My Ántonioni !

 Antonia Of The Nexus

I am going to write a little bit about some films of Michelangelo Antonioni. As I prepared to stuff some letters into the post title area, what came to me was My Ántonia ,a novel by Willa Cather, which itself immediately meshed into Antonia, the wife of Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the Nexus in the Film Star Trek: Generations.

So, the accent over the initial "A" in the word "Ántonioni" in the title is a joke... sort of.

There we are, mates, Laugh if ya got 'em, otherwise we can consider the "extended pun" lamp to still be extinguished in all authorized spaces.

Antonioni.
She-who-must-be-obeyed was watching Antonioni's Blow Up last night, a film so preciously and exactly of its time and age that it begins with students dressed as mimes running about looking for spare change. It ends with mimes, too. A veritable mime-bookended production.
You would think such mummery might stir some interest, but the mimes were as flat as over-extended puns often are, and are a waste of time for people with a lot on their mime.


I went to bed after the first mime sequence.
(I recently watched Antonioni's L'Eclisse, a film which I loved, but he made it back in the days when he used a script instead of coming up with stunning shots which look like they should be in automobile advertisements.)

She-who-etc. stuck it out.

This morning, I asked her how long she would be at her ablutions. She said she would be very quick, and said that she did not indulge in some extensive sybaritic procession of soaps and washings and having exotic fish nibble the epithelial tissues... sort of like the ancient Roman gourmand Trimalchio must have done before descending to one of his many feasts.
As she said this, she accompanied herself with various motions and movements, all very much redolent of mimes and mummers.

I accused her of mime-crime. I said she had been unduly influenced by Antonioni and David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave and students dressed as mimes.

She gave me a dirty look, then turned back to what she had been doing. She briefly inspected an invisible door with the planes of her flattened palms, rested her arm on a notional mantelpiece, then glided towards the bedroom.

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