The World Outside the Window — Antonioni's Architectonics of Space and Time

Abstract

Our article proposes an interpretation of Michelangelo Antonioni's use of architecture to figure fluctuant and unstable relationships of space and time. Films such as Cronoca di un amore, Il grido, L'avventura, L'eclisse, and The Passenger make extensive use of a series of spatial and temporal intersections that also have narrative elaborations. In Antonioni's films, liminal structures such as doorways, windows, and balconies recur almost obsessively as markers of conjunction, points of passage between an inside and an outside, between presences and absences, between on-screen and offscreen events. Alongside the director's cinematic framings, mise-en-scènes, and plot structures, what emerges from these figures is a modernist dilemma that not a few twentieth-century thinkers characterize as the end of inhabitation in the old sense of the word.