Subsistence Through Disappearance: Theology of the Unseen in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni

ABSTRACT The present study contends that the theology of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960s cinema is structured by a reductio ad absurdum logic, whereby the presence of certain qualities is proven by the portrayal of their absence. It is argued that Antonioni's intention to show what is by specifying what is not may have been rooted in a modernist intuition that the opposite approach would verge on blasphemy in a world wherein “none is good, save one, that is, God” (Mark 10:18). A twig dropped gingerly into a barrel of rainwater, a scratch of an Aeolian rock, and a solitary bird circling above estranged smokestacks are evoked as emblems of Antonioni's search for beauty in small things. This quest is hypothesised to have been his way of escaping both the restrictive confines of reductionist concreteness and the pretentious sweep of holistic generalisations, embracing instead sources of astonishment and divinity lodged in everyday detail—accessible to all, yet persistently overlooked. The apophatic theology of this filmmaker, once christened “the only secular Italian director”, is argued to have been rich and expansive, though inherently dissident, even heretical—a label that a bona fide spiritualist living in a society institutionalising spirituality must be ready to bear. In line with the via negativa approach Antonioni employed in his films to arrive at specific points, albeit always ambiguously, his theology was implicit, rooted in natural action rather than explicated in language, the communicational construct whose eschewing is argued here to represent the pinnacle of its use.