Michelangelo Antonioni's L’avventura (1960)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is one of my most favorite films, exploring the incompatibility of the primal elements of nature with human beings, specifically human beings who think they have civilized the inhospitable by maintaining a rigorously prim lifestyle of corsets, frocks, and immaculate white lace dresses. Mrs. Appleyard’s Victorian-fashioned girls’ school plants their field trip in the muggy, buzzing mosslands of Hanging Rock, certain their propriety and neck-to-ankle-length dresses will ward off the wilderness. For the school’s presumption, three of the girls vanish, to god knows where, seemingly swallowed into the earth.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura’s premise is identical, but serving different purposes: a group of Italian bourgeoisie out yachting find themselves drawn to a poker-faced landmass, an island, whose features are often shot to accentuate their permanence as compared to the dwarfed ephemera of the tourists. Whereas the Rock in Weir’s film evoked a more actively malevolent presence, the rocks and quarries on the anonymous island in Antonioni’s film are indifferent to the visitors, though the indifference is frighteningly implacable, and accompanied by the ever-present sound of the wind, the island begins to give the impression that it is harboring secrets. One of those secrets is the whereabouts of Anna (Lea Massari), ostensibly the lead female character in the film – she is introduced to us before anyone else (the film opens with Anna persuading her father not to worry about the yachting excursion). Anna’s boyfriend or fiancée, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), join her on the trip, as well as some other friends.

Anna comes from a wealthy family, is spoiled, and jaded in a petulant sort of way that renders her dissipated restlessness more unlikable than the others, who, granted, are as listless and idle as she, though without the nasty attitude. These people have nothing to do and nowhere to go: ennui hangs over them all as darkly as the uniform cloud that shudders quietly over the island as they idle on land. Anna, so bored she has begun to play irresponsible tricks on her friends and loved ones by claiming to have come within proximity of a shark, seems to be asking for it, and indeed, It answers, and she abruptly disappears, triggering the alarm of her fellow island-loiterers, who then search for her earnestly and without results. It appears her dissipation was more profound than it appeared.

Whether the disappearance is literal or not can be puzzled over for hours – the whole film presents itself in a protracted state of meditative aimlessness, saying nothing, revealing nothing, doing nothing, really, but at the same time, expressing everything.

Some audiences don’t like to fill in the blanks provided by a film, but what is art if not a communication of sensibilities? How is the art to linger in the crevices of your brain if you’ve solved it, know it top to bottom, understand it thoroughly? Film is a medium that is too often used as vulgar diversion, and not enough as a means of refinement. How is one to hear God without silence and stillness (the two things American audiences find utterly anathema when sitting down to watch a movie)?

One might say, after watching Claudia guiltily succumb to Sandro’s affections only to see him cheating on her with a prostitute late in the film, that the disappearance of Anna earlier was not literal, but symbolic of the manner in which men and women, after growing tired with their current lover, lose sight of them. I think the mystery is part of the fascination of Antonioni’s film, a haunting hypothesis that the more insolent a person is in broadcasting their dissatisfaction, how bored they are by existence, the sooner existence will let them know how bored it is of them.


Grade: A+

Spartacus (1960)

“The script could have been improved in the course of shooting, but it wasn’t. Kirk [Douglas] was the producer. He and Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter, and Edward Lewis, the executive producer, had everything their way.”
-Stanley Kubrick
Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography

I watched Spartacus for one reason and one reason alone: out of obligation to finish viewing every single one of Stanley Kubrick’s 12 available features (his first, Fear and Desire (1953) has never been released on video). I’m happy to say it was more compelling than I had imagined and despite the worrisome quote above, basically a success, though one that feels a little dated. Kirk Douglas is best in the first Act of the film, when he silently anguishes in a subterranean holding cell for slaves being trained to fight as gladiators for Lentalus Batiatus (the great Peter Ustinov), a man who is less nasty in lording over his doomed than Oliver Reed’s gnarled Proximo in Gladiator, but still cheerfully pitiless. There is a powerful and moving moment when Kirk Douglas’s eponymous hero is beaten in a impromptu gladiatorial battle by Draba (Woody Strode), a tall fearsome black slave.


Draba is given the thumbs down by Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) and his female companion, but instead of plunging his trident into Spartacus’s throat, Draba hurls it at Crassus and leaps up to the balcony where the royals spectate, only to be incapacitated by a spear, and then brutally slashed by Crassus, sacrificing his life for human decency. It is a devastating moment of noble heroism that is all the more effective for transpiring without bluntly informing us of how noble it was.

