ROBERTO CALABRETTO

The Soundscape
in Michelangelo
Antonioni’s Cinema

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Antonioni was one of the first directors in Italian cinema to exploit the sound- Michelangelo
track in all of its complexity, significantly reducing the presence of actual music in Antonioni
favour of synthetic sounds and, above all, noise. He drew a distinction between Italian cinema
what he termed ‘poetic noise’ – created specifically by the artist – and ‘ineffable electronic music
soundtrack
sounds’, emanating from the natural soundscape. In the first case, the noises are
film sound
created and reproduced with the moving images, and subsequently defined during
The Eclipse
the post–synchronisation process; the second case involves an instinctive search Red Desert
which is far more fascinating, as the director realised from his observations during The Passenger
the preparatory phases of his films. This two–pronged approach helped Antonioni
to build a depth and breadth in the soundtracks that, even today, represent an
experimental model which remains unparalleled in contemporary Italian cinema.
This article illustrates the complexity of Antonioni’s soundscape by means of
the analysis of L’eclisse (The Eclipse), Il deserto rosso (Red Desert)
and Professione: reporter (The Passenger), films that can be considered as
being ideally representative of the director’s poetic ability and sensitivity.

In a well–known quote referring to the soundscape in Michelangelo

Antonioni’s cinema, Michel Chion described him as ‘one of the directors

The New Soundtrack 8.1 (2018): 1–19

DOI: 10.3366/sound.2018.0113
# Edinburgh University Press and the Roberto Calabretto
www.euppublishing.com/sound
2 Roberto Calabretto

most skilled in allowing us to hear the sound of life itself’. Apart from
certain differences concerning his choices and approach, Antonioni might
be considered akin to Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson, two other
‘poets’ in film music history who are greatly respected by Chion. In taking
the sounds ‘as they are offered to the ear’ and organising them into
effective audiovisual plots, Antonioni creates prose using sound, while
Tarkovsky and Bresson weave on–screen paths of rare poetic intensity,
which are subsequently subjected to careful processing in the delicate
post–production phase. While in no way questioning the beauty and
effectiveness of the sound of the wind in the English park in Blow–up
(1966), of the brushing of the purse in L’eclisse (1962), of the rain in
La notte (1961), and especially in the final sequence of Professione: reporter
(1975) – according to him, Antonioni’s masterpiece – Chion considers
that neither of these situations assume musical relevance. The sounds of
the small Spanish town heard during Jack Nicholson’s death, even though
organised and woven into the soundtrack, still have the semblance of a
‘symphony of the sound of life’ in which ‘the rhythmic cadence is not
predictable, there is no search for a rhyme’ (Chion 1999: 94–95).
In reality, Antonioni’s soundscape often assumes the semblance of an
actual musical score – which was exactly his intention – in which the
sounds are woven into melodic phrasings which reflect the rhythm of
the visual images. The extension of the director’s linguistic research into
the area of sound remains a prime example of experimental coherence
which underlines a number of futuristic ideas that anticipate results which
would, especially in the Italian cinema, be seen only decades later.

ANTONIONI’S PHONOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO REALITY

It is immediately clear that Antonioni’s ‘soundscapes’ are extremely com-
plex and very different from those of his contemporaries, who remained
fixated on styles based on late nineteenth–century symphonic poems, and a
trivial, mostly mimetic use of noise. The musical component of his
works – assigned to a number of composers over the years, since the
director was unwilling to rely on a single musical alter ego, but wisely
chose those who could best interpret his visuals for each film – in itself
demonstrates his originality; even more surprising, however, is the way in
which he extends the ‘sound domain’ so that every noise – whether dis-
covered by chance or created on set – becomes an intrinsic part of the final
movie.
In this way, Antonioni’s cinema demonstrates a cinematographic
musicality stemming from a ‘phonographic approach’ to the world, shaping
the development of the plots in which he traps ‘an inescapable reality of
life, often acoustically crashing onto the protagonists’ (D’Amato 2001:
154), turning every noise or sound into a reflection of the protagonists’
angst.
If this is true, music in cinematographic storytelling appears to fulfil
an entirely new function compared to older films (especially in Italian
cinema). As early as 1961, joining Mario Verdone in a lecture to the
students of the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia in Rome about the role
 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 3

of the soundtrack, Antonioni accepted the importance of music in a

movie but points out that its purpose had changed significantly from
ten years earlier, when it was supposed to ‘create in the viewers a
specific mood, so that they would be better able to interpret the images’.
This role of the ‘external comment, one designed to create a connection
between music and viewer, rather than between music and movie’,
was to him intensely anachronistic, because it creates an audiovisual
connection which has nothing to do with the essence of cinema, since it
is realised ‘between music and viewer, beyond the image’ (Antonioni
1994: 41).
By denying cinematographic music its autonomy, he effectively
restored its real purpose, freeing it of the traditional heteronomy in movies
and restoring its precise role within the overall audiovisual narration. As
Giorgio Tinazzi perceptively underlines, ever since his first movie ‘the
music is an aspect in its own right, it is not just used for emphasis’ (Tinazzi
2002: 52):

