“The Alignment of Existence”
by Pepe Fernández Martínez
“I’m tired and depressed; fed up and confused,” says Vittoria in L’eclisse. “There are days when you can hold a cloth, a needle, a book, or a man in your hands, and it’s all the same.”
Months after watching Antonioni’s trilogy, that phrase returned to me as I shared a narrow bed with a lover. I had believed that sadness, anguish, and the feeling of emptiness would find their answer in another person’s body, but they didn’t. I felt the same as I did before a shopping list: distant, indifferent, empty.
It was at that moment that my personal experience unintentionally merged with Antonioni’s metaphysical universe. That bridge revealed to me the true power of his cinema: the ability to capture pain not through melodrama, but through emptiness. Antonioni films absence, pause, the dissolution of human connections—and that, in the end, is what hurts the most.
Antonioni’s mastery lies in his ability to film pain without naming it, to capture suffering without exposing it explicitly. His characters do not scream or cry; they simply exist within a space that devours them. His cinema translates anguish into distances, into frames that highlight disconnection, into bodies that barely touch and dialogues that drown in their own lack of meaning. In his films, pain is not exhibited; it infiltrates, it is breathed in, and that subtlety is what makes it unbearably real.
The first film of his that I saw was Blow-Up, and I hated it. It was on the required film history syllabus, and the imposition, as it does for almost all students, generated an almost automatic resistance in me. But the real connection came later, with the so-called alienation trilogy: L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962). Of the three, the latter became my favorite—not because it offered answers, but because it expanded the question:
How do we deal with a world where communication has broken down?
Antonioni insisted that he did not think in terms of alienation; it was others who did. But how can we not speak of alienation when his characters wander across the screen as if trapped in a dream—or nightmare—from which they cannot wake? How can we not see the weight of the world in their gestures, in their pauses, in the silence that says everything? This is not the external devastation of Italian neorealism; it is internal devastation, the kind that drags itself through the body without leaving visible marks. It is pain turned into art.
Vittoria in L’eclisse is not lost because she does not love or does not want to love. She is lost because everything around her is an unreal mirage: the Stock Exchange, frenetic and ruthless; human relationships, transactions that expire without warning; the streets of Rome, which manage to feel empty even when they are full. As the film progresses, what remains is absence. The characters disappear, and only objects remain. The city, like all cities, moves on, indifferent.
For much of the film, Vittoria wanders through the EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma), bewildered by its apathetic residents and its bland, modernist architectural design. It is as if she were living on an alien planet, completely opposed to human feeling. A sentiment I am no stranger to—I have often walked through my city and found myself observing it as if I were seeing it for the first time. This act of public observation often allows us to take on the role of a spectator, understanding that our role is like a thread in a vast tapestry—small, yet contributing to a larger image, the city itself. Even Piero (Alain Delon) remarks: “It’s as if I were abroad,” as he gazes at Rome’s suburban landscape from a hill. “That’s funny. It’s what I feel when I’m next to you,” she replies. The distance between them is the same as the distance between Vittoria and the world: unbreakable, insurmountable.
In Antonioni’s cinema, dialogues are scarce, characters drift between desire and apathy, and aesthetics underscore their confusion. His films have been called the epitome of decadence: beautiful, stylized figures trapped in a world where certainties have vanished.
They seek something, but they do not know what. They do not reject the world, nor do they hate it—they simply do not know what to expect from it. Just like me, more than fifty years later.
L’eclisse fascinated me with its tension, its use of desert-like landscapes and the suffocating Roman summer, the nuances in Monica Vitti’s face as she moved from euphoria to emptiness with the lightness of a cloud drifting across the sky. But above all, I was struck by the way Antonioni presents a society that moves forward at a rapid pace, yet at the same time, in a frenetic and almost ruthless manner, creating in various characters a sense of uncertainty about what they should be or seek.
What L’eclisse revealed to me is what remains true today: we live in a brutally external, hedonistic, and opaque world, where real communication seems impossible.
The deepest crisis of our era is communication itself.
We have lost the ability to understand each other. Words, which were once the bridge between disparate souls, have dissolved into a tangle of misunderstandings, into superficial relationships that reduce us to mere objects, interchangeable like stocks on the market.
Vittoria says: “I don’t know,” “I don’t understand,” “I don’t see.” And I, more than fifty years later, silently respond: neither do I. Her words are not mere indecision; they are the echo of humanity in crisis. Antonioni captured the transformation of the being into an object, of the individual reduced to just another element in the landscape. His visual style, austere yet eloquent, isolates his characters amid inert objects, showing the overwhelming weight the world exerts upon them. And in the climax of L’eclisse, when the characters disappear and only things remain, we understand the true horror: there is no catharsis, no redemption, only an unbearable void.
That is Antonioni’s mastery: to say without saying, to make the invisible visible.
He does not explain pain; he projects it onto the screen and forces us to look at it until it is imprinted upon us. And that is what makes his cinema so brutally human. There is a difference between being alone and feeling lonely. Vittoria, the protagonist of L’eclisse, is not alone in the conventional sense. She is surrounded by people, by potential lovers, by trivial conversations, by spaces that should fulfill her. But the loneliness she experiences is different: it is not the absence of company but the absence of meaning.
Antonioni does not show us a woman who suffers explosively, who cries grandiosely, or who collapses in a cathartic scene. No. Vittoria wanders. She stops. She observes. And in her pauses, in her lack of answers, the weight of depression is revealed.
In existentialist philosophy, anguish is not simply sadness. It is the confrontation with emptiness, with the lack of direction in a world that no longer offers certainties. Vittoria walks through an urban landscape seemingly designed to reinforce her disconnection: geometric buildings, impersonal, devoid of history or soul. In this space, the past has evaporated, the present is sterile, and the future is a hollow concept. Instead of seeking something to hold onto, Vittoria surrenders to uncertainty.
When L’eclisse reaches its climax, Vittoria has already disappeared from the story. Her traces have been erased. Only the spaces she inhabited remain, the objects that surrounded her, the artificial light illuminating a world that continues without her.
And in that disappearance, Antonioni throws us the most devastating question: does it even matter?
losing our grip on purpose 