The Environmental Ethics of Antonioni's L'eclisse.
In this talk, I will present my current project on Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. The core of Antonioni’s reception negatively characterizes his protagonists’ subjectivity as essentially alienated and also deterministically associates alienation with a specific set of filmic techniques such as long takes, slow camera movements, and decentred human figures. The project reads this reception against the backdrop of contemporary critical theories, environmental philosophies of alienation and Gilles Deleuze's film theory in order to, first, illuminate flawed assumptions that alienation entails the subject’s total loss of relations with his/her environment; and, second, explore whether and how the relations between Antonioni's characters, the camera and nonhuman entities of the profilmic environment articulate alternative, more viable interactions that become ethically meaningful. In L'eclisse (1962), this process is visually enacted by interstitial tensions between the subjectivities of the characters and the cinematic apparatus. These tensions undermine views of the cinematic apparatus as passive instrument of representation of alienation. Moreover, they make its felt presence ethically significant by establishing non-anthropocentric relations with the human and non-human entities (i.e. bodies, objects, environments) included in the image and by positing these relations as co-determinants of these entities’ material being, agency, and subjectivity. These visual articulations ultimately affirm the possibility for human and non-human entities to ground their reciprocal interaction on a viable environmental ethics that illuminates the significance of Antonioni’s films for current debates concerning global issues.