. . .the phrasing of the saxophone throughout Cronaca di un amore

(1950) complements the arid, one could almost say black–and–white,
notes of the piano in Grido (1956–57), the wandering clarinet in
Avventura (1959) and the rough, glassy sound in L’eclisse (1962).
A succession of aural contexts that lend an extraordinary ‘sensory
resonance’ to the images, allowing them to extend ‘beyond the limits
of the narrative timeframe’ (Cuccu 1973: 107)

Together with this gradual reduction of the presence of music,

Antonioni always recognised the importance of noise: in Cronaca di un
amore, noise is absorbed into the traditional role of music, to the point of
becoming actual flashbacks. When the protagonists, Paola and Guido,
secretly meet up in the Assicurazioni Generali office building to discuss
Enrico’s investigation, the noise created by the vibration of the lift cables
begins to emanate from the stairwell, growing in intensity until it all but
takes over the entire scene. The noise, created by Emilio Rosa with a
portable tape recorder, was recorded (at a frequency of less than 3000Hz)
against a steel thread, and sparks a short flashback. At that moment the
spectre of Giovanna – who had, due to their cowardice in failing to act,
fallen to her death in the stairwell of her own home immediately before
Guido’s wedding – returns to haunt them. That noise, re–evoking a
memory from the past, brings the focus back to Paola and Guido and, in
the silence which follows, they turn to face the obsession of their memory
and to think of their next crime. Any empathy on the part of the viewer is
immediately dissipated: the panning shot bringing them back into view
immediately removes the impression that the camera might be framing
the stairwell from their point of view. We are misled into thinking that the
camera is taking a subjective audiovisual shot, bringing us closer to the
protagonists, but the illusion is broken and the camera captures a clearly
tangible presence, extraneous to the action, thus allowing the ‘voice’ of the
elevator to be highlighted in its spectral form. The place itself, a spiral
4 Roberto Calabretto
1. It should not be
overlooked that the
advent of magnetic tape
in that period had
revolutionised the Italian
soundscape in music,
cinema and radio. To
facilitate the sound mixing
and editing process, film
crews began to record
less location sound, since
most sounds could be
replicated in the studio;
also, sound could be
recorded live using small,
portable devices instead
of a sound-truck. The
introduction of the Nagra
1 portable recorder –
which Antonioni himself
used – made filming
easier, thanks to its
compact size and a
stable spooling action that
was necessary to
ensure audiovisual
synchronisation.
staircase where ‘the very time of images winds around itself, twisting until
it unravels [. . .], where every step, every curving arch creates and destroys
encounters, draws and erases apparitions, recreates and breaks bonds’
(Mancini and Perrella 1986: 162), causes the protagonists to vanish
through the noise, which becomes itself an active participant that is able to
free the images from the narration.
The tendency to limit the presence of music in favour of noise can be
seen as far back as L’avventura (The Adventure 1960), but with Eclisse it
becomes a general rule. In these movies, and later in La notte (The Night
1961), the use of music is occasional and less intrusive: there is no longer a
musical ‘system’ as such – no succession of logically-connected situations.
There are no more musical themes, and certainly no themes which con-
tinue throughout the soundtrack. Instead, we have sound presences which
appear at certain points in the story but remain firmly in the background.
The score is often silent for long periods, such as in the beginning of
L’avventura and of L’eclisse; in La Notte there is no score at all, with the
exception of the appearance of Giorgio Gaslini’s band, which is accom-
panied by a series of noises – a combination which creates the ideal music/
noise score the director had striven to produce.
NOISE: BETWEEN LIVE RECORDING AND
POST–PRODUCTION
As a way of integrating the image, noise is a central element of Antonioni’s
cinematographic language. His description of the making of L’avventura,
in which the mixing of live and pre–recorded noise seems to reflect the
protagonists’ characters, has made history:
For L’avventura, I had my crew record a huge variety of sound
effects: every kind of noise made by calm or rough sea, or by the
waves crashing down on the rocks and inside the caves, and so on.
I had hundreds of reels of magnetic tape, just for the sound effects.
Then I selected those that I would use for the soundtrack of the
movie. I think this is the kind of music best suited for the images.
[. . .]. Ideally, one could create a marvellous soundtrack using noises,
and then put it in the hands of an orchestra conductor. Ultimately,
though, maybe only the movie director would be able to do it. . .
(Labarthe 1994: 127)
Antonioni always underlined the importance of including noise in
his filmmaking.1 At the root of Antonioni’s choices one can discern a
precise aesthetic motivation which is why Chion’s ‘prose–maker of sound’
definition is not entirely fitting. He uses both ‘poetic sounds’, custom-
made by a specialist sound technician, and an ‘ineffable kind of noise’,
captured from the soundscape. In the first case, the sound technician
creates and records the soundscape while the film is rolling, and it is later
synchronised during post–production; in the second case, we see a far more
fascinating and instinctive search, which can explore deeper and more
 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 5

