Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Il Grido
1957 · Michelangelo Antonioni · Il Grido on Sightlines
A man walks west along a dyke in the Po delta in winter. He is small and dark against the flat, and the fog has pulled the depth out of the land behind him, so the world seems to be withdrawing even though Gianni Di Venanzo's camera is holding perfectly still. Nothing happens on the walk. Then the shot runs several beats past the point where another film would have cut, and in those beats you notice that you are watching a man who has nothing to do.
Ten years earlier De Sica had sent a man walking across Rome for two hours. That man was looking for a bicycle. Antonioni keeps the walking, keeps the real roads and the real winter, and removes the bicycle. Aldo is a mechanic at a sugar refinery. His partner Irma has just told him that the husband she believed dead has finally died abroad, that she is free to marry him at last, and that she loves another man. He does not argue or plead or drink. He takes their daughter Rosina and starts moving.
Here is where Deleuze is worth having in the room, and it is worth saying why. The ordinary account of this film is that Aldo is heartbroken and cannot get over it, which turns his stillness into psychology. The film blocks that reading deliberately. Antonioni never gives him a speech that explains him; we get behaviour and no motive, a paralysis presented as a condition to be watched rather than a problem to be solved. So we need a language for what the film is doing rather than for what its hero is supposedly feeling. Deleuze built one.
His starting point is almost embarrassingly simple. For half a century movies ran on a circuit: a character perceives a situation, the perception loads a response, the response changes the situation. Continuity editing exists to keep that circuit tight. Deleuze calls the result the movement-image, and the name is literal, because the picture moves when somebody is trying to get something done. What interested him was the moment the circuit failed, when characters began to perceive more than they could act on. He called it the crisis of the action-image, and he found it everywhere in postwar Europe. Il Grido is that crisis carried through a whole film, and carried by a working man, which almost nobody else did. Antonioni's later drifters have apartments and money. This one has a wrench.
Deleuze has a precise name for the shape the film takes: the ballad, or voyage form, the trip that transforms nothing. Aldo's journey is a series of way-stations, each a woman and a place, a roadside petrol station, a shabby house, a shack by the river. Each is a life he could take up and does not. The structure looks picaresque and behaves like its opposite, since nothing accumulates and nothing is learned, and the westward line eventually curves back to the town he started from. Neorealism had already invented this walk. Antonioni's contribution was to strip out the object of the search, which is also to strip out the reason for the cutting.
What replaces it is duration. Eraldo Da Roma, who had cut for Rossellini and De Sica and who had already worked at the near-real-time patience of the maid's morning in Umberto D., lets scenes here run past their dramatic point and stay with Aldo after the event has resolved. Deleuze calls this temps mort, dead time: stretches that advance nothing, where the everyday is simply held. And the joins between episodes are elliptical, slack, giving the drift a vagueness in space and time that matches the man. The causality has gone loose on purpose. Nobody had yet asked an audience to sit inside that slackness for a whole feature.
Di Venanzo's landscape does the rest. The delta in winter gives him fog, mud, bare embankments, a low grey sky over a horizon with almost no vertical relief, and he composes so that Aldo is repeatedly dwarfed by it. The images refuse the picturesque; the fog dissolves the depth cues until the place stops functioning as a setting. Deleuze's term for this is the any-space-whatever, a space that has lost its coordinates and become pure feeling, no longer the stage on which an action will be carried out. The Po delta is a real region with a real name, and the film turns it into anywhere. Antonioni had already shot this terrain himself, in the documentary Gente del Po, and Visconti had used it in Ossessione for another doomed working-class drifter; Il Grido takes the location grammar and empties it of purpose.
Two smaller things are worth watching for. Steve Cochran plays Aldo as a closed, heavy, inexpressive presence, built from stillness and small gestures. That is the affection-image in its most extreme form: a face on which feeling registers and never discharges into an act. And Cochran spoke no Italian, so he is dubbed. This was ordinary Italian practice, inherited from La terra trema and the whole post-synchronised tradition, but here the voice sits slightly loose on the body, and the film's central condition leaks into its soundtrack.
Bazin loved neorealism because its images delivered the fact before anyone had assigned it a meaning. Antonioni keeps that contract. The locations are real, the durations are real, the ambient sound of wind and water and refinery machinery is allowed to stand where a conventional film would put score. What he withdraws is Bazin's faith that the facts add up to a world. Aldo becomes what Deleuze calls a seer, someone who can only look, and we are put beside him with nothing to do either. Viaggio in Italia had shown that a marriage could be dismantled by landscape rather than dialogue. Antonioni took the lesson down the class ladder and made it structural.
Then the cry. The title is a sound, and it belongs to Irma, watching from below as Aldo falls from the refinery tower. The single eruption of feeling in the film arrives from the wrong person, too late, attached to a body that can no longer act. That is the action-image handing in its notice.
Three years later L'Avventura would make this method famous, with Di Venanzo carrying the same eye into L'Eclisse and a cinema of interiority spreading across Europe from it. The template was cut here, on a mechanic. The question Antonioni left and never came back to is why the experiment had to move uptown to be seen.
Watch it once for Aldo. Watch it again for what the camera does after each scene is over.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Irma tells Aldo her husband has died and that she loves another man; a premise built for melodrama produces no reversal, no confrontation, no discharge. Antonioni withholds any speech that accounts for Aldo's behaviour and treats his paralysis as a condition to be observed.
- the ballad / voyage form — The episodic westward drift across the Po Valley through a series of way-stations, each a woman and a place; picaresque in shape but anti-picaresque in spirit, accumulating nothing and ending where it began.
- temps mort — Eraldo Da Roma's cutting lets scenes run past their dramatic point, lingering on Aldo after the action has resolved, holding the aftermath rather than the event.
- weak links / slackened causality — Transitions between the episodes of Aldo's journey are elliptical, giving the drift a spatial and temporal vagueness that mirrors his aimlessness.
- espace quelconque — Di Venanzo's Po delta in winter: fog, mud, bare embankments, a low grey sky over a horizon with almost no vertical relief, composed so Aldo is a solitary dark shape dwarfed on a road, a dyke, a riverbank. The images resist the picturesque.
- any-space-whatever: emptiness — The recurrent fog dissolves depth so that the world seems to be receding even as the camera holds it; the muted, enveloping greys leave a field with nothing in it for action to work on.
- pure optical and sound situations — Sustained wide shots and long takes instead of shot/reverse-shot, with silence and environmental noise (wind across open ground, water, refinery machinery) allowed to dominate where a conventional film would supply score or dialogue.
- the voyant — Steve Cochran's Aldo is a study in affectlessness, a heavy closed presence built from stillness rather than emotional display; the film gives us a man emptied out who watches and endures rather than acts.
- affection-image — Feeling registers on Cochran's immobile face and in small gestures but never discharges into an act; the only discharge in the film is Irma's scream at the close, after Aldo falls from the refinery tower.
- audiovisual disjunction — Cochran spoke no Italian and was dubbed in post-production; as the dossier notes, dialogue floats slightly free of the bodies that speak it, a dislocation suiting a protagonist who has lost his centre of gravity.