Three Brief Portraits of Monica Vitti (1931–2022)

L’AVVENTURA: MONICA VITTI AS IMAGE

We are returned once more to the first form of the any-space-whatever: disconnected space. The connection of the parts of space is not given, because it can come about only from the subjective point of view of a character who is, nevertheless, absent, or has even disappeared, not simply out of frame, but passed into the void.

— Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

The counterfeit premise: a boating party embarks from Sicily, safe beneath the transparent warmth of the Mediterranean sun, coordinates set on a daylight cruise around the Tyrrhenian Sea; the crime occurs out of nowhere, ex nihilo, after which the survivors wander aimlessly between the rocky Aeolian Islands, where the old world of reality has suddenly come undone.

There are few accolades that have not already been lavished on Michelangelo Antonioni's L’Avventura (1960), the first entry in the director’s so-called Eros trilogy. His cinematic tour de force of the Italian leisure class tore asunder the very mechanics of Edison’s movie camera and bestowed upon it a belated obituary; and, rather more cryptically, it removed the bicycle, that iconic instrument of movement, from Italian neorealism and “replace[d] [it] with a specific weight of time operating inside characters and excavating them from within,” writes Gilles Deleuze. L’Avventura is an action film without activity, only motility, only affectivity. Yet, despite Antonioni’s creation of a postwar masterpiece of anomie, femininity, idleness, interiority, and silence, there remain few vivid portraits of the female figure who persistently haunted the director’s dreams, the erstwhile Roman actress Maria Luisa Ceciarelli — more accurately, the cinematic image of Monica Vitti.

In the prologue to L’Avventura, the melancholic Anna (Lea Massari) bluffs her way into the camera’s good graces before evaporating inexplicably into the Mediterranean scenery. Vitti’s role as Claudia appears initially as a paltry plastic device, a beautiful caryatid used to buttress the story of Anna and fiancé Sandro’s (Gabriele Ferzetti) passionless affair. When Anna’s disappearance is realized, a search party meanders around the barren Lisca Bianca Island. Behind them, Antonioni’s deep focus on the darkening horizon suggests the imminent death of cinema, a heliocentric medium that had become the 20th century’s second sun. This death is prefigured by Sandro’s earlier musings to Anna: “Believe me, words are becoming less and less necessary. They create misunderstandings.” But Anna’s disappearance does not dominate the search party’s attention for long. The disappearance is, in fact, quite incidental. Rather, it is, according to film critic Pascal Bonitzer, “the disappearance of the disappearance of Anna (which, however, does not mean her return),” that confounds and disturbs those left to wander in the world’s waning light. Unlike traditional cinema’s solar gaze, whose illumination ordered the components of the film image — setting from setting, body from body, self from other — Antonioni’s vision is of a crepuscular gaze toward the dusky horizon which is, simultaneously, the horizon’s reciprocal disappearance into the image.

This scopic reciprocity condenses in the figure of Claudia, who bears witness to the unsolvable disappearance of the disappearance of Anna and mourns the death of a cinematic visuality and world that she can no longer inhabit. As Anna’s confidante, Claudia’s adventure commences with her friend’s bewildering disappearance and her own budding desire for Sandro, but as Vitti — the living image within Antonioni’s cinema — it begins with a mysterious rupture in the extradiegetic frame, which opens onto an off-screen void. Its hypnotic effects will appear over Vitti’s face in a lingering expression of estrangement as she gazes beyond the camera toward some unreachable vanishing point.

Because Anna’s afterlife, the afterlife in L’Avventura, is viewed principally through Claudia, the viewer may be tempted to declare Antonioni’s cinema a meditation on eschatology, the end of times. However, the director’s vision of Claudia’s transformation is that of a world approaching a descending asymptote of mortality — a sun that never fully sets. For Antonioni, the end never arrives. His imagining of Vitti lies in the ecstasy of mourning the human after death has passed into silence, desire left to its own devices. “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts,” Nietzsche muses in Twilight of the Idols, presaging Sandro’s words to Anna (and much of Antonioni’s vision for a posthuman cinema): “There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

L’Avventura’s iconoclastic shattering of cinema could not be better expressed than in the counterexample of director Ingmar Bergman, the archduke and high priest of Swedish cinema. Bergman’s strict adherence to theatrical conventions was legendary, having staged the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov for decades. He also once remarked, presumably half as melodrama, the other feigned ignorance: “I don’t feel anything for L’Avventura […] only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.” Bergman refused to shed the medieval vestments of the Old Masters. Even in his Grand Guignol cinema of pestilence, torture, and incest, Bergman could never envision desire in a posthuman world (that is, beyond the symbolic apparatus of the frame), but only dramatize it. In Bergman’s camera, Claudia would have suffered a melodramatic death by chronic illness or murder, rather than bear witness to the murder of reality.