hidden sensations. The director’s description of his method of filming has 2. ‘In this respect, Fausto
Ancillai recalls that, in
become famous: ‘I like to stand alone in the set and to feel the environment order to achieve greater
without actors or words. This is the most direct way to establish a rela- authenticity, it was deci-
ded, highly unusually, to
tionship with it, so that it can inspire us’ (Tassone 2002: 186–187). His record outside, at night,
statement is neither ambiguous nor contradictory, as some have claimed; near the plant, on the
Tuscolana. This included
his is rather a two–fold search aimed at enriching the audiovisual content the integration of the
of the movie. original with the newly-
recorded ambient sounds,
including those not in
THE VOICES OF OBJECTS camera shot, which
Antonioni wanted to be
After his first movies, the entire trilogy (L’avventura, La notte and L’eclisse) as realistic as possible –
repeatedly presents situations in which the noise component is crucial; it is even the footsteps of the
male and female char-
often organised into actual scores, giving rise to complex sound environ- acters had to be different.
ments. This is demonstrated in L’avventura, for example, where the sound Unusual, to say the least.
On the other hand, the
of nature in the Aeolian Islands is accompanied by the noise and confusion soundtrack comes to life
of the party or the seemingly metaphysical silence of the deserted town. In more from these noises
and sound effects than
these sequences, the live sounds are mixed with pre–recorded ones (stored from Fusco’s excellent
on around a hundred reels) during the post–production process, to create non-diegetic score, which
was heavily cut by the
the overall soundtrack.2 director, and thus inter-
Thus one comes to discern a kind of harmony between storytelling and venes only on rare (but
intense) occasions where,
‘filler’ sound which, as Federico Vitella suggests (2010), are both useful in once more quoting
sustaining the syntactic discontinuity of the edit, and in conveying events Antonioni, “we need to
detach from reality, to
which are more or less central to the development of the plot or the force it.”’ (Vitella 2010:
psychology of its characters. 128–129)
In the Roman construction site prologue to L’avventura, the story-
telling sounds include the combination of wind and waves in the Aeolian
Islands, the chirrup of the cicadas and the sound of the birds in Borgo
Schisina; ‘filler’ sounds include the sound of the boats at Liscia Bianca, or
the car in which Claudia thinks Anna might leave Montaldo’s villa. Both
kinds of sound are processed through a layering process. For instance,
consider the first sequences, in which her friends are looking for Anna. As
they shout her name, we hear the waves, three layers of wind, the waves
and the impact of the water on the rocks; the waves and the wind.
The sound waveform shows the fade-in of the wind at 2012 secs –
2015 secs; its first layering at 2025 secs; its third layer at 2033 secs. The
film images show the corresponding simultaneous layering of the grey
clouds.
The urban scenes, too, are interpreted in all their complexity. An
excellent example is the long sequence in La Notte in which Jeanne
Moreau wanders around the streets of Milan, ‘accompanied’ by car horns,
chattering voices, distant ambulance sirens and the roar of a jet aircraft. In
these movies we repeatedly see the metaphors of Antonioni’s poetry, such
as the echoing sound of footsteps, heavily resounding and accompanying
the characters’ actions. The scene of the rain falling on Roberto’s (Lidia’s
pursuer) car as they flee the party, covering their words inside the car, is
especially poetic. The same can be said for the tolling of the bells in the
Noto bell tower which Claudia, in L’Avventura, had inadvertently set off,
and for the extraordinary musicality as Vittoria listens during her night-
time walk to the noise from the swaying flagpoles as they knock against the
6 Roberto Calabretto

Figure 1: Waveform of Avventura. Scene: Anna’s disappearance.

2000 secs–2070 secs.

metal cables used to hoist the flags. These are mysterious and strangely
harmonious noises. Vittoria is literally enchanted by this nocturnal ‘music’,
which resembles the wind–harp in the oriental gardens by which Anto-
nioni – who was fascinated by Eastern art – might have been inspired.
All of these situations are poetically expressed in the words recorded on
the tape that Valentina played to Giovanni during the night-time party in
La Notte.

