The Politics of Aesthetics in the Work of Michelangelo Antonioni: An Analysis Following Jacques Rancière

Abstract

The work of Michelangelo Antonioni is considered as trailblazing and as a paradigmatic expression of modernism in cinema. Even today it has an impact on film style and holds a key place in the history of film art. In my contribution I discuss and enlarge upon these interpretations of his work in the context of the political character of his aesthetics. The political in his films, my thesis suggests, is found in the aesthetic experience which be- comes possible by means of his films. As Jacques Rancière has shown, aesthetic experience is closely linked to a democratic experience. Both problematize the theory that the dominant framework of meaning and the meanings of a social and cultural order are set in stone and could not be otherwise. They create an appreciation for contingency and possible changes. Following this argumentation, the political significance of Antonioni’s aesthetic can be defined more closely. The open narrative structure, the autonomization of the camera, the playing with temps mort, the visual development of spaces or the gradual emptying of the image field are characteristics of his style and undermine the representative regime. By different stylistic means, he infiltrates it, leaves it standing in the background and robs it of its structuring power. Antonioni has created a dissensual cinema in which can be found the aesthetic truth of cinema, the ambiguity of dumb and ephemeral things, the texture of the world as it is. His cinema makes real the transition from the representative fiction of the plot to the aesthetic fiction of the signs. Wong Kar-wai has followed him in this. Both design sensual landscapes of the surface of the world which have broken the straight line between cause and effect and are defined by aesthetic affect.