“A few days ago, the thought that Anna might be dead made me feel like I was dying too,” Claudia whispers to her friend Patrizia near the film’s end. “Now I don’t even cry. I’m afraid that she might be alive. Everything is becoming so hideously easy. Even forgetting pain.”

In Antonioni’s camera, Vitti’s Claudia is not forced into the role of sacrament in the long tradition of Bergman’s metaphysical games. She is neither a theatrical symbol of love, despair, or death, which can be sublated or erased through the resolution of the film’s narrative; nor is she mere flesh, a physical embodiment of some religious mystery, translated through the intercession of an auteur who will speak for her. Rather, in L’Avventura, Claudia is an image at the edge of the frame, vacillating between a desire for presence and the seduction of disappearance. Her gaze remains fixed on the horizon, always looking for what is beyond it. But however she tries, she will never obtain the complete satisfaction of absence, for she must remain a witness to the inexplicable disappearances of others.



This is the cinematic image of Monica Vitti, adrift in the in-between.

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LA NOTTE: MONICA VITTI AS FLESH

I no longer have fantasies, only recollections. 

— Giovanni Potano, La Notte

The Pirelli Building. The Torre Breda. The Torre Galfa. As the camera descends on Stazione Centrale, Milan’s surrounding skyscrapers reflect the sun’s rays in a dizzying, urban kaleidoscope. The Pierollone displays across its windows a panorama of the city like a long spool of 35mm film stock. This is Antonioni’s setting for La Notte (1961), a Po Valley of russet plains rebuilt in the monochrome and steel of the region’s boom economico, where a body-of-images and the images of bodies blend in a constellation of light, silhouette, and flesh. La Notte is an anomaly within Antonioni’s Eros trilogy, and his most baroque work — a mocking divertissement or entr’acte between two masterpieces. It is also a cinematic fantasy of interiors and exteriors, light and dark. Within the film’s myriad reflections is his muse and lover Monica Vitti, whose character, Valentina Gherardini, is transformed from a collection of fleshy surfaces into a sensuous body of desire.



To paraphrase — and transpose — Roland Barthes’s celebrated ode to the face of Greta Garbo, it is in La Notte that the flesh of Vitti represents an absolute state of the face when it could be neither reached nor renounced. Antonioni’s second film portrait of Vitti embodies a message that Barthes would relay to the Italian director some years after La Notte: “Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.” It is through Antonioni’s mechanical vigilance that the body of Vitti, like the face of desire or the flesh of sunlight — pure, invisible, and irradiant — is captured and projected in monochrome across a Milanese backdrop.

Yet, in La Notte, desire remains immured in a new kind of urban space, one built from an anomic architecture that forms the postwar cityscape. Through its plexus of steel, glass, and concrete the dissolute writer Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and his melancholic wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) navigate Milan. Their path coils inward like a spiral from the city’s wide boulevards, parks, and war-torn ruins toward an elaborate, and fantastical, domestic interior: the palatial home of Milanese industrialist Gherardini (Vincenzo Corbella), who hosts a nighttime, fête galante where the city’s elite carouse, drink, and swim. Within this private pleasure dome, the couple meets Vitti’s Valentina, the disconsolate scion of the Gherardini family. With her luminescent skin and cropped, raven hair, Valentina appears like both a modern pariolina girl and a baroque muse from a previous century — in fact, she bears an uncanny resemblance to John Singer Sargent’s scandalous Madame Gautreau. Unlike L’avventura, Vitti’s role in La Notte is one of a deuteragonist, a specter, an apparition that haunts the center of Antonioni’s maze and perhaps, appropriately, does not venture beyond the shadowy enclosure of the Gherardini estate.

“Momma says scribbling indoors all day ruins one’s complexion,” Valentina claims archly. When she is first introduced on-screen, she is surrounded by walls frescoed with leafy, Roman landscapes and mirrored in multiple, glass reflections so that both she and her observer Giovanni become dizzying, double images within a labyrinth. Antonioni’s evening palette reveals Valentina’s smallest gestures in a Gothic black-and-white as she wanders about the house’s lamplit interior with a nervous listlessness. She writhes on the checkerboard floor, smokes a cigarette, poses on the bed. The director’s fluid camera follows intently behind Valentina, observing her body, mirroring Giovanni’s erotic fascination and that of the viewer. Her exposed flesh is captured in sensuous movement: a glimpse of her slender legs, the naked valley of her armpit, the perfect symmetry of her smokey, Mandarin eyelids quivering ever so coquettishly.