The park is filled with a silence made of noise. If you press your ear
against the bark of a tree and stay like that for a while, in the end you
will start to hear a sound. Maybe it’s us, but I like to think it’s the
tree. In that silence there are some odd noises, disturbing the
soundscape around me. I didn’t want to hear them, I closed my
window, but they didn’t stop. I thought I might go mad. I don’t want
to hear useless sounds. I wish I could pick the ones I want to hear
during the day. And the same applies to voices, words. There are so
many words that I don’t want to hear! But you cannot avoid it, you
simply have to accept it, just as you accept the waves when you’re
floating on your back. (Antonioni 1964: 350)

Another constant with Antonioni is the use of noise as an expressive

subtext for discomfort and impatience. In L’eclisse, the disquieting presence
of objects, and their way of influencing the life and relationship of Piero
and Vittoria, is symbolised by metallic and glassy sounds. These noises, the
‘voices of objects’, take precedence over real music, which is almost never
heard throughout the entire movie. L’eclisse is, without doubt, the final
result of a poetic pursuit which began with Antonioni’s very first movies
and had by this time come to fruition.
 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 7

The opening scene takes place in the home of Riccardo - who, as

Tommaso Chiaretti shrewdly points out, is constructed like a ‘hearty
Adagio’ - in which the length of the pause which precedes the dialogue
establishes the atmosphere of the whole sequence. Here, Antonioni
masterfully uses the off-screen sound, which ‘insists on the frame,
duplicating it externally, closing off the frame while at the same time
putting an abyss between it and what is outside of the frame’ (Dinoi 1998:
40). The sound of the footsteps and of the fan, that droning noise
accompanying many bars of the Adagio, is a comment on the end of
Vittoria and Riccardo’s relationship. Its presence, far from just being
unempathetic, changes significantly as their dialogue progresses.
Even more famous is the final sequence which, also in terms of the
sound, summarises the entire movie, and seems to be simply a prelude to
those final seven minutes. During the course of the story we have already
encountered many situations which anticipate various places, objects and
noises: the fire hydrant with which Vittoria liked to play, the sound of the
leaves rustling in the wind, the bucket of water, the ‘traces’, and so on. These
noises now guide us in rediscovering the same places and things we
encountered earlier. What we see and hear is merely the image and the
sound of an absence; the two protagonists do not in fact show up to the
appointment, allowing us to see and hear the frame of their previous
encounters. Here the soundtrack is effectively the ‘music of things’, so that
even the chords, solitary notes, deep and long sounds, chromatic scales, all
of which are part of Fusco’s signature style, underline the disquieting pre-
sence of objects. All of this serves to create a global sound system in which
music – both acoustic and electronic – environmental sounds and sound
effects come together to create beautiful polyphonic structures. Sound is
restored to its full original meaning, without links to a priori rules or to
aesthetic judgements based upon stereotypes; it becomes the main musical
object with which the director is concerned. It is no longer an autonomous
manifestation, but rather an element of a unitary sensory expression.
Having collected the sounds required (wind, water, footsteps) from
the real world, Antonioni separates them from their context, using
a method reminiscent of Pierre Schaeffer. His approach is meticulous: he
surgically isolates each individual noise, detaching it from any connections
to other elements of the metropolitan soundscape. Artists had warned him
of creating something like musique concrete, which entails in itself a
transformation of the sound, though Antonioni does not seem to want to
make any major modifications beyond pitch changes. The extreme realism
with which the noises are isolated logically results in hyperrealism, which
gives rise to a process of abstraction. This way, the material acquires a
more ‘concrete’ status, lending itself to ‘reduced listening’.
In this sequence, in which ‘the succession of shots follows a lyrical/
musical pattern’, ‘the admirably synthetic editing is unprecedented in its
irreverence’ (Tassone 2002: 119), the match between the image and sound
editing is seriously in doubt due to the sometimes noticeable audiovisual
dissonance. Often the stressed rhythm of the images is overlaid with a shift
in the stress of the sound, creating scenes with slightly asynchronous
8 Roberto Calabretto

movements. Thus, there is a noticeable tension in the edit, which alters the
rhythm of the images. There are also moments of perceivable ‘delay’,
meaning that the sound of one image extends into the start of the next,
when the source of the sound is no longer in frame. This, too, can create a
marked audio-visual delay.
This final shot shows a highly complex system of tension and relaxa-
tion, audiovisual attraction and repulsion which occur on four different
levels – between sounds in succession, simultaneous sounds, between
sounds and images perceived simultaneously, and between sounds and
images perceived sequentially – all interacting with one another. This
comes together to create a form of score in which music and images seem
to interact in counterpoint.

Figures 2: Soundscape in the final scene of Eclisse.

