Egoyan’s cinematic practice: away from the detachment of his early work
and towards a more accessible narrative style. Acclaimed by audiences and
critics alike, The Sweet Hereafter won three prizes at the 1997 Cannes Film
Festival, inaugurating a new phase in the director’s increasingly transnational

3 Renfreu Neff, ‘A Diplomatic Filmmaker’, Creative Screenwriting, 6.6 (November/December
1999), p. 27.

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