Unlike, say, a crucial scene near the end, when the captured Spartacus talks to his loyal soldier and friend, Antoninus (Tony Curtis) outside the gates of Crassus’s fortress.

Antoninus: “Could we have won, Spartacus? Could we ever have won?”

Spartacus: “Just by fighting them, we won something.”

This exchange and the many others where characters talk incessantly, faces shining while violins play, about F-R-E-E-D-O-M is not too far removed from the platitudes of Braveheart, and if the screenplay of the film had been written by Kubrick (he wrote, or co-wrote all of his other films, including Lolita, for which he went uncredited), such clichéd aphorisms would have been excised. As would the mawkish romance between Spartacus and Varinia (Jean Simmons), who frolic in a meadow in one scene while warm gooey music strums insufferably.

Spartacus: I’m free. And what do I know? I don’t even know how to read.

Varinia: You know things that can’t be taught.

Spartacus: I know nothing. Nothing! And I want to know. I want to. I want to know.

Varinia: Know what?

Spartacus: …I want to know all about you. Every line…every curve. I want to know every part of you. Every beat of your heart.

No doubt Stanley Kubrick was in pain when it came time to shoot this scene. I was in pain watching it. Again, Spartacus was the one film on which Kubrick had no involvement in preplanning, notably in crafting the screenplay. That is not to say that Dalton Trumbo’s dialogue is without merit; on the contrary, there is a wealth of it. There is the relief of Charles Laughton’s cynical, decadent old Gracchus, who when informed by Peter Ustinov’s Batiatus that he’s “…found something I never had with all my wealth…dignity,” says, “In Rome, dignity shortens life, even more surely than disease.”

Much credit should go to Saul Bass. Bass is the most famous graphic designer in film history for his revolutionary opening title sequences, often combining animation and live action to create energetic film credits which sucked the viewer into a film in a way that had never been done before. His most famous sequences are the ones in The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. While the one he designed for Spartacus is not one of his most dynamic, his contributions to the film went beyond title design. He scouted locations, worked on set design, and single-handedly blueprinted the battle scenes of the film. “He storyboarded the scene in which the slaves break down the fence of the gladiator school and originated the concept of the slaves’ using the fence as a weapon” (LoBrutto, 171). He also was responsible for thinking up the ingenious concept of the flaming logs that Spartacus’s army roll down the hill at the charging Romans. Spartacus has the look and the impact of many different collaborators’ achievements and failures being stirred together in the same pot, which gives it the ultimate, vaguely dissatisfying feeling of not cohering into one visionary whole.

Spartacus has many of Kubrick’s stylistic touches, but the actual story has zero: no subversive humor, no lack of sentimentality, no wicked perversity. The film does end mostly tragic and carries an inexorable gloom, but it has a generic sort of pessimism, glum, without Kubrick’s impish gallows humor. Another massive deficiency is the lighting and photography – reading about Kubrick on the set of Spartacus, it is clear that he showed a once in a lifetime complacency about the film he was working on. In Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, he writes, “Although Kubrick was under the enormous pressure of an epic production and having to cope with ubiquitous power struggles, his disengagement from a film that wasn’t really his and his inbred sense of dark humor helped move him through the project.” While he was uncompromising about many things, the long takes, calling for scenes to be covered in every possible angle, the shooting ratio (the ratio between the total duration of footage shot for a film and the footage which results from its final cut), he did not show his characteristic attention to the lighting as he had in The Killing and Paths of Glory. This could have been a result of the open hostility from Spartacus director of photography, Russell Metty, who was heard to say, “Let’s get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off the crane” (LoBrutto, 185). There was much in-fighting between the two on the set, all of which Kubrick endured without raising his voice or becoming angry, another sign of his disengagement from Spartacus. Anyone who has watched Vivian Kubrick’s 35-minute documentary detailing the making of The Shining, has witnessed Stanley Kubrick being disquietingly irascible with Shelley Duvall.

He just didn’t care as much, and it shows. There isn’t a hint of the brilliant Expressionistic lighting of The Killing and Paths of Glory, the very thing that made those films so astonishing. In Spartacus, the photography is adequate, but not particularly interesting to look at: the daylight scenes are too bright and the night scenes are too murky. Indeed, Spartacus has the least impressive cinematography of the 11 Kubrick films I’ve seen. Considered alone, it is a fine handsome epic, but among Kubrick’s oeuvre, it is an unfortunate weak spot.


Grade: B