Figures 3: Soundscape in the final scene of Eclisse.

 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 9

3. ‘I worked for a month

together with Antonioni,
adapting and refining it.
Antonioni accepted my
suggestions willingly and
at the end appeared
satisfied’, recounts
Gelmetti (Comuzio
1988: 13).

Figures 4: Soundscape in the final scene of Eclisse.

IL DESERTO ROSSO (RED DESERT) AND ELECTRONIC MUSIC

For this dissertation, Il deserto rosso (Red Desert 1964a) is undoubtedly
of great interest. The presence of acoustic music here is reduced to a
minimum: industrial landscape noises, recorded using highly-specialised
processes on magnetic tape to create sound distortion, are accompanied
by the electronic music of Vittorio Gelmetti. It is this kind of music,
which the director described in an interview as the only comment
that could reflect the images of the film, that becomes the catalyst able
to transfigure the environmental noises and to meld with the images into
a real audiovisual dialectic which is usually not possible with acoustic
music.
From this point of view, Il deserto rosso, is extremely important in
the history of film music. At the time it was made, it would have been
unusual to resort to electronic music, especially in the Italian cinema.
It was Carlo Di Carlo, who had worked with Gelmetti on the doc-
umentary Terezin (1964), who introduced the composer to Antonioni
(who it seems had initially favoured Karlheinz Stockhausen for the film).
‘He greatly appreciated some of my electronic compositions with the
continuous sound presence of machine noises (the refinery, the ships. . .)’,
the musician said in one of his interviews. He added that in the
preparation of the film soundtrack his music was not used ‘as is’, as
reported by some observers, but rather was adapted in a long series of work
sessions.3
Gelmetti proposed two of his compositions to the director: Treni
d’onda a modulazione d’intensità and Modulazioni per Michelangelo. In the
first, the composer from Rome had experimented for the first time with
the possibility of applying methods and procedures taken from scientific
research, intending to create a new method of scoring and a rational
control of the artistic process.
The structural importance of the modulations of intensity was
underlined when the piece was played at the Convegno Internazionale dei
10 Roberto Calabretto

Centri Sperimentali di Musica Elettronica held in Firenze between the 9th

and 14th of June 1968:

The basic assumption on which this piece is based is incredibly

simple: the characteristic of an electronic sound [. . .] is that it can
be continued indefinitely. Once it is turned on, a generator can
continue to play without any effort; it is no longer a traditional
instrument that requires the player’s effort. [. . .] I would like to
emphasize that this piece stems from the idea that every new means
we use [. . .] should help us think about music in a different
way, create music in a different way. In this case we have the
coexistence of 21 sound units composed of mixtures of sinusoidal
waves, square waves and colour sound (or white filtered noise), which
are always present, and on which I only adjusted the intensity.
(Mollia 1979: 220)

Speaking about the origin of this work, during one interview the composer
would later say:

Given the possibility of an unlimited duration, it was on this

concept that my project was developed, taking priority over the
many other characteristics that a sound can have. That is how
Treni d’onda was created, with its 21 sound tracks (7 mixtures of
sinusoidal sounds, 7 mixtures of square waves – each obtained on
temperaments different from the constant – and 7 different thirds of
octave of white noise) that are always simultaneously present in
an area of modulated intensity spanning from – 35 to 0 dB. It
was then, for the first time, that I knew I had definitely escaped the
area of the new avant-garde influence and my period of being
cloistered with only electronic materials had ended, except for an
improbable reiteration of the gesture which – as is well known – is
the reason behind my success in music and in other fields. (Mollia
1979: 220)

In the Treni d’onda project, the analytical description of sound parameters,

which is typical of the Cologne school’s electronic purism, is replaced
by the exhibition of a formal model whose realisation can vary each time in
relation to different temporal elements. With this choice, Gelmetti
distances himself from his initial experiences regarding serialism,
instead demonstrating his full awareness of the technical issues concerning
production that he chooses not to conceal by adopting analytical
descriptions. Although this composition project simplifies the part
dedicated to the processing of the parameters and prefers not to introduce
probabilistic elements into the planning of the work, it is possible to
recognise in Treni d’onda the adoption of a method of composition
whose systemic profile is similar to that described by Xenakis.
As concerns the second composition, Modulazioni per Michelangelo
(1964), it should be borne in mind that this work was commissioned
 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 11

by the Michelangelo honours committee to bring sound to the

room decorated with drawings of Florentine fortifications, a central part
of the critical exhibition of Michelangelo’s work (1964), curated by
Paolo Portoghesi, to mark the fourth centenary of the great artist’s
death. The planning of this electronic piece is the continuation of
his previous research and, as an extremely important milestone in
Gelmetti’s artistic growth, is an intersection between a theoretical
moment and a practical event – one which is destined to be repeated and
extended as time goes by. As the composer himself writes, ‘Modulazioni
represents a first step towards the finished musical piece, in the
actualisation and cross-disciplinary coordination of the research effort,
which up to now was carried out in separate fields, in a strictly formal
manner. (Gelmetti 1964: 71)’

