"Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much." - Orson Welles
Michelangelo Antonioni directs "Michelangelo's Gaze", a fifteen minute short film alternatively known as "Eye to Eye", "Michelangelo and Eye(I)" and "The Gaze of Michelangelo". Each title has the same double meaning: the film consists of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni watching a statue by Italian Renaissance Man Michelangelo Buonarroti, the great painter, poet, sculptor, architect and engineer of the High Renaissance. In other words, the film's about a Michelangelo watching a Michelangelo who's watching a Michelangelo.
Interestingly, both the Michelangelo statue – a marble sculpture of Moses – and the real Michelangelo Antonioni have been "restored" by science and digital technology. Having recently suffered a stroke and unable to walk, speak or see, Antonioni uses Computer Generated Imagery to "enable" himself to walk one last time. Similarly, a restoration project has recently been completed on Michelangelo's five hundred year old statue. End result: two Michelangelos restored by modern technology and in each other's presence.
But the film goes beyond the ability of art, technology and imagination to transcend limitations (be they temporal or physical). It begins with Antonioni entering St Peter In Chains Church, just off of one of central Rome's busiest streets. He hobbles across our screen like a world-weary cowboy, his hands at his sides like a gunslinger ready to down his next opponent. As Antonioni's feeble body comes to a rest, he's drawn face to face with Michelangelo's Moses, his adversary or perhaps kindred spirit. The two rivals lock eyes and the battle begins.
What follows is an intimate dance of light and shadow. Close ups and medium shots of Antonioni are inter-cut with close ups and medium shots of the statue. This ballet builds and builds until something odd happens: the statue seems to be scrutinising Antonioni as much as Antonioni scrutinises it. This theme – the way facts/objects/truths change when under observation – can be found throughout Antonioni's filmography, but here there's a strangely melancholic tone.
As the film unfolds, Antonioni counterpoints the strength, the virility, the masculinity, the power of this magnificent statue, with the silence of the church, the faint hum of sacred music, and of course the wrinkles of Antonioni's own face, the sound of his feeble footsteps, tortured coughing and laboured breaths. The film forces us to confront the fleshy materiality of Antonioni, his dying body, his bespectacled eyes and dead tongue. In this way the film is at once about the temporality of the artist and the longing for an immortality through art. The artist anticipates his departure, but clings to the meagre hope that he, or his gaze, may be preserved through the artifacts he leaves behind. We recall Welles' "F For Fake".
The second half of the film watches as Antonioni's hands feel the sensuous folds of the Moses statue. In haunting, subtle, slow movements, Antonioni reaches out and feels the marble, both Michelangelos seemingly merging for a moment. Soft liver-spotted flesh on solid stone, it's as though two artists reach out through eternity and touch each other; time collapses, the sixteenth century, present and future conflating.
Antonioni then walks away from the statue, slowly covering the long distance back toward the church entrance. We think the director's movements are being contrasted with the stagnant statue. But the real Antonioni is wheelchair bound. His motions are an illusion, a bit of CGI trickery, a "misconception" that's mirrored to the earlier dance of the statue, in which clever editing allows Moses to himself come alive. The computer aided walk and camera aided revival coalesce into something ghostly: all is dead, dust, but through art these cripples live. Dance. Breath. Move. But there's nothing romantic in this assertion. The film is spiritual only in its absolutely, profoundly cold "deadness". Moses lives, but only in death. The stones are cold, white, pale and bloodless. They are alive in the same way fossils and dinosaur bones are alive; bleached, sterilised and quarantined.
Before exiting the hall, Antonioni pauses for a moment and gives one last backward glance at Michelangelo's Moses. He lingers mournfully on namesake, before walking off into a shaft of light, like some corpse being lifted up into heaven. The camera remains in the church as its master disappears, the machine caught in some ephemeral space. It has to remain here, of course. A digital camera trapped in the alcoves of an ancient Church, left behind for future Michelangelo's to take up the challenge.
The film's shot in ivory whites and limestone-and-chalk coloured shadows. In more ways than one, Antonio's filming his death, the film his gravestone. The choice of location is significant. Michelangelo was hired to sculpt this statue for Pope Julius' tomb. This would be Antonioni's last film before his death. This would be his own tomb.
10/10 - Worth two viewings.
