Much has been said about the advent of the new style of artistic production in the early part of the twentieth century, a movement labelled "modernism". The artists of this period were reacting against the conventions that preceded them, yet modernism was much more than this. It was a way of expressing a new, fragmented, unclear way of life, a chaotic world view brought on by such devastating factors as the Industrial Revolution and World War I. Life could no longer be understood through traditional means of expression. What people such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Pablo Picasso invented was a new and challenging modern language, one that could better depict the chaos of modern life. It was also around this time that the new invention of cinema was evolving, and people such as Dali, Léger and Deren were creating their own languages in this cinema. Yet it was not until the late 1950's that the language of modernism would be inscribed fully into narrative film, with the arrival of the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. In his work, Antonioni creates a language out of silence, a language based on images and not on words. The difficulty of communication, a subject dealt with in detail throughout his career, mirrors the difficulty the viewer has in comprehending Antonioni's own cinematic language, a language which communicates the alienation and fragmentation of modern life. Since his language mirrors modern life, it is fraught with ambiguity, confusion, inconsistency and incompleteness -- form and content become part of the same language system.

The modernist movement is a search for meaning within things that cannot be understood. This might seem to be a lost cause, a cause that admits defeat before it even begins. Yet, even though our surroundings and our inner lives cannot be understood, the language of modernism (with some work) can -- and it is here where the exhilaration of modernism emerges. Two things must be taken into consideration when dealing with modernist texts:

First, a sensibility that understands and accepts the condition of psychological chaos and of the chaotic uncertainty in the external world that generates such internal confusion and dissonance. Second, and equally important, . . . modernism assumes that this first condition can be and has been captured and transformed into a viable system of communication. (Malamud 26)

Another important aspect of the language of modernism is its difficulty, due to the ambiguousness of its signifying practice. Again, there are two reasons for this:

Simplicity in language seems insincere, naïve, irreverent to those trapped in the midst of the dizzying modernist vortex, and generally irrelevant to the sense of external complexity that pervades the modern age. Second, . . . logic and reason, which follow from simple and straight forward language, can be obstacles to valid kinds of experience and imagination. (Malamud 8)

There is certainly a difficulty in understanding any particular Antonioni text, in that he defines within them a cinematic language all his own, a language that lies only within the bounds of the text. The difficulty in interpreting the text formally becomes a significant part of the content of Antonioni's films as well, for it is exactly this problem of communication that he endeavours to address. There is little dialogue in his films, and, as Chatman points out, "even when there is dialogue in Antonioni's films, there is no guarantee that it will ensure communication" (89). Zabriskie Point opens with a meeting of student radicals which eventually dissolves due to a breakdown in communication between the different factions. In L'avventura, Claudia watches a young couple on a train, engaged in what seems to be simple, innocent flirting. She laughs at them, realising the "surfaceness" and the banality of their discourse, yet when they start to talk of love, she becomes sullen, realising that the emotion of love can never be communicated through verbal language. In Il Deserto Rosso, Giuliana has a conversation with a foreign sailor; the fact that neither of them understand each other's language seems irrelevant to them. It would seem that vagueness of communication, whether it is in a tongue we understand or not, passes unnoticed through our daily lives.

Antonioni's cinematic language, then, relies not on words to communicate meaning to the viewer, but on images. Blow-Up provides the perfect analogy for the way Antonioni wishes images to function in his films. The sequence in which Thomas, the fashion photographer protagonist of the film, increasingly "blows up" a series of photographs, has no dialogue whatsoever. The photographic images are, in effect, cinematic images; Antonioni wishes the audience to pay attention to the language of the image, and not the language of words. The images say much more than any words could. However, just like the humans in his films that can never say what they mean (or vice versa), images are not definitive and precise either. Does Thomas really capture a murder on film? Is there really a gun-holding hand sticking out of the bushes, or is it just shadow-play, a trick of photography? The final sequence of the film plays off this unstable nature of communicable "truth" within the photographic image: a band of "hippies" plays tennis with an imaginary ball, a ball which Thomas is invited to toss back to the players when it is shot over the fence. "Placing his camera, his source of communication with the real, on the grass, Thomas throws the imaginary tennis ball back onto the court. At this moment the sound of the ball joins the illusion" (Lyons 170). The audience may not see a ball, but the characters seem to, and the soundtrack seems to verify its presence. Does it really matter if the ball is there or not? The point, then, is that images are just as open to interpretation, just as fallible and unreliable as words are when it comes to their communicative powers.