THE INDUSTRIAL SOUNDSCAPE

As the opening credits of Il deserto rosso roll, the three main
elements of the soundtrack become apparent: the music, the noise and
the electronic music that Antonioni extracts from the expressive
manipulation of noise. From this viewpoint, the beginning of the movie is
masterful.
The first fifteen minutes of the movie are entirely enveloped in this
musical presence, so the blasts from the smokestacks help to render
Giuliana, Valerio and the small picket of striking workers, who come out
of the factory without uttering a sound, anonymous. The factory is
omnipresent, even when Giuliana seeks refuge in a pine grove coated in
soot. The representation of the interior scenes, too, is carefully articulated
in terms of sound: the racket of machines, the sirens, metallic clangs
and ringing telephones interact with the anonymous voices of workers,
clerks and supervisors, ending in a fortissimo ‘cadence’ in the form of
an extremely violent hissing jet, which expands to occupy the whole
audiovisual space, which is then resolved by a closing sequence.
The vapour cloud shrinks and, as it fades to nothing, Ugo and Corrado
reappear, walking away.
In these first scenes we hear electronic sounds and impulses processed
with echo and reverberation, pieces of mixed, periodical, high–pitched
waves or glissandi, associated with the broad–band noises from the factories
and the jets of flame from the industrial smokestacks. Other sounds
associated with technology are the persistent, dull drone emanating from
the high–voltage cables and from the plants of the power substation
and, in the following scene, from the rapid spinning of a toy gyroscope.
Gelmetti’s materials are shown to be highly modern and effective in the
making of a sound edit using various kinds of sources. The counterpoint
between long and percussive sounds is very interesting. The soundscape
becomes unified and takes on a structural role. Starting from the
fast–paced delay, this echo effect creates a subtle difference between the
electronic noises and those of the factory, and it augments their capacity
for representation, making a connection with the colour and the blurring
12 Roberto Calabretto

of the image. Cecilia Fusco’s singing is in focus and near, while the noise
from the factory is constant.
Let us consider this sound sequence in detail, dividing it into four
sections.

Figure 5: Waveform of the opening credits in Deserto Rosso.

0 sec-29sec The soundtrack starts with a band of coloured noise

in the high–pitched region, with effects and
amplitude modulation.
Addition of some short mixtures with ‘glissandi’ and
echo and delay effects.
There follows a small band of six frequencies between
5.5 and 7kHz.
Sequences of impulses follow with delay effects
(repeat speed echo effect), various filters and
amplitude modulation.
The final two sequences rise from the background
High intensity band of six middle–frequency sounds.
Electronic materials with fast–paced ‘glissandi’, with
high–frequency content, with echo/delay effects
(fast–paced ribattuti). Soft and rough attacks.
Middle and low–pitched factory noise in the foreground.
 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 13

Figure 6: Waveform of the opening credits in Deserto Rosso.

30 sec-37sec High–pitched sound band – mix of six frequencies

between 6.5 and 7 kHz
Filtered impulses, followed by a band of coloured noise
with glissato in the middle to high–pitched region. Factory
noise, with noticeable intensity.

Figure 7: Waveform of the opening credits in Deserto Rosso.

14 Roberto Calabretto

43 sec-59 sec Tracts of coloured noise in the middle to high–pitched

region, with amplitude modulation
Shrill mixtures (six frequencies between 2 and 3 kHz,
with intensity modulation) together with the coloured
noise, highlight the entry of the voice.
Sequence of filtered echoing impulses.
Mix of six frequencies between 1.8 and 3 kHz
Band of glissando downward, with delay effects
Electronic fragments with delays, in the high frequencies,
in the background so that the vocalising can stand out

Figure 8: Waveform of the opening credits in Deserto Rosso.

60 sec-79 sec Broad band electronic materials in the middle–to–high

register with delays, in the background
Electronic materials in fast ‘glissandi’, with delays
(fast repeats)

Figure 9: Waveform of the opening credits in Deserto Rosso.

