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Antonioni’s Last Scenes: The Micro Four

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

Several days ago, Scott Kirsner linked a CNET story about YouTube’s plans to automatically block all copyrighted content beginning in September. Google already pulls content based on copyright holder request, but if this ends up going through, it would have a much farther reaching impact on the kinds of fil m clips and oddities that I often link to on SpoutBlog. I think it’s a mistake. Right now, YouTube is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive online archive of 20th century culture. Just in terms of its educational potential, it’s invaluable.

So, while we can, let’s put the YouTube archive to good use. If there’s any filmmaker whose work lends itself to an introduction via YouTube, I’d say it’s Michelangelo Antonioni. At the very least, the YouTube watching experience may be the only way to transform his work for short attention spans. His best scenes worked almost as self-contained shorts; his poderous narrative pacing can make a full feature feel at best like an event, and at worst, like an unbearable slog.

Almost all of the Antonioni clips currently available on YouTube represent the last scenes of their respective films, which makes sense, as several of these are now film school staples, although I’d love to be able to show you, say, the opening of Red Desert. Still, I’ve compiled four final scenes here; consider the fifth spot reserved. If someone manages to upload a clip (ANY clip) from Red Desert (available on frill-free DVD) before YouTube’s proposed regulations go into effect, I’ll update this post.

1. Zabriskie Point (1970)

Antonioni’s much-maligned hippies-in-Death Valley film is by turns laughable and stunning. It’s most famous for its two hallucinogenic set pieces: in one, two beautiful road-tripping strangers screw on rocky desert shoal. As Fiona A. Villella noted at Senses of Cinema, this “leads to a complete breakdown in realist narrative logic as multiple couples and groups of young people engaged in sexual play magically appear throughout the valley.” Antonioni repeats the logic of multiples in the latter set piece, in which the female half of this couple watches as her boss/sugar daddy’s vacation home spectacularly explodes to sounds of Pink Floyd on the sound track. Antonioni presents the explosion in slow motion, over and over again from different angles, cut with close-ups of the innards of the house (the TV, the fridge) combusting as if part of a separate demolition. Thus hippie bliss gives way to violent, anarchic destruction. Absolutely, without a doubt, the best art film explosion sequence of all time.

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The Micro Five: The Summer Midterm

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

Over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Flyball Rule, Dennis Cozzalio has offered the film blog world a 28-question “summer midterm.” As he puts it, “We know that the last thing you really want to do in the summer is to be sitting indoors taking a test. But wouldn’t you rather be doing this than seeing Transformers? I thought so. Now get to work!”

I’m not good with long quizzes, so for this week’s installment of The Micro Five, I’ve picked five questions to answer in short essay form. See my answers below, and be sure to check out Dennis’ post to read the 70+ (!) responses. This is pass/fail, right?

1. Describe a famous location from a movie that you have visited (Bodega Bay, California, where the action in The Birds took place, for example). Was it anything like the way it was in the film? Why or why not?

When I was 17, I was briefly employed as a hostess at Dupar’s, a been-there-forever diner in Studio City, CA that was used as a location for Boogie Nights. Dupar’s is the setting of that post-disco scene where Burt Reynolds explains his directorial vision to budding porn star Dirk Diggler. I haven’t read the Boogie Nights script, but I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime-Studio City resident Paul Thomas Anderson had written Dupar’s in by name–it’s a perfectly preserved monument to the Valley’s mid-70s glory, and I’m sure it required minimal set dressing. In my brief time there, I didn’t ID any porn stars (unless Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa have gone X-rated? They were in there a lot), but it was a fairly sleezy place. We were ordered to lie about our failing grade from the health department, and I actually quit after three weeks due to very low-level sexual harassment from my manager: one day he told me I’d “look good in a potato sack,” and in my teenage feminist brain, that was, like, cause for a lawsuit.

2. Best movie about baseball

Um, does Mysterious Skin count? I think it should. A little league coach’s molestation of two members of his team is the pivotal event that sets off the narrative. One of these boys, damaged by the abuse to the point of obsession, goes on to get a job at the field where he used to play and use his workplace as a venue for sexual encounters. I guess it’s no Major League, but it was one of my favorite films of 2005.

3. Favorite Katharine Hepburn performance

It’s got to be Bringing up Baby. I’m sure everyone says that, but how can you not get all googly over the performance that defines screwball? But Baby’s not my favorite Hepburn film; that would be Holiday, which is more of Cary Grant’s show, don’t you think? I don’t know–maybe I just don’t like to see her play the wallflower. Regardless, check out the funny Holiday clip reel above, set to “Spunky” by The Eels.

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