Michelangelo Antonioni, China, ‘Fascist’

 I recently watched a documentary on Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian filmmaker best known for 1960s films like l’Avventura, L’Eclisse and Blowup. These films have an absolute integrity to Antonioni’s artistic sense, can be deep and poetic, visually rather than narratively focused, but also to be honest contain at times for me very tedious passages. They typically embody both an ennui or emptiness at the heart of Western society, not overtly portrayed or discussed but silently portrayed in the lives of its generally beautiful, quite well-off lead characters, like Monica Vitti; but also at the very edges of all this is, very much unspoken, a sense of the spiritual whose very absence in the modern Western world, is the cause of this emptiness, and towards which there is some almost wholly unarticulated, or barely even sensed, yearning. In embodying this spirit of emptiness, this lack of dynamism, though as a consequence the result can be that the films themselves, are heavy with this spirit of ennui; Passenger with Jack Nicholson from the 1970s a strong example of this.

So anyway, I think it fair to say that regardless of how much his work resonates with one, there’s possibly no well known director of the West who could be less claimed to be a product or slave of the system than Antonioni. To add, by contrast the very purpose and heart of totalitarian ‘art’ is always propaganda, and where the heroes of fascism or communism are all-conquering superheroes, certain of truth, embodying good and defeating evil, and thus incarnating in themselves the very essence of the State itself - which of course is the very highest good. The films intentionally target the big emotions and adrenaline of the viewer, full of action and excitement, with, to add, the modern Hollywood mania for superhero films very much in this tradition and of this ethos. And tinkering about with, for example, the gender makeup of the superheroes is itself specifically an ideological motivation, rather than in any sense an undercutting or breaking free of the this propagandist essence. 

In 1972 Antonioni was commissioned by the Chinese Communist government to do a documentary on life there, which he accepted. Perhaps they asked him because they had the idea of him as either apolitical or at heart inimical towards ‘degenerate’ Western values. Or perhaps someone there knew of his earlier documentary works, focused by contrast to his later films, on the lives of the Italian poor. The resulting documentary Cino can be seen on YouTube. I’ve seen only some of it, and it seems to focus on facets of ordinary life, on finding the deeper spirit of the people, and as usual with Antonioni without dogmatically forcing any opinions on the viewer. At first his documentary on viewing was accepted by the Chinese Communist Party apparatus - and which was probably a condition of his commission - but later after its release, perhaps due to internal politics and personality clashes within the Party, there was a major sea-change in attitudes to the documentary, and in the official proclamations about Antonioni it was declared that:

“Inspired by a vicious motive, by underhand and utterly despicable means, Antonioni hunted specifically for material that could be used to slander and attack China. [This is the work of] an extremely reactionary and despicable fascist.”

As shown, there has likely been no director in the West who less fits the criteria of a fascist propagandist than Antonioni, but this was of course irrelevant to his accusers. Antonioni responded that he had fought in the Resistance during World War 2, and was condemned to death, in his personal absence, by the fascists under Mussolini. True though this was, though maybe at times it may be unavoidable, one should be very slow to go on the defensive against these kinds of people - which is to accept in some sense the legitimacy of the position from which they attack, and against which one then seeks to defend and justify oneself. Instead if at all feasible it is they and their truthlessness that should be attacked and exposed. 

So Antonioni was felt now to be on the wrong side of the good/evil divide in the dynamic where no opposition is permitted and where one must overtly serve the establishment, and so he was now a legitimate target for the ruthless mechanism of cancel culture. Any felt threat is absolutely demonised,  and thus the catch-all accusation of his being a fascist, and which should generally tell one far more about the nature and motivation of the accuser than the accused. And being declared to be a fascist, or some such slur, by these kinds of forces should very likely be considered more a badge of honour than one of shame, it signifying that you are now a felt threat to their paranoiac, totalitarian lusts.