 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 15

After the opening credits, in the first scenes the ambient noise prevails over
the dialogue, a reversal of the standard cinematographical rules. We may
consider the scene in which Ugo and Corrado are leaving the factory: from
the ‘aural comment’ point of view, it is precisely divided into stages. At first
we hear the ambient din from the machines – a realistic backdrop. The
voices then disappear. Details of the factory come into frame: smoke,
smokestacks. The two resume their chat, but we hear the only the factory.
No change could justify an increase in volume: what changed was the
expressive register because the noise ceased to be simply a backdrop and
instead began providing a comment on the images. This will happen
several times in the movie.
In the movie, Gelmetti’s music is heard infrequently, as the constants
of Antonioni’s poetics might suggest, and is a comment on the
psychological turmoil of the protagonist, Giuliana, becoming her ideal
leitmotiv. We find her, in the middle of the night, when her angst seems to
be suffocating her, and she staggers down the stairs clinging to the
bannister, and then limps to the landing. In this case, Gelmetti’s
modulations are enriched with a mix of sine waves of various intensities.
This is repeated as, with Corrado, she crosses a road in Ravenna, near the
stand of an old man roasting chestnuts and in the final scenes where she
confronts her son’s ostensible illness. The reference to Treni d’onda is clear.
As a result of her mental illness, Giuliana’s view of reality is subjective:
this leads her to exaggerate her expressivity in other elements of the film’s
semiotics, such as the colour which shows the world not as it is but as it is
perceived by the protagonist. In this context, the electronic music has an
important, ambiguous function. In the movie, its recurring themes
sometimes seem to be outside of the mind of the protagonist, thus diegetic,
and they manifest her distress to the viewer; at other times they are
manifestly Giuliana’s aural illusions which have no visual justification.
We may consider the long sequence in the hotel room where Giuliana
visits Corrado; the music is clearly non-diegetic, and precisely articulates
the images, in perfect sync with them. At the same time, though, it might
be interpreted as a transformation of a reality from outside. As a sound
(sinusoidal sound waves) is heard for the nth time, Giuliana stops Corrado
in his tracks, and looks away as if looking for the source of the sound,
which leads us to think its origin might just be out of frame. This idea is
proved false by the subsequent shots: Giuliana, standing at the window,
moves the curtain aside, giving us a glimpse of Piazza del Duomo in
Ravenna, instead of the port we had expected. A moment later, they are in
bed, motionless, in an unreal pink light which permeates the entire room.
Given these oscillations between diegesis and non-diegesis, the
music can be maintained at an intermediate level, using a technique well
described by the film music critic Sergio Miceli, to define the aural
illusions and the sound ghosts which continue to cause disquiet to
Giuliana. This use of electronic music, which is far from the stereotypes
which still permeated the cinema of the period, and the play between the
different layers of the movie is extremely effective in interacting with the
peculiar nature of these images (Miceli 1994).
16 Roberto Calabretto

Even in the sequence in which we see Giuliana wandering around

the port of Ravenna at night, Gelmetti’s music is blended with port
sounds – metallic clangs, sirens and deep rumbles redolent of caves. Thus
we have a contrast between what these noises evoke – a working
environment – and the nocturnal stillness which blankets the scene. At a
certain point, hearing a loud metallic noise, Giuliana turns, seeking
its source, only to find that the noise was a product of her angst. The
difficulty in identifying the sources of sounds, proof of an uncertain and
undefined universe, is akin to the recurrence of out–of–focus shots,
with ambiguous colours, one of the most noticeable characteristics of
Deserto Rosso.

‘THE GREATEST SILENT MOVIE IN THE LAST FIFTY

YEARS. . .’: PROFESSIONE: REPORTER (THE PASSENGER)
In Professione: reporter (The Passenger 1974), music occurs for only a
few minutes and does not even accompany the opening credits, going
against one of the main tenets of music in cinema. A few bars of
El testamen de n’Amelia by Mighel Llobet and Lagrima by Francisco
Tarrega form the frail aural backdrop in just three moments of this
tale shrouded in silence, which has been called ‘the greatest “silent”
movie of the last fifty years’ (Aldo Tassone 2002). In this silence, however,
there are occasional aural presences, such as the continuous noise of
the fan, a backdrop for the sequence in which Locke finds Robinson’s
dead body, or the rhapsody of sound that accompanies the famous final
sequence.
From a ‘sound comment’ point of view, Professione: Reporter is, in my
opinion, Antonioni’s most accomplished movie. Its narrative structure is
reflected in the soundtrack, which can be heard in different ways.
Consider the scene in which Locke and his girlfriend, fleeing from
Knight, stop at a bar by a road leading to the south. The two sit by a table,
near the grating of a window. Behind them, cars rush by. At first, the
camera, with fast–paced panning shots, fixes onto the cars and the
soundtrack favours their noise, ignoring the two characters’ dialogue. At a
certain point, after a cut, Locke and the girl are framed in close-up and
their words become intelligible: ‘I’m running from everything. From
my wife. From my home. From my stepson. From a good job. From
everything, except a few bad habits I can’t give up’ (Antonioni 1975: 69).
The sound of the cars remains the same throughout this exchange, even
though the point of view (and presumably the position of the microphone)
changes.
A similar situation may be seen in the scene where Locke looks toward
the window of the hotel in which he has found Robinson’s dead body, and
he has the idea of taking the place of his friend. At this moment we hear a
melody played on an Arabic–sounding flute - ‘From outside came music
from an instrument like a flute’ (Antonioni 1975: 35) - which, most
ambiguously, is neither part of the diegesis (although Locke seems to
follow it with his gaze, perhaps wondering where it might come from?),
 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 17

