Antonioni has always been one of the most difficult of directors. At Cannes in 1961, L’avventura was hooted by an audience yelling “Cut! Cut!’ during most of the long takes, but has since gone on to revolutionise the cinema. His films have been a major inspiration for the work of Bertolucci, Jancso and Tardovsky, while more recently his style has been made popular and sentimental in Diva and Paris, Texas. Yet L’avventura, which retains its place in all the critics polls, is not really about an adventure at all, while his one completed fiction film of the Seventies, The Passenger, is a thriller which does not thrill and was never intended to. Antonioni’s version of the world which is arbitrary and chaotic is shared in some ways by the late Orson Welles, but their films are as alike as chalk and cheese. Welles created melodrama at its most intense and humorous out of tumultuous life. Antonioni’s camera is melodrama pure anti-melodrama. There is always the insistence that film must mimic the rhythms and patterns of daily life. Apart from occasional mass eruptions these tend to be balletic, hypnotic and slow, slow, slow. Watching Welles all the time might make us megalomaniac and hyperactive. But Antonioni and nothing else would result in death through melancholia. In the contrast between the two, the vitality of the cinema has been generated. Both Welles and Antonioni have challenged the popular insistence on sympathetic heroes. But in Antonioni the active power of judging is more important than the passive act of gazing. It is the spectator who completes the meaning of the film through scrutiny and distanced judgement.

Chatman’s new book provides a timely reminder of this and demonstrates that what makes the Italian’s openness compelling is the visual coherence of form. Chatman coins the term ‘visual minimalism’ to emphasise how much the image does the work. Though both are vital, dialogue and soundtrack are also minimal. One thinks of the uncanny silences and then the isolated sounds, the waves in L’avventura, the street noises in La note and the rustling trees in the park In Blow-Up. The sound informs the image: the image itself explains. More than any other director of the Sixties, more than Bergman or Fellini, Resnais or Bresson, Antonioni revolutionised the interpretation of visual signs. The blank speechless gaze on the face of Bobby Ewing or Krystle Carrington was once, in another time and another place, profound.

Yet it is misleading of Chatman to suggest that Antonioni’s focus is on ‘the surface of the world’. For the visual image should never be identified exclusively with surface. Apart from the telephoto lens which he uses for the neurotic Guilia’s point of view in his first colour film, Il deserto rosso, Antonioni’s camera has by and large continued the tradition of Welles and Renoir in using depth of field, and here one of his great successes has been the effective use of the wide-screen lens. That the surfaces of his films are polished and coherent is beyond dispute. But they also represent a spiritual reality with recess and depth. The savage landscapes and deathly ghost towns of L’avventura, the oppressive verticals of Corbusian architecture in La notte, the garish artefacts of the fashion photographer’s studio in Blow-Up are internal as well as external, the work of an artist painting the mind as well as the world. Indeed Chatman’s conceit of surface seems to fracture later during his more accurate insistence on metonym rather than metaphor or symbol as the source of Antonioni’s cinema. If surface is extended elastically to suggest that everything is contained within the image, that is improvement. But then everything is not contained within the image. As Noel Burch has pointed out, Antonioni is a master of off-screen space, of the what has not yet, and may never yet be seen.

Chatman is more persuasive when he refers to the contingency of Antonioni’s world, a world that is contained almost totally within the present. Before The Passenger Antonioni made little use of flashback or reference to the past, and events take place in compressed sequences, L’avventura and L’ecisse within the space of a fortnight, La note and Blow-Up within the space of a single day. Here the narrative never shows events as cause and effect but as mere sequences, unstructured chronology. Here, as Chatman points out, the insistence on a fluid reality neither ordered nor fully explicit, evokes comparison with Joyce, Woolf and Hemingway. Such contingency, he goes on to suggest, also issues in the bad faith of many of Antonioni’s male protagonists. They are imprisoned by distraction. In L’avventura Sandro goes on a cruise with Anna to the demands of work and later switches his attentions to Claudia to distract himself from the demands of the search for the vanishing Anna, then distracts himself from involvement with Claudia by searching for Anna again and by finally betraying Claudia in a one-night stand with an American actress. By the time of Blow-Up, distraction had become chronic for Thomas, the superbrat photographer leaving his cowed models in the middle of a session to go off and buy antiques, leaving the antique shop to photograph a courting couple in the park, later leaving his agent on the other end of the phone to have a sex orgy instead of discussing the murder he thinks he has discovered in the blow-ups, then finally abandoning his search for the elusive woman in the park by stopping off at a rock club to watch one of The Yardbirds smashing his guitar. While James Stewart’s discovery of murder in Rear Window is a result of pathological obsession, David Hemmings’ discovery in Blow-Up is a result of pathological distraction and the discovery never leads anywhere because of further distractions. What Antonioni has called ‘the fragility of the emotions’ are exhibited most effectively at the level of anguish and uncertainty by the women of his early films, Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau. But male distraction is equally subversive of purpose and will. The capacity in modern culture to lose interest in what we are doing is presented here as something of epic proportion.

Despite the strength of his general interpretation, Chatman’s format for analysis is somewhat disappointing. He divorces plot and character from cinematic form and analyses them separately with heavy text-book pIod. Moreover, under the heading of the ‘Grand Tetralogy’ he lumps Il deserto rosso with the trilogy which preceded it, when the colour film is a clear departure. The earlier and later films, by contrast, get individual attention which can be useful, as when Chatman explains the photograph sequence in Blow-Up, but confusing when he makes a hypothetical comparison between Passenger and the unmade film.

But the cult of academic subsections touches an exposed nerve. The early films are largely unavailable for public viewing and may have already disappeared, in this country at least, into film history. Chatman’s recaps may stir memories of halt-remembered plots and images, or tell the unprivileged in story book form what they will never see. Unfortunately, he only succeeds in dismembering the finished film and narrowing down the openness he praises. In The Passenger for instance, his potted plot does not question Maria Schneider’s appearance on a park bench in Bloomsbury some time before Nicholson actually meets her in Barcelona. Thus in summarising the famous seven minute tracking shot which ends the film, he omits to mention that in the courtyard towards which the camera tracks, the assassins’ car pulls up out of frame where Schneider, also out of frame, first encounters them, before both move back into view. The transaction, at first out of sight and then in view but out of hearing, is clearly ambiguous, and not to be dismissed with the assertion that ‘she will clearly have none of them’.

In plot-potting L’avventura it is equally simple-minded to suggest that ‘Claudia senses that it is not herself that he (Sandro) lusts after, but Woman, any Woman. . .’ At the very least Claudia and later Sandro both come to realise all too painfully that their relationship will never reduce to lust and never peter out, despite Sandro s continued whoring after other women. The storyboard is a killer and flaws the sensibility of what is, at times, a very fine and perceptive book.