Along the Pirelli skyscraper

Lungo il grattacielo della Pirelli - March 10, 2016

I had initially set out to talk about three films, three directors, three years, and almost three continents.

La Notte (1961)

秋刀魚の味 Sama no aji aka Le Goût du Saké (1962)

মহানগর Mahanagar aka The Big City (1963)

Precisely almost three continents of cinema that ultimately the little time I can dedicate to these posts prevents me from addressing, let alone exploring. So I leave them here with already a few notes, which have brought me back to these three directors for 20 years.

Antonioni

Ozu

Satyajit Ray

I realize that the terms to refer to these films since my discovery of their directors, during intense retrospectives and sweet love encounters*, could have been those of time. After all, these films are from an era; they reached me in black and white, at the height of my youth's technicolor. They had the authority of time on their side, and we used to come see them in their temples, at Les 3 Luxembourg for Ozu, Les 5 Caumartin for Satyajit Ray, at Le Grand Action for Antonioni. What held me back was that they placed their camera at a time, but what I retained from it was lines, straight lines. And that, that didn't resemble me at all, coming out of a movie theater ecstatic - that's fine - but thinking that what I liked about it was related to geometry. Today I know that it should be said differently. I had fallen under the spell of "Antonioni's interest in the abstraction of space." That's how one should talk about Antonioni, and what this critic does very well here. I find it very good because it gave me two keys, which I hadn't bothered to find before, this story of abstraction of space, and the name of the building on the glass facade along which Antonioni's camera glides in the first minutes of La Notte - and therefore the confirmation that this opening tracking shot* was remarkable. "the opening shot of La Notte that tracks down the Pirelli building".

It was probably one of my first encounters with space, and it took place along the Pirelli skyscraper. A building whose good taste I didn't even have until today to know that it was one of Milan's landmarks, which hadn't caught my attention during any of my arrivals at Milano Centrale, upon which, running on a treadmill at the rooftop palestra of the Hotel Principe Di Savoia, my jet-lagged runner’s gaze had not wandered. And it was its lines that my iconolatrous mind still connected today to the overhead wire of the opening scene of Mahanagar.

Note for self and whoever wants to know:

travelling fr tracking shot En