L'Eclisse

Michelangelo Antonioni - 1962
Antonioni- about as good as it gets. Again, the sound, the busy street, the silence, the light hums and the metallic. Some of the great images of the cinema; a light area and a dark area, using the limits of the frame- Delon at Vitti's wondow. Tracking moves that follow about for little stretches. A lot of decentered stuff. Also, the most obvious uses of Vitti sinking into the background; when not animalistic, she wears the whites of the interiors. The cacophony of mid-shots in the stock market, space ripped up.
A slightly glib reading of this film is of the precise moment, fragile, where modernism was able to look at postmodernism. Emtpy containers, all is a frame, life dissappears. What is left is the last humans, the semblances of subjectivity; a thousand locations left, but why no romances in them? The only possbility, as Delon and Vitti show near the end, is imitation; but always fakery.
And of time. Time is destroyed, watches meanginless, I'm not sure the scenes at the end could be said to be linear. Without time, which is turned into space (Deleuze), space loses ontiguity, turns into a series, as at the end, of scenes of a crime, of the crime of the twentieth century, ripped apart, empty, humming with electricity.
For all these thoughts, this is the least abstract I know of Antonioni's films. The diversion into a critique of ethnography. The discussion of the stock market, which all I say above can be translated into, and nuclear warfare. I have no trouble saying that this, (and 'L'Aventurra'), is for me, at the moments, not surpassed in 'narrative' cinema.