But Valentina’s character is not merely an architectural conceit. Much like the baroque paintings of Milanese artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in which human figures are composed of a cornucopia of food, and the phantom pleasures of taste and smell often overwhelm the eye with a synesthetic profligacy, Vitti’s body evokes a gustatory fantasy, an expression of the consumptive imperative of desire — kalophagia. Her svelte trunk, lineaments, and limbs, appear as supple helices of flesh, like dishes served for a gourmand. With the black spaghetti straps of her cocktail dress slithering along her arms, her bare shoulders betray Antonioni's gray-scale images and burst with imaginary colors, like the hues of pralines and crème, fried cotoletta alla milanese or buttery panettone. The camera descends from the svelte neck to the rounded slope of her bosom, tracing the fine hairs and freckles with the tip of its ocular nose until it begins to suffer a delirium. When she leans against a wall to daub her neck with a vial of perfume, the screen exudes a phantom aroma.

Overwhelmed by desire, Giovanni reaches out and attempts to kiss her. “Don’t you see?” Valentina trills and spirits away from his desperate caress. “It’s ridiculous.” Quick flashes of her backless gown reveal a tiny mole upon her right side, no more than a centimeter in diameter and well-concealed along the crest of her shoulder blade. Its peculiar beauty momentarily eclipses her body like a shadow projected on a white scrim. The camera spies another on the outer curvature of her left breast near the fringe of her décolletage and then the last of the triptych budding on the edge of her sternum perfectly equidistant from each breast. Their delicate shapes appear to have been fashioned by an artisan, architect, or mathematician to imitate the imperfect perfections of nature. Antonioni lenses these painterly surfaces with a muted delight, incapable or unwilling to tarnish them with too much dialogue. Instead, his camera seems transfixed by cutaneous fantasies of her body.

Valentina eludes Giovanni’s caresses just as Vitti resists the gustatory urges of the camera. Unlike L’avventura’s Claudia, who poses motionless against the Sicilian landscape for Antonioni’s extended, deep focus shots, Valentina paces, circles, or recedes deeper into the house’s darkness. Are these gestures of refusal purely narrative or part of an extra-narrative pas de deux? Is Valentina’s character at the behest of Antonioni’s fantasies alone, or has Vitti, the emerging star of a new Italian cinema, created a more defiant Valentina from a frictious collaboration with her director/lover? In the illusionist traditions of the baroque, the answer is manifold and indecipherable.

“You’ve exhausted me, the pair of you,” Valentina announces as her final verdict. Although her words are directed at the tortured Giovanni and Lidia, they are also undoubtedly intended for Antonioni himself and La Notte’s viewer. In the last moments of the scene, she retreats to a window where daybreak spreads over her like an aureole. Giovanni and Lidia turn to depart. The camera follows them now. Valentina switches off the lamps with her foot, plunging the room into darkness. The silent outline of Vitti’s body remains, the luscious surfaces of her flesh only visible in shadow.

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L’ECLISSE: MONICA VITTI AS MEDUSA

O Rome! From all your palms, dominion, bronze
And beauty, what was firm has fled. What once
Was fugitive maintains its permanence. 

— Robert Lowell, “The Ruins of Time”

In the opening scene of L’Eclisse (1962), the last entry in Antonioni’s Eros trilogy, Monica Vitti is introduced on-screen much the same way she last appeared in La Notte: standing in a shadowy room lit only by a pair of lamps, in front of a bank of velvet drapes drawn tight across a window. Her back is turned, shoulders demurely exposed in a black shift dress. Her hair, however, is blonde and coiffed in a flipped bob. She spins toward the camera and observes the capacious living room, overstuffed with books, paintings, and objets d’art, modern furniture, and appointments, all the domestic accoutrements of the nouveau riche. In exasperation, she peels back the drape slightly and gazes out a sliver of the window for a moment; the view is obscured by trees, leaving only a reflection of her disconsolate face in the glass. She collapses onto a nearby sofa in a tight ball, echoing the posture of a naïve child. When she finally summons the strength to throw open the curtains completely, the window reveals a modern, cycloptic tower looming over the middle-ground like a domineering eye.

