Born: September 29, 1912, Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy Died: July 30, 2007, Rome, Italy Michelangelo Antonioni's death marks the loss of perhaps the last great living embodiment of the heritage of Italian neorealist filmmaking, and of what came after. Like the cinema of Neorealism, Antonioni's was cinema of observation. However, he practiced kind of looking so concentrated that it at times seemed to warp things out of familiarity. Strangely, in the days and weeks following his death, commentators seem to have had difficulty articulating what it was that made his filmmaking important. The best of his films are stylishly beautiful, but never vapid; rigorous, and yet radically open and open-ended. They are grounded in history, the specific history of post-World War II Italy, the Italy of the economic boom. Moreover, they seem as modern and strange today as they did decades ago upon their release. We accept that it is difficult to talk about Antonioni. In order to memorialize his achievement-one that we, too, find difficult to put into words-we have decided to follow one of his cherished methods: we choose to meditate on the fragment. In what follows we think about two passages from two of his finest realizations, La notte/The Night (1960) and L'eclisse/The Eclipse (1962); both passages materialize Antonioni's persistent preoccupation with the landscape of modernity. We hope that by isolating these moments and their aesthetic and historical operations, we may be able to fumble toward an appreciation of what is one of the most crucial-if gloriously ineffable-bodies of work in modern filmmaking and modern art. Breda Factory, Milan's Periphery Although carefully positioned in real, contingent places, which always embody specific modernity (either because of the modern's overdetermined presence, or its conspicuous absence), Antonioni's bodies never seem at ease with themselves or their surrounds. Sidelined, marginalized, displaced, they their ways through spaces they do not dominate, and make us feel them too, pressing as they do at all the borders of the screen. While the frame is often static, it is nevertheless traversed by vectors of gazes, which move in significant directions. In Antonioni's cinema sexuality is materialized through the geometrical relationship between body, gaze, and space, just as sexuality itself is product of the positioning of bodies in society, in gender roles, in everyday practices, in architectures, in power structures. Antonioni does not give us generic sexuality; rather, as David Forgacs has proposed, he offers one of a specific moment in Italian society, in artistic culture and the history of sexuality and representation.1 Summer of 1960, Milan, the peak of the economic boom: La Notte. Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) gets out of taxi and looks around. A specific, significant place: Sesto San Giovanni, the immediate outskirts north of Milan, an important industrial area since the nineteenth century. The landscape is decidedly peripheral, mix of modernity (tall buildings in the distance, circular, glass petrol station) and the last remaining fragments of marginal pre-modernity. We stand outside the Breda factory, potent symbol of the roots and history of Italian modernity. The factory embodies several myths of Italian modernity: the myth of progress (the manufacture of trains and airplanes); that of power and expansion (the manufacture of the cannons and military trucks of the Fascist empire); that of post-World War II industrial rebirth and consumerist utopia (the manufacture of motorcycles and fridges). Like Vittoria (Monica Vitti) in Sicily in L'avventura/The Adventure (1959), bourgeois, urbanized Lidia is an alien body in landscape that turns uncanny in her presence. A group of working-class men, much younger than she, stride into an empty yard as actors on stage, silently. Two exchange blows after one of them has taken off his shirt. …