‘The gods will have a great time’

Wouldn’t it be quite something if Ray embraced Fellini’s quirky style, and the latter went to rural Bengal to shoot a film? Or if Kurosawa made a De Sica-like neo-realist film, and the Italian director went samurai? The gods would have a great time!

Antonioni, like Bergman, was a product of a violent era of war, devastation, economic upheavals and rapidly changing social relationships. The two masters dealt with alienation of the individual and the collapse of family ties in post-war Europe and their worldview was informed with a strong element of nostalgia, even perhaps romanticism, but their quests were completely divergent.

Bergman was firmly rooted in his universe of Catholic morality; Antonioni drew his inspiration from Italian neo-realism and captured the crisis that his society faced during the painstaking rebuilding process. While Antonioni (like Fellini) often seemed to ridicule aspects of faith, Bergman simply questioned Catholic morality and God.

In Antonioni’s Il Grido, the male protagonist, drifting aimlessly away from his town and the woman he loves, kills himself in the end. The director seems to suggest that the man does not need to live anymore. In L’Avventura, as two characters talk, their words are drowned out by the sea waves. Communication, Antonioni suggests, has become redundant. This nihilism separated Antonioni from Bergman, though both captured the sense of doom and gloom that enveloped a Europe struggling to emerge from the after-effects of war.

From L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse to Blowup and Zabriskie Point, all made in the span of a remarkable decade, Antonioni sustained his inimitable ability to conjure up astounding cinematic moments. In Blowup, he came up with the incredible mock-tennis scene: the game is played without racquets and a ball.

I admire European cinema of that era. Nothing can compare with it. Contemporary market forces have engendered a cinema too simplistic. Even when Antonioni made a murder mystery like Blowup, it had layers.

Was that why Antonioni and Bergman, in the last years of their lives, did not find takers among people who controlled the industry’s purse-strings? Bergman made his last film (Fanny and Alexander) over two decades ago and retired to the island of Faro. Antonioni could not have made Beyond the Clouds (mid 1990s) without the support of Wim Wenders. That probably says something about the world we live and work in. Antonioni will be happier up there.

The writer is an eminent filmmaker