L’eclisse

A woman wanders through Rome in search of a man, of herself or of nothing at all; brief encounters with men make her loneliness all the clearer; at the end, the sun will darken for a moment, and the streets of Rome seem to be in darkness anyway. One of the cult films of the 1960s is about the dissolution of social relationships, and Antonioni ultimately makes the characters disappear. Monica Vitti wanders through Rome as if it were a modern-day Nineveh on the brink of divine judgement. Experts want to identify a ‘logic of disappearance’ in all these inexplicable and unexplained events, when people suddenly appear on the screen without any reason, just as some plot threads disappear into nothingness. However, we rarely think this ‘logic’ through to the end, and rarely do we realise its premises, which originate from literary modernism. Like a narrator who ventures too far into his own stories and is unexpectedly narrated himself, the camera follows an event that deals with disappearance and what is left behind. Nowhere is this more oppressive than in the last seven minutes of LEclisse . Monica Vitti has an appointment with Alain Delon on the corner of a house, and we wait. Wind ruffles the trees, a harness racing driver and a public bus pass the scene, a newspaper announces: ‘Peace is weak.’ Then the sun darkens. (Bert Rebhandl)