In L’Eclisse, Antonioni trains his camera on the suburbs of Rome — capital of a civilization, an empire, and a political nightmare from which the country had slowly begun to reawaken. Antonioni moved to Rome at the beginning of the war, where he contributed briefly to Vittorio Mussolini’s fascist film journal Cinema before eventually joining the resistance movement in 1943. More than either of his previous films, L’Eclisse is haunted by the immense shadow of fascism, from its setting and grotesque architecture, courtesy of the city’s infamous EUR district, to its obsessive spotlight on technologies — cars and airplanes, electrical wires and telephones — to the naming of Vitti’s character, Vittoria (Victory), a moniker of special significance in fascist lore.

It is perhaps this explicit link to Italy’s collective trauma and shame that ensures Vittoria is the most elusive, and tormented, of Vitti’s triplet of saturnine gazers. More than Claudia or Valentina, Vittoria is an archetype of the postwar urbanite plagued by what Antonioni described as malattia dei sentimenti, or a “sickness in Eros.” Her lovers in L’Eclisse, Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) and Piero (Alain Delon), the intellectual and the speculative capitalist, respectively, are incapable of fathoming the depths of her malaise. Both become reduced, through her despairing gaze, to a set of distractions, her temporary playthings. “What can I say?” Vittoria laments to her friend early in the film. “There are times when holding a needle and thread, or a book, or a man — it’s all the same.” Only Antonioni’s camera seems to grasp the true profundity of her stoniness. Amid the film’s opening close-ups of a lamp, a fan, an elbow, a wrist, a bust, a painting of the city, and Vittoria’s high heels, Vittoria herself appears — at first — as yet another dream object assembled in the muzzy aftermath of fascism.



Vittoria's severity mirrors the uncanny setting of the Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR), the Roman district that provides L’Eclisse’s distinctive backdrop. EUR lay near the fascist-sponsored Via del Mare halfway between the capital and the ancient port city of Ostia. Its alien landscape was initially hatched in the 1930s by architect Marcello Piacentini under the supervision of Mussolini, who envisioned it as a monumental development for a new Roman Empire that would absorb all of Western history while spreading its influence across the continent. At its completion, EUR’s network of ribbed buildings and neoclassical temples would evoke the image of perfectly preserved skeletons rising out of the earth. But Mussolini’s grand ambitions for EUR were never fully realized due to the outbreak of the war. In the decade after Italy’s defeat, the district’s imperial aspirations were traded for a leafy suburb of municipal administration and finance offices adorned with middle-class housing and an artificial lake for promenading.

Three years before Mussolini ceremoniously planted the first cluster pine on the future site of EUR, futurist Filippo Marinetti underscored fascism’s grandiose, architectural ambitions when he claimed, in his manifesto on the Ethiopian Colonial War, that, “War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. […] War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.” Marinetti’s valorization of war as an aesthetic experience embraced an architectural reimagining of the world, one in which mechanical technologies ensured the diminution of classical time (time as dialectic, tradition, pause) into a singular, ecstatic moment — an ever-present nowness predicated on speed. This embellishment of modern space established ever-widening territories for military and artistic conquest.

“Time and Space died yesterday,” Marinetti famously writes in his original 1909 futurist manifesto. “We already live in the absolute, because we have created the eternal, omnipresent speed.” In futurism’s quest for immortality through war and speed, the world lapses into a condition of living death, within which art serves as a repetitive series of ecstatic death throes. But what survives in the aftermath of the death of time and space? Mussolini’s answer to this futurist riddle was the fascist states: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” With Mussolini’s increasing preference for the rival neoclassicist movement, Marinetti’s vision of an apocalyptic art was transformed into fascism’s fetish for Olympic spectacle and the decorative grotesque.

Perhaps the most controversial fascist art exhibition was the Milan Triennial of 1936, an international cause célèbre designed to legitimate Mussolini’s recent colonial expansion into Ethiopia. Among its highlights was Lucio Fontana’s ceramic sculpture Medusa, presented at the Triennial’s Salone della Vittoria (Hall of Victory). This work, alongside the works of painter Marcello Nizzoli and architect Edoardo Persico, was intended as a putative Greco-Roman trophy to Italy’s conquest. In reality, however, Fontana’s contorted effigy of Medusa’s face was a more equivocal emblem of fascism’s victories. In the classical account of Medusa, the notorious monster was born a figure of great beauty but was cursed for engaging in a sexual affair with Poseidon, after which she retreated to a deserted island near the garden of Hesperides — the land of twilight at the very edge of the world. There, she trained her withering visage upon any mortal man that sought her encounter. Medusa eventually became an exemplar of patriarchal subversion, sexual dissolution, and the cult of the goddess, all elements of Greco-Roman myth expunged by fascist disciples of the fatherland. Perhaps worst of all, Medusa’s transformative gaze turned male warriors into stone — not as monumental statues but as ignoble playthings, mere decor.