Antonioni's trepidation when it comes to relying on verbal language is a direct result of his modernist tendencies, tendencies born from the modernist mistrust of an intelligible and comprehensive surface depiction of reality. Mistrust of an outside, understandable world results in an alienation from this reality, an alienation Antonioni's characters have exhibited throughout his career. Modern life has become much too oppressive for Antonioni. Man-made landscapes are foreign, lacking any empathy for the humans who happen to inhabit them; they are spiritually and physically empty. Think of the cold, oppressive and vacant buildings of L'avventura; the polluted factory "desert" in Il Deserto Rosso, with its dead colours and desolate decay; the commodified city of Zabriskie Point, choked in its own urban clutter of billboard signs and endless freeways. The city of London in Blow-Up serves to stand for all cities, in their most oppressive modern state:

As [Antonioni] said at the time he was filming, "I don't want to make a film about London. The same events could happen in New York, maybe Stockholm, and certainly in Paris." In other words, it is the ambience of the "modern city" and not the particular one that is crucial. In addition to depicting war protesters, mimes and derelicts which represent certain social elements of the international urban population, Antonioni conveys a sense of the anonymity which the city breeds. (Rifkin 31)

This place at which the narrative dies, at which the camera becomes distracted, is often a place in which another, non-narrative interest develops . . . These are places which are openly non-narrativised, of a pictorial and visual interest which suddenly takes hold, causes the narrative to err, to wander, momentarily to dissolve. They are among the most interesting places in Antonioni's films, at which everything and nothing takes place. (Rohdie 51)

Possibly the greatest defining motif in modernist art is its incompleteness. No narrative is ever neatly wrapped up in a bow and presented as a complete package for the viewer, and the "meaning" of cinematic form can never be definitively interpreted in Antonioni's films. "The language of modernism may often seem to be fraught with incompleteness" because "completion, the presentation that is objective and convincing for the senses, may no longer be considered necessary or even sufficient" (Malamud 19- 20). Incompleteness furnishes modernism with a unique sense of urgency and presence:

Incompleteness augments the effect of temporal immediacy . . . The language is unfinished because that which it describes is still unfolding. This is a triumph of the language of modernism: it can capture more clearly the sensibility of external life. Whereas the old language could depict only that which was dead (that is, completed), the new language expands its boundaries to include and affirm the incomplete. (Malamud 20)

A common but mistaken view is that these writers simply give up plot -- or, to use the common phrase, that "nothing happens" in their novels. This simply means however that nothing significant happens. There are no "important" events by the ordinary standards of life. (Chatman 74)

Along with the incompleteness of narrative is the incompleteness of image. The two are related, but it is here that Antonioni displays his mastery over the relation between the shot and the narrative information it reveals. The perfect example of this mastery is the seven minute long final sequence in The Passenger.

The shot starts as a painfully slow track from inside a hotel room toward a window facing the square jut outside. The protagonist (Locke) lies on the bed. The shot moves to the bars on the exterior side of the window, passes right through them, and then pans 180 degrees around the square until it returns to the window, now looking inside from the outside. Is Locke now dead? Was he murdered during the camera's incredible circular journey?

Each figure the camera identifies during this long take is given equal emphasis: a car, an old man, a dog, a boy throwing stones, the unnamed female protagonist of the film, two black men, a police car which rushes up, the exit of the black men. Each figure or event is presented in an "objective" fashion; that is to say, the events and figures that would seem to be most important to the narrative are not emphasised any more than the dog or the boy. In this way, then, the shot is "incomplete" -- it does not clarify all the action going on for its duration. It is up to the viewer to make the causal connections and piece together the narrative. Is it the two black men who kill Locke, or is it the anonymous girl? Why are all these people here? What are their off-screen actions? These questions cannot fully be answered, a testament to the incompleteness of narrative that is directly related to an "incompleteness" of form.

Modernism has a language all its own, a language translated into film by Antonioni. Many before him used the medium of film to express their own particular world views, yet only Antonioni created a whole new language in film based on modernist alienation and incompleteness. It is a language that owes more to silence than it does to verbal language, more to stasis than it does to action. As with all modern texts, it requires a concentrated effort on the part of the spectator if it is to be understood at all, a concentrated effort to decipher the embedded codes and motifs of the language. Yet, even when we do know the codes, recognise the patterns and the order that seems to be born out of his chaos, we are still never quite sure what Antonioni "means" in his films. There is no one-to-one relationship of signifier and signified. Every moment in his films generates emotions in the viewer, emotions at once simple yet contradictory, ranging from boredom to exhilaration, and stopping everywhere in between. Antonioni's films are not just artefacts -- they are texts, in the true sense of the word. They interact with us long after their running time is finished. They are incomplete in both form and content because they are incomplete within us as well. They never finished working on us, through us, and in us.

Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni; or, The Surface of the World. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

Lyons, Robert. Michelangelo Antonioni's Neo-realism: A World View. New York: Arno Press, 1973.

Malamud, Randy. The Language of Modernism. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989.

Rifkin, Ned. Antonioni's Visual Language. Ann Arbour, Michigan: UMI, 1982.

Rohdie, Sam. Antonioni. London: BFI, 1990.