but neither is it a real musical comment – and it stops as soon as he makes

his decision. We are faced with a situation that Lorenzo Cuccu calls
a ‘blank gaze’ (1973), by which the movie, and in this case its sound
commentary, seems detached from what is being narrated. Locke’s room is
filled with the sound of a fan, which marks the moment of the flashback,
which judging by the images seems to be uninterrupted. The jump from
the present to the past is marked by this noise and by the voices from the
tape recorder, which sound metallic and unreal, while the naturalness
of the voices of Locke and Robertson represent the narration of the facts.
In this scene we have another theme that is dear to Antonioni: the
window, an aural threshold through which the exterior invades the interior
with its audiovisual apparitions, one which we also find in Identificazione di
una donna (Identification of a Woman 1982) in the scene set in the hall of
the Venice hotel, where the notes from the piano merge with the call
of the seagulls and the sound of the vaporetti.
So, we come to the notorious final sequence, in which we can
observe the protagonist’s feeble, vacant gaze. In the bedroom at the
Hotel de La Gloria, Locke awaits his destiny. The shot begins with the
camera moving forward slowly, away from Locke and towards the iron
bars on the window, while a number of passers-by wander around the
square in a surreal silence that is interrupted now and again by voices.
A far-away voice is heard calling, ‘Miguel, viene aqui. . .’ Also the singing
of birds, the chattering of small children and the mumbling of an elderly
person that calls a dog, which is wandering around him; then a train
whistles, far away with voices of two elderly people chatting while a car
comes back. The same car comes into field from the right, and leaves to
the left during the barking of a dog and a Spanish-sounding trumpet
solo. A long medley of sounds and noises, all totally devoid of any
semantic value. After a short while, two men arrive in a white Citroën; one
walks towards the hotel, the other approaches the girl. At this point, a
door slams, bells begin to peal, followed by a dull thud. The camera
continues to move slowly forward, while the girl walks off and the killers
flee. The chug of a scooter. A dull thudding noise. The trumpet sounds
again. The Citroën and the other car come back. The camera moves
towards and then beyond the iron bars until it takes in the square itself.
Police siren. A woman’s voice calls: “Miguel, viene aqui. . .” The camera
spirals around – as we have seen, one of the director’s favourite techniques
in situations involving death – to capture the exterior and the arrival of
the police and Locke’s wife. After panning slowly along the façade of the
hotel, the camera returns to the iron bars of the bedroom in which Locke
lies dead.
From the waveform analysis it is clear that Antonioni does not work
with superimposition, as was the case with other movies, but instead
chooses juxtapositions interposed with narrative ‘silences’: isolated, exact,
closed events. In this case, too, it is hard to define the appropriate listening
perspective: it is not Locke’s nor the girl’s (the intensity of the noise belies
this), nor is it the camera’s. Instead, the noises seem to be ‘presences’
which can only be perceived as phenomena. As opposed to other movies, in
18 Roberto Calabretto

Figure 10: Waveform of the final sequence in Professione: Reporter.

which the narrative framework grows, characterising settings and

situations and lending themselves to be understood symbolically, here they
seem to be entities without a semantic reference; instead, they do have
a clear musical connotation. This is why Professione: Reporter is the final
result of Antonioni’s aural poetics; in divesting music from the need to
represent any form of redundant comment, he elevates noise to the status
of true cinematographic music.

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 Michelangelo Antonioni’s Soundscapes 19

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CONTRIBUTOR’S DETAILS
Roberto Calabretto is associate professor at the D.A.M.S. (Arts, Music
and Entertainment Studies Department) of the University of Udine, where
he teaches musicology. He also works with the University of Padua. He is
part of the research group on Musical Historiography and Film Music of
the Levi Foundation of Venice. He has published monographs on Robert
Schumann, Alfredo Casella and Nino Rota, on music in the poetry of
Andrea Zanzotto and in the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Luchino Visconti, Alain Resnais and other
directors. He has recently edited The Sonorous Screen. Music for Films
(Venezia: Marslio, 2010) which was received with enthusiasm.
Contact: roberto.calabretto@uniud.it