In L’Eclisse, Vittoria is just such a cursed cipher. Her almost mythic beauty, her stoniness, her sexual elusiveness, all of which had been elaborated previously in Antonioni’s focus on Vitti’s formal image or desiring body, are, in his third film, the attributes of a radical femininity by which she becomes the subject of her own gaze, the transformational figure of the Medusa. Vittoria's power, and simultaneous melancholia, prompts her desire for escape from the suffocating omnipresence of patriarchy, which looms over her like the concrete tower soaring above EUR’s suburban landscape. This world of confinement appears throughout L’Eclisse: in the acquisitive rituals of love, family, domesticity, and labor; in the ceaseless images of tower blocks, barred windows, electric wires, and contrails; in the accelerating temporalities of technology, from the reckless cars and airplanes penetrating the city at rapid speeds; in the speculative gambles won and lost on the Borsa trading floor from which Piero makes his dubious fortune.

What the fascists conceived as the mechanized splendor of the future, Vittoria yearns to reverse in the slow drifting of her Gorgonian gaze. Like the Medusa, her stare transforms her bombastic (male) lovers into ornaments, until they are no different from the impotent monuments and buildings that populate EUR’s landscape. “I feel like I’m in a foreign country,” Piero confesses to Vittoria as they laze in one of the neighborhood’s quaint, but desolate, parks. “Funny. That’s how I feel around you,” she smiles before instantly turning glum again.

Vittoria can also induce a sudden ossification of narrative time — what critic Christian Metz famously calls the temps mort (“dead time”) — in which the film momentarily turns in upon itself through Vittoria’s languid gaze, as she observes the phenomenon of time unfurling from its diegetic space, lingering over an image or character or scape that lay just at the edge of meaning. This culminates in L’Eclisse’s eight-minute denouement, in which Vittoria has left Piero’s apartment for the final time and wanders onto the busy street. She has her back to the camera, framed by a lattice of towering trees in an apparent restaging of the film’s opening scene. Yet, when she turns there is a different expression on her face, an inscrutable look of steely determination, grief, and elation, as if she is experiencing the first, terrifying presentiment of a sublime freedom. Vittoria peers into the distance for a moment longer, her face captured at a Dutch angle, before she exits from the frame. After her retreat, the film’s remainder is absorbed in an uncanny retracing of her travels through the suburban streets of EUR over the previous hour of screen time, repeating many of the same background characters and actions but without Vittoria or Piero. In the absence of her body to orient the film’s temporality and coordinate spaces, Antonioni’s camera seems to drift unmoored to various rhythms and along different vectors. Although Vittoria has vanished, her gaze persists in haunting the camera, as when a svelte blonde with a flipped bob steps across an empty street and reveals herself as an inferior lookalike. The entire sequence is one of the most disturbing and hypnotic ever committed to the screen.

From these extraordinary hallucinations of time and space, Vittoria’s Gorgonian subjectivity transforms Antonioni’s alien landscape in L’Eclisse and fulfills his vision for a different sort of futurity that passes on-screen, one in which the modern fetish for speed and instantaneity is replaced by a desire for an eternal unfolding. Or as he describes it in a 1969 interview, “When [wo]man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes [her] true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.” But it is the profundity of Vittoria’s gaze, rather than Antonioni’s camera, that induces this mysterious dissolve into the background, where she eclipses the director’s world of time and space and reframes it as her own. Yet, in the final split second before her departure from the screen, the camera manages to capture a double image of the character Vittoria and the actress Monica Vitti stepping defiantly into the world just beyond.

Across her limpid eyes lay the first, flickering reflections of eternity.

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Erik Morse is the author of Dreamweapon and Bluff City Underground: A Roman Noir of the Deep South, and contributor to The New York Times, Vogue, Artforum, Art-Agenda, Sight & Sound, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Guardian, among others. He is also an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer grantee, a former lecturer at SCI-Arc, and a contributor to Semiotext(e). He has just completed his third book.