Ciclo Luzes na Caverna VIII:
”A imagem como erosão da presença.”:
“L’ECLISSE” 1962 | 2h06’ [IT/FR]
De Michelangelo Antonioni

_ENG

Lights in the Cave VIII Cinema Screenings: “The image as the erosion of presence.”:
“L’ECLISSE” 1962 | M/17 | 2h06’ [IT/FR]
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
With Alexandre Braga

L’ECLISSE withdraws presence from its own evidence and exposes its silent erosion: every face, every gesture appears as a trace of something that has already begun to recede at the very moment it becomes visible. Here, there is no revelation or redemption — only erosion. What kind of truth persists when relationships dissolve into space, when encounters fail not through tragedy but through the gradual emptying of meaning? What form of awareness is activated when the image no longer guarantees presence and instead bears witness to its slow withdrawal? In Antonioni, cinema does not embody the world — it records the intimate fracture between being and existing, making the image that still insists on remaining the very place where presence fades away.


Here, cinema no longer walks alongside bodies — it circles them.

The characters move through spaces that do not receive them; they speak, yet do not meet; they draw close without ever coinciding. The modern city — stock exchanges, geometric buildings, deserted streets — is not a backdrop: it is an active force of dissolution. In L’ECLISSE, the image does not confirm presence — it slowly corrodes it, until only the interval between one gesture and the next remains.

Michelangelo Antonioni constructs the film as a device of emptying — narrative, affective, and visual — in which human relationships do not collapse through conflict, but through wear. The creation of the work begins with a deliberate refusal of classical drama: there is no psychological progression, no resolution, no promise of meaning. There are only intervals. Absence is filmed without dramatization. There is no catastrophe, no redemption, no climax: there is erosion. The camera observes the world continuing even as the characters fail, as if reality no longer required them in order to persist. The celebrated final sequence — without protagonists — consummates this gesture: the image remains, but human presence has become dispensable.

From a formal perspective, L’ECLISSE radicalizes procedures already explored by Antonioni in L’Avventura and La Notte: long takes, rarefied staging, functionally insufficient dialogue, and an obsessive attention to architectural space. Rome — and particularly the EUR district — does not function as a background, but as a dramatic structure. Geometric lines, urban voids, and the circulation of capital (the stock exchange) become forces that reconfigure human behavior, shifting the center of action from the subject to the environment.

Antonioni worked intensely on shot composition, pushing the relationship between figure and ground to the point of dissolution. Characters frequently appear cropped, distanced, or swallowed by the frame, as if the camera were already anticipating their narrative irrelevance. One revealing aspect of the creative process is the director’s insistence on filming spaces before and after the action, culminating in nearly seven minutes without protagonists — a decision that definitively breaks with the expectation of dramatic closure.

In L’ECLISSE, the image does not lead toward a hidden meaning: it bears witness to its erosion. The film’s creation rests on this rigorous — technical and philosophical — wager: that cinema can abandon the task of representing the human in order to reveal something more unsettling — the persistence of the world when presence can no longer inhabit it. Here, the image does not embody — it wears away.