The Lady Vanishes: Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and photography

Abstract

How does cinema deal with its photographic substratum? Is there anything more to a film than an endless displacement of its link with the photograph’s temporal and spatial fixity? The answer is no, as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) seems to claim. Indeed, L’Eclisse’s very first scene asserts the essence of cinema as motion of the frame and the point of view. Accordingly, later on the film tries — but fails — to turn actual photographs into a cinematic sequence. However, by forcing photography onto the side of stillness and absence, the film incorporates them in its development as photographic features, and is finally able to acknowledge its own link with fixity and death. This becomes apparent in L’Eclisse’s last scene, in which the protagonists disappear and the world slows down, ready to stop. The implicit reference to photography, implied in the fixity of most of the last scene’s shots, provides the film with the tool to explore its finiteness and announce the coming of the end.