Word: antonioni
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Eclipse has been criticized for lacking "life," and the criticism is justified. In his earlier films, Michelanglo Antonioni showed how frail and hard to communicate emotions can be. In Eclipse, he shows that they need not exist...
...Antonioni uses all his verbal and visual devices to show how his characters feel. Some of these become tiresome, like shots of people taken from behind lattices and fences. Others are more obscure and lead one into guessing games. But in the last scene, which for seven minutes pictures former meeting places of the pair, shows the emptiness of solitude. The sun is setting, but the director avoids heavy contrasts; the scene is a dull gray. If Eclipse--like its last scene--is lifeless, it is because it illustrates the difficulty not only of communicating, but of thinking and feeling...
Near the end of the film, Clelia (Eleonora Rossi-Drago) and Momina argue fiercely and end their friendship. Antonioni makes this scene almost unbearably crude by setting it in the midst of a fashion show crowded with gawking strangers...
Such is the style of Antonioni. He presents us with men and women who cannot succeed in a private love and enter society only to find themselves under constant surveillance by great crowds of prying bystanders. In privacy, there is emptiness; in society the emptiness is exposed...
...Clearly, Antonioni chooses a milieu of wealth because the rich have more leisure for being "in public," for reducing each other's wives, and, generally, for picking at each other" psyches. Although he is conscious of class barriers, his analysis of human nature is by no means limited to the upper classes. One could apply it with less force, to any group. Antonioni doesn't do this because High Society is the clearest case for his moral insights. At any rate he is hardly a Marxist...