I pretend to understand what a dog means when it is howling, they sound like they’re calling for some kind of response, and it is the same with birds. Humans, they talk to themselves. I do. I feel myself mouthing words in Antonioni’s La Notte, those Italian syllables bubbling against a white noise of rain falling, the rain in the film; here there is a marine layer hanging over a June Pacific, pretending to be rain.
I am continually intrigued by movies, especially those of Fellini and Antonioni. Signore Antonioni created artful tension, that if it ever existed in life, has since been tortured to death by the chaotic fingers of internet massage. Personally, I am as easily distracted by pelicans soaring in formation, and ships like blocks of wood floating on the horizon toward Oakland, but the internet with those endless videos and photos and words and AI generated … well, it’s called information, yet there isn’t much information included … that content, for me has more in common with pollution. Maybe movies are just more pollution..
So I sit … listening to Italian punctuating the whoosh of the heating system blowing through vents in the floor, then I stand and wander into the thin mist outside trying to see if people at the party next door are having fun; I can’t tell. In every glance I take between staring at the ocean, they seem so deadly serious. The mom told me a few weeks ago her son was getting married, so today she decorated her fence with brightly colored ribbons and tassels, tagging her house as the destination.
After all my furtive glances across the street I return to La Notte’s gray scale distances. Distances between men and women, distances between a presence and lack of presence, how money increases distance between bourgeoisie and proletariat, after all, it’s 1961, the economic miracle is still in bloom, a time filled with “vile and anti-philosophical” content without intention, where the only purpose of democracy is to remind humanity that it lacks courage to say what is of value and what is not, the only guidance is to take things as they come. Thank you, Signore Antonioni.
As I drift between drifting after watching my neighbors drift through their living room, and consuming La Notte like a fine, however melancholy, dinner, I catch a strange affectation in the subtitles when Jeanne Moreau asks Monica Vitti, in a rather entitled and world weary and envious tone, how old she is, and Monica Vitti responds with an aplomb born of too much experience for such a short life. The Italian is “eighteen and many, many months”, which I think is a great line. The subtitle says “twenty-two”. In my current mood, similar to Monica Vitti’s character, such a translation is a lie and makes me wonder how many translations are just as faulty, in so much the same way, I convert my thoughts into speech, sound, occasionally I invent a bon mot of my own, often I misquote others, all of those tainted with the dull indifference of habit. Thank you again, Michele. You never stop giving. I continually am urged to keep moving forward … they, my adoring friends who want to be helpful, also say I am the only person who can know what forward means to me.
I may be moving myself in circles. Or my perspective is coming from such a distance, movies seem solid. In this moment La Notte is solid, dimensional, compared to this room, or the furniture, this chair where I sit, the books, the art, the piles of objects, even myself. I slump forward when I notice my keys for the post box and house splayed out next to electronic remotes and a hard faux leather case for my reading glasses. Reluctantly I put them on and pick up a remote to pause La Notte and Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti halt in mid-gesture, still, yet my reality is vague compared to the image still caught on the screen in Antonioni’s chiaroscuro.
I feel something not happening, a pause, as if the planet wasn’t turning as it had a moment ago. The light bouncing through the mist is the wrong color and it has no future, it landed without a story worth telling, its present unmemorable and so unredeemable. This summer dusk has no memory. I touch the play button and Monica Vitti says with finality, “You two have really worn me out tonight,” she touches a switch with her foot, and is transformed into a silhouette backlit by a gray dawn. Is it the same gray light seeping into this room? An image, a thought untranslated or subtitled tells me I want to watch L’Eclisse. Do I need an eclipse?
Without a graceful interlude, my fancy technology takes me directly into Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. L’Eclisse has no subtitles and I feel a sense of relief; even when I do not understand, its lies belong to a fiction being presented as truth. This room I inhabit pulls darkness into its curves and corners, with an old-fashioned floor lamp lit to fight off my personal shades and an ocean of black outside. Monica Vitti has pulled aside a curtain admitting me into another gray, unwilling morning. Her curtains lost their defence against daylight after this terrible night, my lamp and the film’s house lights insignificant against that spreading sun. As she leaves, we are both soundless except for the click of her heels. Is she looking for connection? I am.
Now it is overwhelming day in a chaotic Rome stock exchange where Alain Delon tells us why there is a minute of silence, we accept it as the briefest of memories for someone soon forgotten when chaos erupts again, we still have no idea who that man might have been.
I feel I will be remembered like that, perhaps a moment of silence enveloped by chaos. Tempi morti. My existence a silence defined by a louder, more dramatic story surrounding its all too porous borders, the moon, bloodied by a shadow.
