Il grido
Rohdie on Antonioni:
 
1. Often what occurs in [Antonioni’s] films, as in Il grido, is a repetition of things, the coming of the same, as if in the story nothing happens, which is precisely what marks a duration [the time of waiting].  In a  more classical rendering duration is erased by the force of events; in Antonioni, the events, in their repetitiveness, their doubling, their mirroring, and often their emptiness… are erased by the force of time, by the imprint of duration.  Perhaps ‘event’ here is the wrong word.  In fact it is not events which are lacking [in Antonioni] so much as their connectives, the progress and continuity of a story; Antonioni’s films are filled with events, by the events are emptied of drama or the attributes of a story. (103)
 
2. In Il grido wet clings to everything; the air is always damp, the grounds muddy, the banks slippery, there is a perpetual drizzle and sometimes an enveloping rain which turns inside into outside – the rain comes into Andreina’s small hut… – and there is the river itself whose presence is permanent in the film…  Damp and humidity… are distorting mediums through which figures and landscapes are perceived in the films… the necessary terms for visibility…  Weather is a phenomenon of the moment which can erase or alter a perspective or the shape of an object… making things tenuous, fragile… And it has other qualities:  it turns depth into surface, it blurs the line between things.  (98-99)
 
3. Even if the scene [the boat race] lacks dramatic interest (the race itself is in itself unimportant and comes to nothing in relation to any plot or character in the film), it is not without visual interest (the movement of the boats; the tonal shifts between sky, bank, water; the unreality of the scene, so distanced, without ‘subjects’, the boats and drivers almost disembodied; the seeing of everything, mediated through spray and mist, losing outline), and there is, in the pause, a narrative sense of Aldo’s isolation… (91)
 
4. The film [Il grido], which depicts a loss of centre and hence of meaning and hierarchy, at the same time decentres itself by structuring within the narrative alternative places and dramas to focus upon; it multiplies centres, each autonomous, none more important than the other. (89)
 
5. The other fascination and compulsion… is the link, obsessive in Antonioni, between desire and death, freedom and obliteration, which is perhaps why the desire for both; and the positivity of that desire, suicide, is so familiar a figure in Antonioni’s films… (55) [Later, in a summary of Il grido] In the end, Aldo returns to Goriano, and accidentally, in an image which resumes the very beginning of the film, he falls off the tower to his death… (88)
 
6. I have no measure of the shot, but its length is well beyond that required by its function to establish place.  Shots of this kind, of a dead time… are frequent in Antonioni’s films…  The anticipation-of-an-action shot, or the lingering-after-an-action shot, is connected to another frequent figuration in Antonioni’s films… when the attention of the camera is caught by something either peripheral to the narrative or utterly unconnected with it, and the camera simply wanders off… (50)
 
7. The fate of characters, of narrative, of emotions, of desires, and of objects and images to disappear, to lose form and identity, is a permanent fixture of all of Antonioni’s films… real women and images of a woman multiply and disintegrate, to the point not only of their but of the narrative’s extinction.  (43)
 
8. [Antonioni writes of seeing a dead body discovered on the beach]  Suppose one had to construct a bit of film, based on this event and on this state of mind.  I would try first to remove the actual event from the scene, and leave only the image… In the white sea-front, that lonely figure, that silence, there seems to me to be an extraordinary strength of impact.  The event here adds nothing: it is superfluous. (39)