Michelangelo Antonioni directs "Michelangelo's Gaze", a fifteen minute short film alternatively known as "Eye to Eye", "Michelangelo and Eye(I)" and "The Gaze of Michelangelo". Each title has the same double meaning: the film consists of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni watching a statue by Italian Renaissance Man Michelangelo Buonarroti, the great painter, poet, sculptor, architect and engineer of the High Renaissance. In other words, the film's about a Michelangelo watching a Michelangelo who's watching a Michelangelo.
Interestingly, both the Michelangelo statue – a marble sculpture of Moses – and the real Michelangelo Antonioni have been "restored" by science and digital technology. Having recently suffered a stroke and unable to walk, speak or see, Antonioni uses Computer Generated Imagery to "enable" himself to walk one last time. Similarly, a restoration project has recently been completed on Michelangelo's five hundred year old statue. End result: two Michelangelos restored by modern technology and in each other's presence.
But the film goes beyond the ability of art, technology and imagination to transcend limitations (be they temporal or physical). It begins with Antonioni entering St Peter In Chains Church, just off of one of central Rome's busiest streets. He hobbles across our screen like a world-weary cowboy, his hands at his sides like a gunslinger ready to down his next opponent. As Antonioni's feeble body comes to a rest, he's drawn face to face with Michelangelo's Moses, his adversary or perhaps kindred spirit. The two rivals lock eyes and the battle begins.
What follows is an intimate dance of light and shadow. Close ups and medium shots of Antonioni are inter-cut with close ups and medium shots of the statue. This ballet builds and builds until something odd happens: the statue seems to be scrutinising Antonioni as much as Antonioni scrutinises it. This theme – the way facts/objects/truths change when under observation – can be found throughout Antonioni's filmography, but here there's a strangely melancholic tone.
As the film unfolds, Antonioni counterpoints the strength, the virility, the masculinity, the power of this magnificent statue, with the silence of the church, the faint hum of sacred music, and of course the wrinkles of Antonioni's own face, the sound of his feeble footsteps, tortured coughing and laboured breaths. The film forces us to confront the fleshy materiality of Antonioni, his dying body, his bespectacled eyes and dead tongue. In this way the film is at once about the temporality of the artist and the longing for an immortality through art. The artist anticipates his departure, but clings to the meagre hope that he, or his gaze, may be preserved through the artifacts he leaves behind. We recall Welles' "F For Fake".
The second half of the film watches as Antonioni's hands feel the sensuous folds of the Moses statue. In haunting, subtle, slow movements, Antonioni reaches out and feels the marble, both Michelangelos seemingly merging for a moment. Soft liver-spotted flesh on solid stone, it's as though two artists reach out through eternity and touch each other; time collapses, the sixteenth century, present and future conflating.
Antonioni then walks away from the statue, slowly covering the long distance back toward the church entrance. We think the director's movements are being contrasted with the stagnant statue. But the real Antonioni is wheelchair bound. His motions are an illusion, a bit of CGI trickery, a "misconception" that's mirrored to the earlier dance of the statue, in which clever editing allows Moses to himself come alive. The computer aided walk and camera aided revival coalesce into something ghostly: all is dead, dust, but through art these cripples live. Dance. Breath. Move. But there's nothing romantic in this assertion. The film is spiritual only in its absolutely, profoundly cold "deadness". Moses lives, but only in death. The stones are cold, white, pale and bloodless. They are alive in the same way fossils and dinosaur bones are alive; bleached, sterilised and quarantined.
Before exiting the hall, Antonioni pauses for a moment and gives one last backward glance at Michelangelo's Moses. He lingers mournfully on namesake, before walking off into a shaft of light, like some corpse being lifted up into heaven. The camera remains in the church as its master disappears, the machine caught in some ephemeral space. It has to remain here, of course. A digital camera trapped in the alcoves of an ancient Church, left behind for future Michelangelo's to take up the challenge.
The film's shot in ivory whites and limestone-and-chalk coloured shadows. In more ways than one, Antonio's filming his death, the film his gravestone. The choice of location is significant. Michelangelo was hired to sculpt this statue for Pope Julius' tomb. This would be Antonioni's last film before his death. This would be his own tomb.
10/10 - Worth two viewings.