THE CYNEPHILE

I saw N.U. for the first time on film as part of the recent Antonioni Centenary conference; and what a revelation it was. Though it clocks in at around ten minutes, it qualifies as a miniature masterpiece.

N.U. is set in Rome. The first frames go by in flashes without any apparent link and without the rhythmic games of montage. We then discover the city through the eyes of the sanitation workers, and our eye is drawn to minute details as well as grand monuments, such as a homeless man and the Spanish steps of the Trinità dei Monti. The sweepers’ work is routine and their gestures seem automated, but Antonioni imbues even the simple act of sweeping with poetry and humanity. With minimal voiceover, Antonioni focuses on the immobility of the workers when he isolates figures in space. Time is suspended, accompanied by a contrapuntal and aesthetically discordant (but for that reason very effective) jazz soundtrack. There is a reflexive pause when Antonioni cuts to a shot of a soldier lingering in front of a cinema. Note the last deep focus, extra-long take on the poles receding into the distance in a painterly, perspectival manner.

Antonioni explained why there were few internal shots of the homes: “It would have required lighting which we did not have at our disposal: therefore we remained on the street. Let’s say that I constructed an aesthetic system from this fact. Even the other Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel within the space he was assigned.”

Directors were more sensitive than the critics to Antonioni’s documentary work, which is at the very heart of his aesthetic. Valerio Zurlini states: “For us who were then busy with documentaries, N.U. was the revelation of a master. It made an extraordinary effect on us, like the great films of De Sica and Rossellini. We didn’t have eyes suited to looking at the city. Antonioni made us see it for the first time. All my documentaries, and not only mine, are indebted to N.U.“

On a friend’s recommendation, I just finished reading Alberto Moravia’s Contempt, which was adapted by Godard for his eponymous film. Moravia’s novels have served as fertile source material for several iconic European auteurs, including Bertolucci (The Conformist), and Vittorio de Sica (Two Women). A new edition of Contempt was published by the NYRB Classics imprint in 2004, along with Moravia’s Boredom. English translations of these novels had been out of print for close to 50 years, so their re-introduction heralded something of a mini-Moravia renaissance.

Known for his rendering of modern psychological states, Moravia’s novels are rife with cultural references, such as German opera and Greek tragedy. However, while Godard shares this proclivity towards reference, he abandons Moravia’s first-person narrative in favor of numerous meta-narratives, alienation over traditional identification with characters, and an all-over Brechtian estrangement of the audience. Godard keeps the basic framework of the plot intact, yet manages to produce a film that feels wholly alien to Moravia’s sensibility. For more on the distance between the two “Contempts,” there’s a lovely essay by Anne Carson that looks at both texts though the eyes of a classicist. But for me, the formal rigor of Godard’s film far surpasses the artfulness of Moravia’s writing—a judgement I concede is completely unfair since I read Moravia in translation. But to each her own.

Godard’s comments on the novel are less than charitable — perhaps he resented remaking a bestseller, regarding the text as yet another ugly manifestation of the highly commercial production. Regardless, his notes on the adaptation are uncharacteristically direct, revealing his intentions like an overhead light illuminating the corners of the room.

Godard on Le Mépris

Moravia’s novel, Contempt, is a nice, vulgar one for a train journey, full of classical old-fashioned sentiment in spite of the modernity of the situations. But it is with this kind of novel the one can often make the best films. I have stuck to the main theme, simply altering a few details on the principle that something filmed is automatically different from something written, and therefore original. There was no need to try to make it different, to adapt it to the screen All I had to do was film it as it is: just film what was written, apart from a few details, for if the cinema were not first foremost film, it wouldn’t exist. Mélies is the greatest, but without Lumière he would have languished in obscurity.

Apart from a few details. For instance, the transformation of the hero who in passing from book to screen, moves from false adventure to real, from Antonioni inertia to Laramiesque dignity. For instance also the nationality of the characters: Brigitte Bardot is not longer called Emilia but Camille, and as you will see she trifles none the less with Musset. Each of the characters, moreover, speaks his own language which, as in The Quiet American, contributes to the feeling of people lost in a strange country. Here, though, two days only: an afternoon in Rome, a morning in Capri. Rome is the modern world, the West; Capri, the ancient world, nature before civilization and its neuroses. Le Mépris, in other words, might have been called In Search of Homer, but it means lost time trying to discover the language of Proust beneath that of Moravia, and anyway that isn’t the point.

“The point of Le Mépris is that these are people who look at each other and judge each other, and then are in turn looked at and judged by the cinema–represented by Fritz Lang, who plays himself, or in effect the conscience of the film, its honesty. (I filmed the scenes of The Odyssey which he was supposed to be directing in Le Mépris, but as I play the role of his assistant, Lang will say that these are scenes made by his second unit.)

“When I think about it, Le Mépris seems to me, beyond its psychological study of a woman who despise her husband, the story of castaways of the Western world, survivors of the shipwreck of modernity who, like the heroes of Verne and Stevenson, one day read a mysterious deserted island, whose mystery is the inexorable lack of mystery, of truth that is to say. Whereas the Odyssey of Ulysses was a physical phenomenon, I filmed a spiritual odyssey; the eye of the camera watching these characters in search of Homer replaces that of the gods watching over Ulysses and his companions.

A simple film without mystery, an Aristotelian film, stripped of appearances, Le Mépris proves in 149 shots that in the cinema as in life there is no secret, nothing to elucidate, merely the need to live—and to make films.

P.S. Another advantage that the film has over the book is the score—which I unconditionally love. You can download the iconic theme music here: 16 Le Mépris-Theme De Camille.

Why seek extraordinary adventures when we are presented daily with artless people who are filled with real distress?

Why did I make that film? Well, after Sciuscià (Shoeshine), I read some thirty of forty scripts, each more “beautiful” than the one before, full of facts and interesting situations. But I was looking for actions which would be less apparently “extraordinary”, which could happen to anyone (above all to the poor), action which no newspaper wants to talk about.

Anyway, everything happened as follows: one evening Zavattini called me to tell me he had read a beautiful book, Ladri di biciclette, by Luigi Bartolini, and that the book had inspired him to write a story for me. The next day I read the first draft of the story. The story differs from the books fairly radically; the latter is really rather cheerful, colorful, and picaresque. It suffices to note that the protagonist of the film is not Bartolini’s but a bill poster who wanders through Rome in a desperate search for his means of transport. From that point, there is another atmosphere, other interests, more adapted to my own means and scope. Why did we then acquire the title and the rights to a book for which we planned a free adaptation? To acknowledge a remarkable writer who, with his vivid style, has given me inspirational motivation for my new film.

My scope is to trace the “dramatic” in everyday situations, the wonderful in small events, what many consider to be artificially embellished trivia. What is the importance, after all, of stealing a bicycle, one which is far from bright and new? In Rome many are stolen every day and nobody cares, since it is of no importance to the rest of the city. Yet, to lose a bicycle is a grave event, a tragic circumstance, for those who have nothing else, who use it to go to work, who cherish it in the turmoil of city life…